18 Oct
2012
18 Oct
'12
12:29 a.m.
On Wed, 17 Oct 2012 08:18:26 -0400
David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
A first pass using commodity chips that "just
work" might
not be a bad idea just to get the ball rolling; more
compliant solutions can be devised later, and a
7438 solution isn't going to blow anything up.
My words. I thought about a
"universal" Uni- / QBus device and CPU
emulator some weeks ago. The bus driver chips are really the smalest
problem. The usual hobyist QBus box is a single BA23 / BA123 / BA213.
In that situation you will get away with somthing thats much lower
speced.
The real problem is to make a complete hardware solution. I.e. design
and _manufacture_ a PCB at an affordable price. AND write all the
software. The later can be a huge task. (MSCP...) If I did it I would
go as far as putting an ARM SOC on the board that runs NetBSD plus a
FPGA as QBus / UniBus glue logic. I'd not go without NetBSD because
that way you get a large software ecosystem. This will ease developement
of software for this beast imensely. (E.g. you can write / prototype
NetBSD kernel device drivers as modules written in the Lua scripting
language.)
Think of a board that runs NetBSD and simh where the peripherals are
partly emulated and partly real QBus hardware. Start an other programm
on that NetBSD board and it starts to emulate a MSCP disk controler for
a real PDP-11 or VAX CPU where the disk image is attached via iSCSI...
--
\end{Jochen}
\ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}