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Archive Corp./Seagate Tape Driver Controller Card Drivers

Super-Slasher

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 21, 2003
Messages
222
Location
Ontario, Canada... the frosty north.
I found a rather obscure 8-bit device card which turned out to be an aincent tape drive controller card made by Archive Corp. (Seagate branch). It's from '86 and the model is "80530-152 REV A".

Anyone with drivers or know where they are, exactly, please get in touch with me. Also any info about the actual tape drive and what size of tapes it took would be most helpful as well. Thank you.
 
Can you post a picture somewhere? Is it SCSI by any chance?
 
mbbrutman said:
Can you post a picture somewhere? Is it SCSI by any chance?

I can post a pic of it later when I'm back from college, but the card in question has an internal 50-pin connector which I at first assumed to be a SCSI hookup, but the few sources that's told me about this card has referred to that 50-pin connector as an "internal tape drive connector".

I still consider it to be a SCSI hookup...
 
I was digging through all of my new cards and I came across mentioned tape card again. I totally forgot about this post, so long ago! Here is my much overdue pics:

archive-card.jpg


archive-card2.jpg


Please forgive the quality, my digital camera sucks at taking close up pictures, but you can see the card well enough in the pic, I hope.

Still looking for the drivers and the tape machine, if possible...
 
Sorry man, the pictures aren't worth it. Try to lay the card on a scanner gently and get a picture that way - it works great.
 
I go for the lettering on the chips, especially the larger chips. Many of the smaller chips are just TTL glue logic, and are not interesting. (Hex inverters, NAND gates, etc.) The bigger chips tend to be EPROMs, ASICs, etc.

The EPROMs might have the name/source of the code on them and a version number. The ASICs often tell you what chipset was used. On an older card knowing the chipset tells you what driver software you need to find.


Mike
 
Here ya go. 220KB of scanned goodness...

The original scan was over 2MB, so I compressed it, needless to say. Because of the zoom, you should beable to see all the markings and silk screenings okay, but if you want the full-sized, uncompressed version, e-mail me and I'll see how I can get it to you.

Thanks for the scanner idea, too! I would have never thought of it for cards...
 
It's an NCR chipset. I believe the card is an Archive SC402. It's a controller for a QIC02 tape drive (150MB), probably an Archive Viper 2150L. (According to Google.)

It had Linux support as a tape controller, but it's not a general SCSI controller.

Unless you have the drive, I wouldn't bother with it - it's not very usable because of the lack of drivers ...
 
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