new disks, old DEC (was Re: 4.3BSD Quasijarus)

I've got cartridges, but I really, really, (_really_!) doubt that it'll make your drive work. RC25s were notoriously unreliable even when they were new, and as unsealed (even the fixed platter is open to the air) drives they just don't age well at all. I've got two RC25 drives (well, maybe even three but that's another story) and none will work. I spent a couple of weeks working on them once, and all will now try to spin up and then fault with various error conditions (I've since forgotten the error codes - sorry). Another option would be to build something that plugs into the LESI (aka Aztec) controller and pretends to be a disk. That'd be way cool. But I've never seen any documentation on the LESI interface, either electrical or the protocol, so I've no idea how hard that would be. As long as the interface remains undocumented, I'd guess "really hard". And of course the LESI interface wasn't very popular (it was only ever used for the TU81 and the RC25) so the potential market, outside of you and me, is limited :-) The important thing is that whatever you come up with has to be close enough to a standard MSCP controller so that you can boot it with the standard DU bootstrap and so that VMB can talk to it. Unfortunately some of the third party SMD controllers weren't really MSCP compatible and needed custom bootstraps and VMS drivers (we used to have an SI controller on a 780 that fell into this category) - those would be a problem unless a) you can also recover the software (difficult), and b) they supported a 11/730 (even more unlikely!). The LESI approach at least avoids this problem. Of course if you only want to run Un*x then you have more flexibility :-) Bob