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BlueSCSI is an open source, open hardware, and open design SCSI solution for vintage computers. It's designed to replace a SCSI hard drive inside of your vintage computer or device, but it can also do so much more!
It is built by a community of makers, and you! Checkout the BlueSCSI v2 announcement here.
Note
If you received a BlueSCSI kit, please refer to these Kit Assembly Instructions.
This section will help get you started with using your BlueSCSI. This wiki has plenty of helpful pages located on the sidebar of this page, in addition you can use the search function to help find a topic.
The BlueSCSI uses a Raspberry Pi Pico board and an SD card to emulate the functionality of a hard drive, CD drive, removable storage drive, or even a floppy drive! This is accomplished by using disk image files on your SD card. These image files are presented to your vintage computer or device as a real SCSI drive, so your system is unaware it's actually using a modern BlueSCSI. You can even use multiple disk images and disk types (hard drive, CD, etc.) at the same time.
You can use premade image files created by members of the community or create your own, check out the BlueSCSI Images page for details. Disk image files must be named using a special naming convention so the BlueSCSI understands what type of device the image file is emulating (hard drive, optical disc, removable disk, etc). These file names also designate the SCSI ID, LUN and sector size of the disk image. Please see the Usage page for helpful examples of how to name your disk images.
The BlueSCSI can be powered by the SCSI termination power provided by your computer's SCSI controller. In some cases you may only need to plug in the SCSI connection for your BlueSCSI to work. However, if your system doesn't have termination power, you can instead power the BlueSCSI via a Berg power cable (Desktop model only) or via a USB cable connected to the Raspberry Pico Board. The log.txt file on the BlueSCSI's SD card will record the voltage detected on the Pico board to help you troubleshoot any low power problems.
- Try the new and improved Troubleshooting guide first!
- Open Retro SCSI Discord
- TinkerDifferent
- GitHub Discussions
If you are looking for the documentation for the v1.x hardware, click here.
