Stripping an RA80

On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 8:08 PM, Pontus Pihlgren <pontus at update.uu.se> wrote: I've just re-read the printsets... The microprocesor boards in the R80 and RA80 printsets are different. They have different layouts. But the circuitry looks at first glance to be much the same. Whether this is just a revision level thing I don't know. I will look over it more carefully. At first glace the external connectors seem to have the same pinouts. Interestingly the personallity board in the R80 printset is called the RM80 personality board. Suggesting that as I thought the RM80 is the R80 with a Massbus interface box. The microprocessor board includes the write data encoder and the read data separator. There is a clock/data pair for each to the personality board. The R80 (and thus RM80) personality board just buffers them and sends them to the 26 way host cable. The low level format is thus determined by the controller. I have no reason to assume that an RM80's controller uses the same format as the VAX11/730 IDC. The RA80 personality board has some circuitry between the clock/data lines to the microprocessor board (and thus eventually to the heads) and the host cables. But not that much circuitry, I've not looked at it seriously yet (after all it's the one part I will not be using). Certainly not enough to have a sector data buffer. So my guess is that againg the host does a lot of the low-ish level stuff. -tony