16 Jan
2016
16 Jan
'16
11:22 a.m.
On 1/16/16 12:44 PM, tony duell wrote:
Does anyone have any sensible ideas as to what to try
next. At the moment I have no idea if
it's the tape, heads, roller or what....
This might not be what you want, but I boot my 11/730 from a tu58
emulator running on a linux box. I used a little ttl<->rs232 converter
board. It works well and is reliable.
If nothing more, it will let you load the microcode so you can check out
the cpu.
That R80, however. mmm. Those are cranky. And noisy. At first I put a
UDA50 in to boot off more modern disks. But that took 2 slots so I
switched to a unibus scsi card. That allowed me to get a slot back for
memory.
The fun thing about emulated tu58 is that it was easy to make a new boot
tape with PUTR and put a unix loader which knows how to boot over
ethernet. These days I tend to boot new kernels over ethernet with that.
just a thought.
ps: tu58 controller boards are easy to find. I have at least 4-5 of
them. The rollers are the issue, when they turn to goo.
-brad