Hi
I haven't done it myself and a I could have sworn it has been discussed
over at vcf, it might have been about a CMD controller.
If you succeed I have at least one Viking tape controller that I would
like to convert.
/P
On Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 08:35:35AM +0200, Mattis Lind wrote:
I have a TD Systems Viking QTO MSCP emulating SCSI
tape QBUS controller and
I found a manual for that one one the net:
http://manx.classiccmp.org/collections/antonio/chrisq/TD_Systems_Inc_-_900-…
But I rather have a disk controller rather than a tape controller. Or a
combined tape and disk.
An old post from '99 (
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sys.pdp11/2XddHq03SQI) indicate
that the web address is
www.tdsys.com. Accessing this webpage just informs
me that the company doesn't exist any more. But someone is paying the
domain fee. I tried to email but hasn't got neither a bounce nor a reply
yet.
I would guess that it is all up to the EPROM and the PAL chip to decide how
this card is working. QDO, QTO, QDT, QDD or QDA. The PAL is a simple 16L8
so it is most certainly only used for address decoding and should be pretty
simply to change. The EPROM contents is a problem though. I dumped it and
did some initial checking with a Z80 disassembler and simple operations
like "strings".
There are a lot of strings in there. Some of them seems to relate to tape
drives, like "EXABYTE", "WANGTEK" and "space forward". But
also others that
seems to be disk oriented like "Booting from DU0", "Disk common command
set" and "Fomat unit".
A couple of years ago a someone sold such a controller on Ebay but also
included an EPROM and a PAL to convert it. I contacted this seller but
never go a reply.
Does anyone have this controller? Know anything about it? Has anyone
converted it from tape to disk?