Zip Drive Reverse Engineering
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 เม.ย. 2018
- Tragedy has befallen Ben Heck, once upon a time he created some awesome levels for Doom and now he wants to revisit them, but he cannot! They reside on an ancient and old media type called 'zip disks', zip drives were made by iomega and came in various sizes from 100mByte up to 1gByte. So to reverse engineer it Ben and Felix are going to find an old computer, an oscilloscope and a parallel port connected zip drive to find out how it talks to one another and make it do their bidding! What old hardware have you tried to make work? Or reverse engineered? Let the team know on the element14 Community!
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"Regrettable acting" OH YEAH ! HERE WE GO !
I love the acting in this video.
I want an intro with star wars again
Soooooo... What was the point of the logic analyzer? All we really learn here is that Linux still has a kernel mode driver for the parallel Zip drive.
Nothing was reverse engineered in this video.
I love the regrettable acting!!
Today, Ben plugs in a zip drive into an old dell, and it works.
Exhilarating.
damn, I almost hoped you had hacked linux onto the zip-drive controller literally playing DOOM on it
Silly engineers, the parallel port is still on most new PC’s, you just need a LPT header cable to get the old parallel port back
It would have been easier to make a test board out of it too
Felix has gotten really good in front of the camera!
LOL. "We're gonna do a ton of work to RE zip drive!.... Oh wait.. it's working so... nevermind!" (OH thank god we get a weekend!)
I got a USB zip drive and a IDE internal zip drive so all you need is any computer.
Yup! Me too! I was about to say the same thing. I was actually messing around with it last month! Still works great.
Don't forget about SCSI for the Mac folks. Seriously though I think the model Ben has is that actually obscure item rather than any of the others
I think the parallel version was the most common. At least it's the one I saw on the shelves way more often than any other. It was slow and the first one I had. I later got the SCSI version and the internal version. I never got the USB one. That sounds cool.
no 750MB and 100MB IDE, a few 100MB parallel, 1 100MB usb, and a broken 100MB scsi external versions.
Had the parallel port 100 MB version. Bloody unreliable, don't miss it.
@The Ben Heck Show
Oh the Zip Disk...
That brings back memories of high school.
I wonder how many kids watching this even heard of it let alone used one before.
Man, Felix has gone from totally camera shy to stud actor.
Way to go, dude!!
Ben: "Zippy!"
Felix: "How's that spelled?"
The acting was extra regrettable this episode, great job guys!
How is this channel not at 1mil plus yet!? Love you guys!!
That beginning should be sent to Oscar evaluation! Unbelievable (literally!) acting work! ;)
But that's a logic analyzer not an oscilloscope.
"Show us what you got!" haha Felix cracked me up there.
It's easier to get a parallel port than you think. First off it's still sometimes a feature on AMD mainboards, even the newest ones, but only as a pin header, just no rear panel port. For other, pci-e adapter is a thing and it should mostly work.
My old HP DeskJet 840C also uses a parallel port and my mainboard actually had only a pin header on it, so I had to take out a port cable (female port to pin header) from my old 486 AT tower and have it hanging around out the back of my PC. I think I need a new printer.
drunkenmaster666 I think your printer is fine! No problem keeping such a printer at all really, you can even use cheap USB adapters with them. However USB adapters really only work with printers and nothing else at all, and advanced error reporting may not work, nor should be needed here.
My life is complete now that I know who the voice of your intro belongs to.
USB zip drives are a thing
i still own one - AND it still worked 2 month ago when i backup every single zipdisk i could find
@@wombora I also own a USB Zip Drive. It's one of my fave pieces of Retro Hardware
"We could hook up a RAID array! Oh, that's redundant."
I'll admit, I laughed at that one.
I remember back when I got a Zip Drive an a few 100mb Zip disks one year for Christmas, I still have that stuff around here somewhere even the original box it came in.
“We can hook up a RAID array... that’s kinda redundant” 🙊 made me chuckle
Next teach us how to make doom levels!
If your hdd connects by sata, the pc is not ancient. Its ancient if it connects via MFM/RLL! Now hands up all who know what I am speaking of!
This what I had in my XT back in the day. th-cam.com/video/9RN-m5FsMGQ/w-d-xo.html
This was a new to me computer when my friends were rocking a 386.
*Raises hands* owner of an XT here.
The oldest saving technology I have access to is delay line memory. We have a ancient calculator at work that uses it. Don't know why it is still there, but it is kinda interesting.
A 70s storage oscilloscope I have has one, but its analogue storage.
My university has an old delay line memory on display in a display cabinet, but they haven't labeled it for anyone to know what it is. shame really.
My 2016 motherboard has a header for parallel and com ports. Never going to use them, but it's nice to know they are there
Holy crap I saw Felix smile! An angel just got his wings.
Did you just call the Doom Guy "Duke Nukem"?
Ben, PLEASE upload those Doom maps so we can all play them. I want to try them out in Brutal Doom.
This episode made me remember why I love this show.
I genuinely love the reaction shots that break continuity. I burst out laughing each time Felix, Ben, or Karen go from vaguely happy in one shot to frantically excited in the next.
"Should they really make these batteries look like pills, I mean kids might start eating them like tide pods"
I lost my shit this morning, someone couldn't tell if I was laughing my ass off or depressed as all hell. Hats off to you.
This episode was awesome.
I still have a ZIP drive with a SCSI connector. Finding a 25 pin SCSI to USB adapter isn't too hard I think. I'd have to check my shed but I think I also have an internal ZIP drive with IDE. Anyway bringing up ZIP made me nerd out because I used to connect the SCSI ZIP drive to my Amiga 2000 which had 2 hard drives in it. I could back up everything on the drives to a pair of ZIP disks.
the parallel version of the ZIP drive was terribly slow. a bad idea.
Mitchell Theobald ikr? They should’ve just bought a USB one. Sure it’s only USB 1.1, but it is way faster than parallel.
They could have gotten the USB2 ZIP 750 drive, you can even still get them new and the read the 100 disks. but the project was to sniff a parallel IO device the "recover doom levels on zip disk" was part of the "Regrettable acting"
I think you guys are missing the whole point... I don't think he was REALLY missing his old Doom level. It's just an excuse to experiment with parallel communications
My first couple of portable MP3 players used a parallel interface to load music onto them. Might be fun to see the signaling on the Diamond RIO PMP300 with a whopping 32 megabytes of music storage. I also got the special edition which doubled to 64 megabytes. I mean an entire album could fit!
I have an old SCSI Zip drive and it runs at a decent speed. It's a much better bus than parallel, but still a legacy connector.
I still have my two zip drives. SCSI and Parallel. The disks are still usable as well as the drives.
Locating a new version of the windows driver took longer than I thought but found one in the end.
Ok, I'm excited for the 5200 video. I had one of those growing up, and we had to do all kinds of weird stuff with the controllers to make it work. We even invested in the giant track ball controller.
This is great!! Zip Disks!!! I remember when I had no idea how I would ever fill one of those things :P
"When we launch our console, it shall blot out the sun!" Then we shall play Joust in the shade!
Oh my gosh... I still use a Dell Dimension 3000 (the Optiplex's older brother) as a linux hard drive backup computer. Never thought anyone else took an interest in old Dells
The Dell Optiplex 755 is still my main computer since 2007. Most durable machine ever!
8:12 "show us what you got"
I remember the biggest problem with these ZIP Drives was what was called the "click of death". The drive would be working fine and with no warning a loud click was heard and your drive was bricked, no recovery possible.
Cracking the box with the "Regrettable acting" :D
Did you ever upload them somewhere? Come on, the Doom Community would love to have those archived!
amazed that tandy pocket computer still works, the flexible keypad on mine broke long ago.
"We could make a raid array... Oh, that's redundant."
I need to play those doom levels, great acting
I'm incredibly sad that this show is going to be ending at the end of the year.
So, ended up flying past the Zip wikipedia page. For whatever distance you can trust it... essentially, all but a few early (and not very good) pure-IDE models, pretty much every Zip drive is SCSI at heart. The external Parallel ones just include a SCSI-to-Parallel bridge chip (the PPA3 you mentioned), and the internal ATAPI ones are, like all ATAPI devices, essentially SCSIs that happen to have an IDE connector. And presumably the USB ones just incorporate the same chipset that you might find in an external SCSI drive caddy, or external USB optical drive that's basically just an ATAPI (and thus, SCSI) mechanism in a chunky box with an onboard PSU. In all cases (but the pure, driverless IDE model), the driver simply talks to them in SCSI commands, carried over whatever convenient interface it's presented with, which in all but USB is at least 8 bits wide and so requires very little real massaging - just fling the bits at the port and it should all work out. And presumably any magic in terms of parallel passthru is handled by the SCSI-to-Parallel bridge hardware... maybe it co-opts some of the LPT lines to pull it off, but then how would the basic unidirecitonal-LPT mode ever work?
I was just about to throw out an IDE ZIP-100 drive, maybe I can make use of it after this!
Had the same zip drive. Got the parallel port version because my work only had old PCs that didn't have USB yet and I needed their fast network to download large files. Also miss those blue plastic hard drive caddies in the Dells.
@48 seconds what's with Felix's Fonzie pose cutaway?
Ahh, so this is what the "regrettable acting" part of the intro is for.
I kept a parallel Zip drive after a clear out at work years ago, I've never attempted to use it but it's like new. There are a couple of unopened disks too.
Ha! I still have my ZIP drive in it's original carry case along with a bunch of disks including some new ones. Still have a couple of computers with parallel and SCSI ports too. Anyone remember the original IBM XT? Yea, I still have one of those, well, actually it's a clone that I built back in the early 80's. I'm old school and proud of it!
Now I get the part of "Regrettable acting"
Your intro acting has become better. Good Job
You should make a retro handheld that plays games from zip discs
Hey!!! It's good ole fashion Ben Heck! Fun projects, and regrettable acting!
Reverse engineering + DOOM? Hell yes.
You need to share your doom maps!
Colin Stuart yes I would love to play with Ben's Doom maps
Oh, and USB to Parallel adaptors are pretty easy and cheap to come by. Hell, I have a spare one if you want it. Local electronics chain was going out of business and so doing a lot of liquidation reductions... got them for about £2 apiece, but they wouldn't have been more than about £10-15 originally, and that was just on the shelf in a walk-in store. Probably most big electronics retailers will still have a few on one of their dustier racks. (Only picked up the second because on a repeat visit to a different branch I forgot some of the things I'd already bought, so there's also a spare 3.5mm optical to TOSlink converter going begging)
Even though it might not support anything better than the base-level "nibble mode" transfers, that's still enough for a few dozen kb/sec, so if you can stand waiting a minute or two for each WAD to copy, and maybe an hour for the entire disc (which won't be more than about 2/3rds full of WADs unless you deleted the original Iomega Tools folder) it shouldn't matter that the higher speed modes are unavailable for a one-time thing.
AM1 systems for a while there could be reliably built with legacy ports because they were replacing old machines very often.
We now all know about Ben’s past work massacre fantasy. Creepy
Zip drives are great for transferring data to old DOS era machines. Since they made USB versions of the zip drives you can just plug them into a modern PC and copy files over then move the disk into a parallel version of a zip drive and it just works
The machine I have doesn't like those new IDE memory card adapters so it's the main way I play dos games on real hardware
that old dell *would* make a handy media server or data back up, os-image back up, application back up machine. And if the OS is on an SSD, you'd still have plenty of sata slots to dedicate to some 4 tb hdds. Oh and it could read your old floppy's too. in case you happen to come across a lighting system or networking system that relied on an OS booting from fdd.
Felix's voice is sooooo smooth
Will Felix take over the channel when Ben will go live in the dumbster room of EEVblog?
Plugs in a ZIP drive to a parallel port, starts talking about SCSI.
IIRC the last version of the ZIP 100 Drive, before they went to USB, had a smart connector that sensed whether it was connected to a SCSI card or a Parallel Port.
Edited to add: Just checked it and Parallel Port ZIP Plus drives were SCSI drives with a SCSI to Parallel interface.
Which gives me an idea for a few old Macs I have...
High quality sarcasm in this video.
I mostly came for the regrettable acting! :)
i put togheter a working zipdrive for my old synth with 3 nonworking units. mine is scsi. have 2 now, one internal and one external. guess the head needs to be aligned cause i could not read old discs, but after format they worked fine.
More Felix!
I bought a mobo late last year that had a parallel port header, I'd just need to get the cheap actual bit that stuff plugs into.
Sorry guys I could have helped you but the DELL Dimension has been scrapped except for the hard drive, there is a video file called "Because it's your Stuff", Microsoft Windows 98SE is what you should have installed as it had the drivers on the disc, there are ZIP IDE drives that can be installed just like a hard drive, have a look at the files at "d:\drivers\storage\iomega" that should let you reverse the unit.
Am I the only one wondering why Ben hasn't uploaded his maps? I would love to try them!
a Dell 4:3 ultrasharp, the real star of this show.
What about a video talking about how you made the custom map for doom?
Ohh boy! RISC OS on a Goodman's IBX100 is how I used mine !
You had fun with this one lol.
Redundant best joke of the week
Never got caught in the "Zoom" drive trap. I invested in LS-120 SuperDisk instead and never regretted it. These drives are still working today.
When I was a little kid my dad told me SCSI stood for System Can't See It. I had no experience with SCSI, but I laughed anyways cause I'm a good son.
Links to the linux driver and how you got the drive working in Linux would have been nice, as I actually do have an old parallel Zip drive, and several old machines with parallel ports on them. It might be fun to get the thing working again.
I gave away two 5200 and a some boxes full of games and stuff to a friend and yes they all worked. He love old games. Mostly when I get a new computer, phone or gaming device I give away my old system. But if I love it to much I would keep it. I don’t trash them or recycle them if they work. Someone will love them.
Felix realy started going grey. Guess the time with crazy Ben is the guilty part.
Man 2007 isn't an ancient computer, I recently sold my Pentium 1 166mhz machine with 64Mb of 72pin edo memory, that was a lot of memory back in the day. Shame I put my 386DX40 with 387 maths co-processor in the bin more than 10 years ago.
Felix watches Rick and Morty! Thumbs up
Because he is an intellectual while he enjoys Richard and Mortimer
Funny how you got the info off using a parallel zip drive and an old Dell ststem running Ubuntu. I had to do the same not long ago.
Windows supports ZIP cassettes natively, but Linux needs a module.
Funny how that works
Yesssss there not dead welcome back
Everyone always makes their workplace, home and/or school when they make their first custom map in a game lol
Wow... Felix smiled. Then he did it again. Weird. Not sure if I'm comfortable with Felix smiling...
Protocols... probably SCSI-over-LPT. It started out as a SCSI device, and it was a common enough thing for various external devices like CDROMs. SCSI signalling is fairly adaptable to any connection with at least 8 data lines and some status lines alongside, and if you have a suitably sophisticated driver to handle the bit banging and translation, packeting up the commands and data to send over the parallel lead (or receive and decode it), the actual device itself can be more or less wholly unmodifed. Even the ports on the machine can be exactly the same, as a 25-pin D-shell is plenty enough. The cleverness is probably mostly the printer passthru ability; presumably the Zip only responds to commands that have a particular magic cookie in it, and everything else just passes through unmodified.
(later: The use of the error, busy, etc lines are probably to do with its "nibble mode" operation where it can work on a regular unidirectional parallel port, getting data back from the drive 4 bits at a time using the status lines; timing otherwise would just use the regular strobe... if you've got a very basic built-in driver, it'll default to that because even though it's super slow, the more sophisticated modes would need extra code and not be as widely compatible. Never heard of SCSI using its 8 parallel lines as separate bitstreams, though possibly Iomega were scrambling the data as some kind of encyrption / anti-hardware-piracy thing?)
OK, so, er... what did we actually find out here? I'm confused. We seem to have started doing some logic analysis, then a poke at the source code, and.... er... stopped. What was the actual outcome of those investigations? Some kind of odd SCSI-via-LPT or what? Did it just prove too predictable and uninteresting to continue with?
And, yeah, as far as I know myself, 512 byte sectors, though almost certainly glomped into at least 2k clusters in the 100mb discs (maybe not the very early 25mb ones, and probably larger for the 250 and 750s), much like the case for CDRs to keep the FAT / other file tables manageable, and more importantly easily addressible under MSDOS. Possibly the driver would have done some transparent translation turning DOS cluster-level accesses into Zip sector-level ones, and that might be the origin of the odd multiple-serial link thing (interleaving the bits from each byte of a logical 4k cluster into separate physical half-k sectors?!), though I would more suspect that's down to whatever data is being transmitted being a 7-bit-or-less-character representation packed into 8-bit bytes, meaning that one or more of the lines will remain seemingly unused during transmission.
Discs were... 300? 360rpm? and hard-sectored with increasing numbers of sectors from the inner to outer edge of the disc, Mac / Amiga style, and belying the format's attempted bridging of the floppy and hard disc worlds (which was kinda Iomega's thing from the Bernoulli onwards), so the speed would vary somewhat if you had a very high speed connection (highest-rate parallel, SCSI, ATAPI) but not really be noticeable on slower ones because the link would be permanently saturated even with the lowest physical data rate. It might make figuring out the timings somewhat difficult though, unless you did a continual survey of the transfer rate whilst copying a full 95mb file one way or the other. So long as the link was fast enough, it should show a stepped increase (or decrease?) with very nearly an exact number of kb's (or half kbs, if it's actually single sided / only reads one side at a time, which would seem to be a bit primitive for such a machine) per second at each stage - as it's likely spinning the disc at exactly 5 or 6 revolutions per second - only maybe varying from that if the link reaches saturation point.
Oh my god I absolutely adore your fucking appalling acting. Don’t ever change x
@8:58 I still have that calculator!
You could have just brought the disk over to my house and we could have popped it into my PowerMac G3 with the built in Zip drive and played the levels in Mac Doom! (I'm pretty sure Doom wads were cross platform.)
I don't know if there is time or a will to take this on, but it would be really cool for you guys to hack the C64 Mini. It uses a single board computer with an ARM processorand has pads for a UART connector, so you might be able to get into the system (not known if Linux or Android). It also has a fake keyboard, but that's something you guys could fix.
My brand new Z270 motherboard has a parallel port, you just need to add the ribbon cable.
Hey Ben I had this crazy idea I have these old CR TVs at my house And some cable that was left from the cable company to each of them I was thinking it would be kind of cool to maybe hook up a computer. Where they could pick up a few channels artificially made channels from the computer