It seems like quite a few vendors have that kind of thing in their SCSI BIOS, to the point where I'm disappointed when they don't, but maybe it's just because I've generally only used "modern" SCSI controllers from the 486 and later eras?
Quite possibly! I'm the same - the Adaptec PCI card in the cable headend has it, and I find it tricky to do without it. You can't beat the convenience of firing it up from ROM without even needing a bootdisk.
My AVA-2906 PCI doesn't have it (no boot ROM), and my AHA-1540B ISA card has a boot ROM but doesn't seem to have SCSISelect. Could be that it needs a ROM/Microcode update but I've never seen the ROM files available for download. The last I've seen for the AHA-1540B is AT/SCSI v3.20 in
http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/chst-strio-95/DIR34/154XBCOD.ZIP, which doesn't include SCSISelect in ROM.
I've dumped the ROMs from my card (I know it's off topic from the thread, but I may as well as we're talking about it...) -- these are v3.10 BIOS and A005 microcode.
I also included 154XBCOD.ZIP for completeness - that's BIOS v3.20 (with >1GB support) and A014 microcode.
It seems like SCSISelect was available on disk for the 1540B card:
http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1961&menustate=0 -- so I'd put this on any SCSI testing disk I was creating for a machine with an Adaptec card.
The AHA-1542C has SCSISelect in ROM, but sadly I doubt the 'C' ROMs will work on a 'B' card: the onboard processor is different (the 'B' uses an Intel 8085, the 'C' uses a Zilog Z80) for a start. The 'B' also has passive termination, whereas the 'C' has discrete active termination, and the AHA-1542CF has Dallas DS2107AS active terminator ICs.
In terms of other cards I have a Tekram 880 VLB cached SCSI card. It has something like SCSISelect in ROM, but not quite as polished. It works, though.
Symbios Logic's CONFIG.EXE - which I'm pretty sure is from SYMC8DOS.ZIP from
http://www5.ncr.com/support/support_drivers_patches.asp?Class=pc_library_53c810 - seems useful, its main purpose seems to be to modify your AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS or Windows configuration, but it has a "System View" button which lets you pick an adapter, then pick a device on the bus and see some details about it. I'd prefer it to just display a list/table instead of displaying a picture of a ribbon cable where you have to click on the device icon, but it's something.
Is there anything similar included with CorelSCSI or EZ-SCSI? I've yet to try them. Truth be told, I don't really know what they bring to the table!
Beyond that, my usual method is a Knoppix live CD - 'lsscsi' will give a brief device list, and 'smartctl -a' gives identification information for drives even if they don't support SMART.