Neil,
I have not had any luck with PCI to PCIe converters under eCS or ArcaOS. Running what you have in a real PCI slot seems to be the best route.
Thank you very much for your reply. I was afraid that might be the case. Did the converter work successfully under any other OS ?
Out of curiosity, which PCI cards did you try that failed ?
The Adaptec 29160LP is a low-profile PCI card that has OS/2 support that sells for next to nothing, and should physically fit with a PCI to PCI-E adapter - if that converter worked. Altogether that combo will run about $50, most of it being the converter.
I'm recommending Lenovo M93p SFF and mini-tower lately for eCS and ArcaOS users who want recent hardware. Both of them feature one PCI slot.
I don't require recent hardware, just a way to boot OS/2 and use the SCSI tape drive.
Seems like my best bet is to transplant my existing 6-year old AMD motherboard / CPU / RAM to a new case. This will probably be about $50 depending on what kind of case I choose, and seems like a surer bet than the PCI to PCI-E converter.
I am just not crazy about maintaining one more physical box. Already have 2 HTPCs and one desktop.
Even with a KVM switch with a free port, I need some space to physically but the box. The existing AMD motherboard is full ATX, so the case can't be too small. And it would need space for at least one optical drive for CD boot, and an internal SSD. Fortunately I do have spare drives already to boot.
Oh, and the KVM currently goes to my portrait mode monitor because it's a DVI-D single link switch KVM. The monitor can rotate back to landscape, but this is quite a PITA. The other 2 monitors in my triple monitor setup are landscape and HDMI 2.0 or DisplayPort due to 4K, which are not supported by any affordable and reliable KVM that I know. And those two 4K monitors have a total of 3 inputs each - 2 HDMI 2.0 and one DP. All of which are in use now.
Maybe a used single port IP KVM would be in order for the physical OS/2 box. Then I could locate it anywhere and space wouldn't be as much of an issue. Not sure how much those KVMs run. It just seems like a lot of trouble / expense.
I think the last SCSI card to get OS/2 drivers was LSI-320, which was PCI-x. I'm not sure about support details -- I'm not personally that fond of SCSI.
Thanks. I have always loved the feature set of SCSI - just not the price. But it's certainly outdated today. The only thing I don't like is the lack of hotplug support with the LSI cards. Not sure if it works any better with Adaptec.
I just plugged in one of my two LSI U160 PCI cards into my i5 / Z170 NAS box last night. The SCSI BIOS only takes about 45 seconds. Still seems like an eternity. Ubuntu 18.04 sees the card and even the tape drive - but only provided it is turned on at boot time. I tried many approaches to rescan the SCSI bus under Linux, but none worked if the tape drive isn't present during SCSI BIOS execution. I think this is due to the layer driver architecture of LSI. Some code is in the driver for the OS, and other code in the SCSI BIOS.
I wonder if Adaptec works better and has a full software stack in the driver, which would allow SCSI rescan if the machine is booted without the tape drive.
Looks like VMWare Workstation & Player actually support a virtual SCSI device, and expose it as either Mylex or LSI devices in the guest OS ! And the doc mentions that it can specifically be used to use SCSI tape drives visible in the host OS in the guest OS.
This probably was never tested under OS/2, though. I did get the eCS CD to boot under VMWare player last night, after much pain.
The fonts in Ubuntu are much too small, though. The whole screen in text mode is only 4x3 inches on my 32" 4K monitor in Ubuntu.
Seems a lot of people have this issue too with VMWare.
If the SCSI tape drive virtualization actually works, it would be my preferred solution, rather than to have a bare metal OS/2 box nowadays and worry about unsupported hardware or KVMs, and space for an extra box.
