3 Jun
2005
3 Jun
'05
4:44 p.m.
I have a device that plugs into a serial port on a PC and looks like a
disk drive to an Atari 800. Is there such a thing for RT-11? It seems
like it should be possible to write a disk driver that uses a serial
port and some sort of serial protocol to communicate with a PC and make
RT-11 think it is accessing a local disk drive. Has anyone done
If you'll accept it emulating a tape drive, make it emulate the TU58.
That has an asynchornous host interface (which is trivial to turn into
RS232), and a fairly simple protocol which is documented in the user
manual IIRC. The TU58 is a block-structured device, so it is pretty
similar to a (very slow) disk to the software.
There must be an RT11 driver for it (DD.SYS?)
I think there used to be unix-based software to emulate a TU58 (so that a
PDP11 conneccted to a serial port on the unix machine thought it had a
TU58 connected). It must still be around somewhere.
Another related question is what is the smallest QBus
backplane mounted
in a box with a power supply that will support an 11/23 CPU (M8186), a
memory card (M8044) and a serial port/boot rom card (M8047) and maybe a
multi-port serial card (M8043)?
A BA11-V. It's tiny -- a dual-hight 4 slot backplane alongside a little
PSU. I think it supports Q18 (which is what you need for the 11/23), but
if not it should be trivial to wire-wrap.
-tony