19 Oct
2016
19 Oct
'16
7:15 p.m.
On 2016-10-19 6:48 PM, shadoooo wrote:
Hello,
I read several posts about Unibus disk interfaces and emulation.
One of my retrocomputing dream is to design an Unibus universal board,
probably based on FPGA because of precise timing requirements,
to emulate one or more disk/tape interfaces, and possibly something more.
The real storage could be based on SD card, so very easy to be moved
to a PC for imaging and data transfer.
Probably a low level emulation would be quite easy, while a more complex
solution (MSCP) could be more difficult.
The board itself wouldn't be cheap at all, because PCB would be big,
and because FPGA aren't cheap either.
Probably it would be anyway cheaper than an MSCP-SCSI, and it would be
far more
flexible.
From what I understand, there could be a great demand of a such
interface here around?
Been thinking about this for more than 10 years :-(
Isn't Noel working on something related?
Btw, MSCP isn't really as complex as its reputation... While I'm not an
expert, the hard parts of this project seem to be the boring bits -- the
mechanical interface, the drivers/transceivers, and all that. Once
that's taken care of, the software/fpga is the fun bit. Imho, etc.
--Toby
Andrea