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Roland W-30 Information
This is my little trove of technical information on the
Roland W-30 Music Workstation.
Contents
SCSI
Yep, the W-30 has a SCSI port on the back. The standard model has the
connector fitted, but not the SCSI interface chip needed to communicate with
other SCSI devices (mmmm...some cunning marketing ploy?) An optional upgrade
kit, KW-30, was available to activate the port. It included the SCSI
controller chip, a revised version of the OS, and a manual.
The SCSI interface is the venerable old version 1 (SCSI-1) which came out
in 1986, and in the W-30 it is hard-coded to SCSI ID 7. Apparently, all
SCSI-2 devices should be compatible with SCSI-1. The engineer in me
says "yeh, right" so here I'd like to have a catalogue of all known
SCSI drives that work with the W-30. I kindly ask all W-30 owners with SCSI
devices to let me know the details of their successes.
It would also, I think, be beneficial to know which devices definitely
DO NOT work with the W-30, so that we know which devices to avoid in
future exploratory tests.
The Good Guys -- These Work Perfectly |
Device (HD/CD) |
Manufacturer |
Type |
Capacity (MB) |
Notes |
HD |
Conner (Seagate) |
CP3040 |
40 |
The first drive I've tried. No problems encountered, formatted at
40MB, with system 1.07 |
HD |
Quantum |
ProDrive LPS 42S |
40 |
An ex-Apple drive. |
HD |
LaCie |
Atlas |
9GB |
Another ex-Apple drive, but HUGE (sadly most of it ignored). AND it
is BOOTABLE!!!! (Thanks to Richard Fouchaux for this
valuable information) |
The Sad Guys -- These Partly Work |
Device (HD/CD) |
Manufacturer |
Type |
Capacity (MB) |
Notes |
None so far... |
The Bad Guys -- These Do Not Work At All |
Device (HD/CD) |
Manufacturer |
Type |
Capacity (MB) |
Notes |
None so far... |
Drives waiting to be tested
I have rumours and hints that the following drives might work. As
yet I have no information either way.
- CD-ROMs
- Sony CDU-541 (internal) CDU-6111 (external)
caddy-loading 1x speed, apparently Roland CD-5
drives by another name.
- Sony CDU-8001 in Apple CDSC drive (1x speed)
- Sony CDU-8002 in Apple CDSC+ and CD150 drives
(1x speed, but faster transfer rate)
MO Drives
Derek Taubert has successfully connected an Epson OMD-5010 (rev 3.09)
Magneto-Optical drive to his W-30. After some kludging with jumpers, here
is how he managed it:
I decided to give my 128MB optical drive a shot (EPSON OMD-5010 Rev 3.09).
It has two jumpers to make it 1) appear as device type 00H instead of 07H,
and 2) not issue "UNIT ATTENTION". The W-30 will then gladly accept it as a
hard drive, but fails when trying to format a disk.
Not yet giving up, I decided to format an optical disk on another machine,
and then dd'ed one of my above quantum drives to the formatted optical disk
(dd if=/dev/sdXh of=/dev/sdXh obs=2048 count=163840 -- see below about my h
partitions). Not only does it work (can read and write songs/sounds), the
W-30 will even boot from the optical disk (say, that is fast)!
For anyone that has an OMD-5010:
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So there you have it, a contender for removable media for the W-30 that
is bootable! So far the only issue is formatting a drive (Derek got round this
by copying the format structure from a hard drive).
And sadly we're still stuck at the 80MB (64 volumes) limit...
LARGE DRIVES
The W-30 is limited in the main software to a maximum of 80MB of disk
space (well, 64 areas, which I guess comes to 80MB). Hacking of the
boot ROMs indicates that this is a limit imposed by the main operating
software -- the BIOS code would be quite happy accessing much larger drives
(upto 2,000GB -- 32-bit block number, 512-byte blocks). This is a problem
of not using a filing system, but rather specific disk vectors (either
<side, track, sector> or <block>). Yet another feature to add
to the list...
SCSI SOFTWARE
The W-30 boot ROMs include a lot of software functionality for talking to
the SCSI bus. While investigating the boot ROM software I find a number of
interesting pieces of information, which I present here.
Firstly, the only types of devices the W-30 recognizes are:
- Type 00h -- Direct-access devices (e.g. magnetic disks)
- Type 05h -- CDROM devices
The type numbers refer to official SCSI device types.
Thanks (again) to Dave Fenwick, we now have a clearer idea of why the W-30 cannot
boot off ZIP drives. Over to Dave:
After some pain-staking reverse engineering of the OS, I believe I've finally
figured out why we can't boot from Zip disks. It is a bug in the ROM BIOS that
causes this (and probably a lot of other SCSI-related issues.)
Basically it comes down to a very odd issue with how the original developer read
from the mb89352 scsi chip. There's a register called the SSTS register (the chip
status register) that holds information about the state of the mb89352. When in
initiator mode, the chip won't register properly until the REQ line on the PSNS
line is high. Unfortunately, there is a BIOS routine (kindly labeled as
BIOS_Synth_Function_37_Select_Device by Neil Johnson in his original attempt at
reverse engineering the BIOS) that sits in a tight loop waiting for the initiator
flag to go high on the SCSI chip. The unfortunate part is it sits in this tight
loop waiting for it to go high, but every time it reads the SSTS register, it
clears the REQ bit in PSNS and it never gets a chance to go high.
Inserting a very small delay during the reading of the register clears up the
problem nicely. I don't have an EPROM emulator for the 27c64-20 chips, but I've
mimicked the entire boot process with some code I wrote that boots from floppy. I
hope that I'll be able to transfer control to the zip drive soon to boot.
The crux of the problem is really that the Zip drive doesn't identify itself fast
enough in the scsi-select process to allow the REQ line to go high. Compound that
with the bug I just talked about, the Zip drive will never be detected and the OS
will drift off into la-la land waiting for the REQ line to go high.
So, there you have it: its a bug in the W-30 firmware.
The SCSI disk that the W-30 tries to boot from is the last SCSI
disk (not CDROM) on the SCSI chain. This disk must have 512-byte
sectors, and have the string
* ROLAND S-550 *
in the first sector. Are we to assume that the W-30 boots of S-550 SCSI
disks? Seems bizarre....
SCSI CONTROLLER
The SCSI controller chosen was the Fujitsu MB89352AP SCSI Protocol
Controller (SPC), also sourced by Sharp. Sadly, it is no longer in
production, although there are still quantities of them left in specialised
distributors.
I have recently found the datasheet for the MB89352 (1.4 MB).
SCSI CONNECTOR PINOUT
The SCSI connector on the rear of the W-30 is a standard DB25 SCSI
connector, as used on PCs etc. While not recommended for faster data rates,
due to the lack of twisted-pair grounds, it is fine for the relatively slow
5MB/s (max) data rates from the W-30.
DB-25 Pin |
Signal Description |
Signal Function |
1 | REQ | Request |
2 | MSG | Message |
3 | I/O | Input/Output |
4 | RST | Reset |
5 | ACK | Acknowledge |
6 | BSY | Busy |
7,9,14,16,18,24 | GND | Ground |
8 | D0 | Data bit 0 |
10 | D3 | Data bit 3 |
11 | D5 | Data bit 5 |
12 | D6 | Data bit 6 |
13 | D7 | Data bit 7 |
15 | C/D | Command / -Data |
17 | ATN | Attention |
19 | SEL | Select |
20 | DP | Data Parity |
21 | D1 | Data bit 1 |
22 | D2 | Data bit 2 |
23 | D4 | Data bit 4 |
25 | TermPwr | Termination Power (+5V) |
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