Expose drives as USB mass storage devices when plugged into host

[erichelgeson]

Similar to how DietSCSI (BlueSCSI v1 fork) is doing USB pass through we could use TinyUSB to present the drive images as usb mass storage devices. Since HFS Fuse has been updated and things like CiderPress/etc can open volumes it would be handy to just be able to plug in your BlueSCSI to your modern or slightly less retro computer and have the HFS/etc volumes mounted.

I've done some work on this and will push a branch soon.

[MrTechGadget]

This would be awesome and eliminate the whole emulator shuffle workflow I'm fighting right now for my devices that don't have ethernet to access my NAS.

[Grieverheart]

Would it be possible to pass through other SCSI devices, like a zip drive?

[crackmonkey]

Would it be possible to pass through other SCSI devices, like a zip drive?

Not really in this future feature. The initiator mode hardware that @androda is working on should be able to, eventually.

[ewanuno]

i'm, very interested in this. this is a holy grail for supporting vintage samplers (akai, roland , emu, etc)with modern systems. as it stands there are several bits of software used for managing these samplers which are hard to use on modern computers.
software includes:
AKAI Mesa which is for editing sounds and programs in AKAi xl series samplers,
Propellerheads Recycle which can send and receive samples and programs to a wide range of samplers from many manufacturers.

As it stands the options are:
Desktop pc with a PCI scsi card,
Old laptop with a pcmcia cardbus scsi card,
Virtualised system with a usb scsi interface. (the only one that people seem to have success with is the Ratoc U2SCX)
Using vintage computers.

pci and cardbus scsi cards are getting harder to find and usb scsi devices are impossibly expensive

fortunately the Ratoc U2SCX interface has fully functional linux drivers.
it has drivers for Windows 98/98SE/MillenniumEdition/2000/XP/XPx64, AND Mac OS X 10.2.7 or later, 10.3.x, 10.4.x

https://www.synchrotech.com/product-usb/usb2-uscsi-conv_01.html
https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2002.0/00325.html

i have an extra akai S2000 sampler (it's a part of the XL series, supported by MESA) that i would be willing to provide for development use.

[akuker]

I think we're getting two distinct functions blended in this ticket. THIS ticket will be for exposing disk IMAGES to the USB host.

Issue #212 will be for updating BlueSCSI to "bridge" physical SCSI devices to a USB host.

Something to consider when this issue is picked up.... Allowing the same disk image to be accessed by a USB host and a separate SCSI initiator at the same time is extremely risky. This will likely lead to data loss. When this feature is implemented, if the images are shared, they should be read-only. Otherwise, the images should be exclusively presented to the USB host OR the SCSI initiator. NOT BOTH.