> 
> On Thu, 6 Jul 1995 22:45:39 -0500 (EST)  Mark F Willey wrote:
> > 
> > The main things that I am worried about is the quality of the monitor, and
> > the NCR SCSI.  Does anyone know, is that a good SCSI controller, and might
> > I be better off with a Buslogic, etc?
> 
> You might want to stick with the NCR.  I recently purchased a new Pentium
> system with AWARD BIOS and a BT946C.  I have a nifty 'problem' with
> the BT in that it doesn't seem to save it's configuration in Auto-SCSI.
> 
> I called BT about it and they said it was my MB and the MB people said
> it's BT :-(

This has been a long standing issue between BT and MB manufacutres.  BT
has been pointing at the MB manufactues as the problem for 2 years, yet
it amazes me that Adaptec does not have this problem, and that BusLogic
has revised the design of the 946 twice and gone through some 12 revisions
of there bios trying to fix it, they (BT) seem to make the problem move
around a lot but it has never been fixed as far as I can tell.

The bigger problem than being able to save Auto-SCSI is that the board
often locks up before Auto-SCSI even gives you the ^B prompt :-(.

> I've used BT products previously without any problems;  I'm just exasperated
> I'm having this kind of experience at all with it...

Same here... more below...

> 
> Basically it's a wash for me.  I've moved from CA to MA in the interim and
> not had another chance to attempt to work on it.  All of this was with
> NetBSD 1.0.  Th machine basically works under DOS, but I'd really like
> to be running Net on it as well.
> 
> Also the adapter appears to report it at 0x130 instead of 0x330.

:-(.

> A freind mentioned something about the FreeBSD camp announcing that BT
> is not the prefered PCI SCSI host adapter any longer.  I've not dug
> though the FreeBSD mailing lists to determine if this is fact or
> fiction tho.

The FreeBSD core team has in fact dropped BusLogic as the prefered SCSI
host adapter.  We no longer recomened the bt946, in fact we are trying
to stear people clear of it at this time due to the problems mentioned
above and a major technical support problem within BusLogic.  

I am a FreeBSD core team member, so this is _fact_.  Several of the
core team members do own bt946 cards and we are not happy about the
situation one bit.  My 2 boards now sit on the shelf and collect dust
having been replaced by $72.00 NCR 53C810 cards.

> Has anyone heard anything about this or had similar problems?

As a BusLogic VAR I am rather upset with BusLogic's finger pointing
tactics and there rapid shot gun techniques with the firmware changes
in attempts to fix the problems.  Haveing used the bt946 product line
for the last 18 months I have not been very happy with having to match
eprom revisions to MB bioses to get them to work.  I am also not happy
with having spent well over $100.00 in phone charges to sit on hold
waiting for there technical support people to ``support'' me by telling
me my MB is not PCI 2.0 compliant (yea, right, Intel mfg board clearly
stating PCI 2.0 compliant right on it isn't PCI 2.0 compliant :-)).
 
> I'd like to try booting it with current, but I've just not had
> the chance...

Once you get a bt946 working with a MB, they just work, but until you
get it working correctly it is a royal pain in the ....


-- 
Rod Grimes                                      rgrimes@gndrsh.aac.dev.com
Accurate Automation Company                 Reliable computers for FreeBSD