I hope I won't cause offence with the following --- it's not intended!
Is it known whether the current IP owner intends to sell more of these devices? I know you can get the bare boards from VintageMicros, but the ROM is useful for booting the Lisa, and if that's not for sale, then you'll have to boot MacWorks Plus II some other way. I'm also not sure how easy it is to source the L5380 SCSI controller IC. Incidentally, I found
this technical post (by James MacPhail I assume) interesting. It looks like you only need two bytes in the ROM to allow MacWorks to use the card, provided you have some other way of booting MacWorks, like a floppy disk.
(
ETA: The ROM situation described in the post is an interesting one. I wonder how easy it is for the IP owner to make working ROM/PAL hybrid assemblies these days.)
I can understand misgivings about copying the PCB net (regardless of legality, which I think permits it for the reasons Patrick said, although I'm no lawyer!). I don't think this is
plagiarism: Alex is not trying to say that the card is their own invention.
But if reverse-engineering and copying the net isn't fair play for other reasons, then we can abide by that, especially on this forum. Suppose instead you identified the "theory of operation" of the card and built some kind of replacement that MacWorks could use in the same way --- would this be all right?
It seems pretty likely that the card is the L5380 IC and some glue logic, and that basically MacWorks talks to the L5380 pretty directly. One of the chips on the card is a flip-flop, so there's a little additional state, but the rest is buffers and logic gates from what I can tell. Some of the glue logic may be for switching between the way the Lisa expects to talk to the ROM (using 16-bit 68000 peripheral interfacing) and how the MacWorks software might talk to the L5380 (which would be different if it uses 8-bit 6800 peripheral interfacing). The
AppleNet card does the same thing.
The L5380 datasheet can be found on pages 424-447 of
this PDF. I would bet MacWorks might only use a subset of the L5380's features, and you might be able to guess what they are by looking at the card's wiring or by examining MacWorks itself. From that knowledge you could make a new, compatible card, maybe one that makes use of modern ICs and a microcontroller that wouldn't be too hard to source. There's a lot of open-source activity these days in creating disk-emulating devices like BlueSCSI, so it may be possible to reuse some of that work here to recreate an L5380-based computer SCSI interface.
Alternatively, suppose you did have access to some L5380s, plus knowledge of what the support chips are doing (some logic function plus some state). You got this knowledge by understanding what the SCSI card logic does and/or by reverse-engineering MacWorks. You think you can probably replicate that same logic with a couple of GALs and some buffers, which you also have to hand, or maybe with your own 74-series design, or maybe with some other kind of programmable device.
Would either of these options be possible to discuss here? I promise I'm not trying to play games by asking. These alternative routes to a MacWorks-compatible SCSI card are ones that Alex or someone else might enjoy, and that bystanders like me would probably find enjoyable and educational to read about and discuss. If it's allowable on the premier Apple Lisa forum on the internet, then it's good to know it's an option. If not, there's always other projects.
