micmic, It was a friendly fellow with a deep voice, correct? He seemed to anticipate my question, though I didn't mention SP-808 by name, just a Legacy ATAPI Host that used a ZIP Drive. But yeah, right off the bat he was certain their card wouldn't work in a generic way.

***

1) DHL should have my SalvationData board to me by Wednesday, straight from Hong Kong. I expect to have it tested by next weekend.

2) I bought a WiFi-enabled USB thumb-drive to test, but it was too fiddly to just connect to it as an FTP site, which is what I'd want to do so that I could easily synchronize it via command-line. They wanted you to download a special Phone App for it and there were other quirks too. So I decided "regular" USB drives are probably a better choice for this application. However, that means I can't just seal the drive up inside the SP-808 -- I'll need a solution that allows changing the USB drive without disassembly of the unit.

3) Therefore: if the SalvationData card ends up working, I'll release the Front Panel Express files, for the Front Face I made for the SP-808 drive slot. It is designed to use a professional-grade Neutrik NAUSB panel-mount socket. I will release it along with documentation of the entire process and a BOM, all probably as part of a Github. The SP-808 has a metal "caddy" inside, which screws to the main chassis. This caddy is entirely separate from the housing of the ZIP Drive -- so once the Drive is removed, the caddy fully remains, and can be reused to mount another solution in fine style.

(The bracket I designed is "industrial grade", and runs in the $65 range shipped -- so certainly there are cheaper mounting solutions possible. I'll leave the exercise of determining those solutions to the reader.) (:

rs

@ryansupak, before you install the adapter, could you photograph or scan (CCD) the PCB? I'm curious as to the identity of the 8-pin IC.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar, see attached. My phone does not take great pics, sadly. I can't make out that the markings on that IC -- I ordered a 5x magnifier light which should arrive Wednesday and I can try to make out the markings then. Otherwise you say having it Scanned is a good method?

***

Update: I have installed the SalvationData board (in default mode, which is presumably IDE) and the SP-808 powers on, and both Status Lights on the SalvationData board illuminate, meaning it is at least getting power. The initial "Roland SP-808" screen appears, and then after exactly 20-seconds (which is the time within which it would normally be reading from the ZIP) it goes to the "Groove Sampler" screen, which is the second part of the intro sequence. Next, the screen reads "Please Insert Zip Disk" but inserting/removing a USB drive does not do anything.

Other variants I tried: Booting both with a USB Drive inserted and without one inserted, and booting with the Jumper J2 (which is the jumper on the corner of the board next to the USB socket) both in (default) and out. (I assume this is Master/Slave?) No change in behavior.

Next steps: Perform the IDE->ATAPI mod on the board by lifting the 10K resistor R60 (thanks @fzabkar for this tip a few pages back!). I will probably wait at-least until Wednesday night to try this, since that's when my Magnifier arrives, and I want to be extra-careful...

More as it comes, rs

I scan my HDD PCBs with a CCD scanner (not CIS) in 1200dpi resolution. It produces much better results than most cameras. CIS scanners are not suitable for this.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar, my friend works at a place where they do a lot of paper blueprint/engineering drawing generation, etc. I'll ask her if one of their multi-gazillion dollar machines would do the trick. rs

tip for great photos with a phone:

use a desk lamp or some kind of light to shine at the wall, a corner where both walls are white is ideal.
Put the subject close to the wall and manouvre it around until the writing on the chips show up well.
Change angles with the subject and the phone until you get a desired result.
Dont zoom in with phone controls, wait until you get a good pic and you can zoom in on the PC (or phone gallery).

play around and you will get great pictures.

Further to this,

crop out the unwanted area/background. This is good to reduce bandwith of upload and to help out people with slow connections. Yes they still exist, 1MB pic can be annoying for people. high res of course you wil have to make that sacrifice.

here is some I took on my Samsung 9+, just using a LED lit magnifying glass to shine some light where needed. You kinda need 3 hands for this!

If taking a pic on the phone and you want to remove EXIF data, win 10 has a handy feature. right-click picure and choose properties, then the details tab. down the bottom, click the link to create a copy that removes all personal info. You can also choose what properties to keep if you like.







I coupld probably read this Eeprom if required.

To reconfigure the PCB for ATAPI mode, you need to remove resistor R60 and connect a leaded resistor with a similar resistance between TP26 and a nearby ground point.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Back when I had intended to research the SP-808 a bit more, I bid on, and won a CPU board for the SP-808 on eBay.
The dodgy seller sent me this useless (to me) Panel board.

If you own a SP-808, and want it, let me know. I will post free to anyone in AU, or if international, you just pay postage.

First in gets it.

@HaQue, I will be more sensitive to people with slow bandwidth in future by cropping photos more-tightly. Thanks for that reminder. Also, thanks for the SP-808 board offer. As I have (4x) SP-808s (one is a Parts Machine that I'm testing on, and (3x) are ones I use), I'm good.

***

@fzabkar, the chip you asked about has the following markings. Looks like a USB Power Switch, according to Google?



***

I just got my magnifier (that was how I was able to read the chip) and some very small solder. I hope to attempt the ATAPI mod to the board sometime this weekend. (Also @fzabkar , thanks for the reminder on the exact board mods.)

rs

OK, I'm not sure I have the skills to perform this mod. Had never done SMD before and the SMD part was easy: I removed 10K resistor R60 no-problem.

However, My TP26 doesn't have a through-hole like this one does, so I tried jamming a resistor lead in there (I know, I know) and I just ended up making a mess. Then I tried soldering magnet-wire directly to the Epson IC pin, and I'm not sure if I bridged some of the neighboring pins in the process.

I suspect that DriveStar made my Salvation Data board on-demand when I ordered it, so I am going to see if they can produce it in ATAPI mode.

rs

Back to the proverbial "drawing board"...

1) I picked up some Flux, which will arrive Thursday. I'll try to clean those Solder Bridges I made with that, and Wick. (Again, I'm a decent through-hole solderer, but I'd never touched SMD until today.)

2) I also emailed DriveStar to see if they can just manufacture the darn board the way we need it in the first place. If this approach turns out to work, eliminating the step of making SMD mods to the board, will make this whole exercise way more approachable for most people.

rs

Updates:

SalvationData board was a dead end. Did the ATAPI mod to that SD board, and it responds identically to the way it does in the default IDE Mode (in other words, it doesn't do anything but light the Status and Power LEDs up).

***

I found a gentleman online who manufactures and sells a board that was originally designed to emulate ATAPI Optical Drives for (I think?) defunct arcade machines, using USB Drives as a storage replacement. He was so interested in what we were doing, that after a couple of emails, he bought his own SP-808, and he is going to give adapting his existing board to our application a shot! He says he expects that his existing board will work, by way of a few small software enhancements to handle ZIP-specific commands.

He is aware of this thread, and of the concurrently-happening MidiManiac attempt to crowdfund an adapter. To me, this guy's work seems like it's by far the closest thing to a solution out there at the moment. I won't link to his page here -- but know that he is serious about pursuing this, and certainly I am sure he'll speak up if/when he wants to.

rs

Check the Enable pin of the Sipex chip, or check whether +5V is present at the USB connector.

http://www.jctic.cn/Sipex/USB/img/SP2526a.pdf

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

@fzabkar, I'm certain that Power was getting to the USB Connector, because the USB Drive I was using to test has an LED inside it. The LED was solid "on" when the SP-808 was powered up. rs

Been bitten too many times to participate in crowd funding projects. If this thing is possible, it *should* be a relatively cheap microprocessor board. Someone just needs the skills to know how to make it.

Other option is custom firmware for the 808

@HaQue: I hear ya on crowdfunding. The nice thing about the other fellow (NOT the crowdfunding guy) is that he already produces a microprocessor-based working solution for sale that does a slightly different thing. He's not asking for any money (unless, of course, he releases a working product and somebody wants to buy it, haha).

Meanwhile, I've sent for a Raspberry PI. I feel like I should be able to use the GPIO pins and a little C code to sniff what's going on, and maybe eventually make the RPi into a USB Drive solution. If nothing else I'll learn something.

rs

I remember a few years ago when looking at a games system, there was a sniffer for I think IDE. I am blanking on details but I think it was called bus hound or something like that. It may have been hardware based or a license I couldnt afford at the time or something but I know I really wanted it, but either never did or never got it to work.

@HaQue

Yes -- BusHound is one I saw in my research. If I end up engineering a solution myself, I'm gonna try to use an RPi 4 in a similar way. I'd need to be able to read the GPIO pins at 1Mhz minimum to match the maximum data transfer rate of an ATAPI ZIP drive, which was about 1.4 MB/second (which I rounded up to 2 MB for good measure), and it looks like the native C library for GPIO can conservatively operate at 20-times that rate.

Meanwhile, I've been in correspondence with the guy I mentioned who already developed, and sells, a similar product. He got his SP-808 in the mail and says his card solution is pretty close to working as-is; there are only a few special commands coming from the 808 he has to iron out. I can tell he's pretty far along because he was asking me about details of hot-swapping vis a vis the 808 workflow, etc... I've offered to beta-test for him, and barring that I'll buy (3x) or (4x) from him, if his solution comes to fruition.

Here's hoping...
rs

Here's the guy that I ran across with an existing, but similar, solution for another application. Looks like he is pretty close. I gave him a few corner-cases to test and he did discover a few glitches, but all in all making he is excellent progress in a short time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYdAEDZJxCM