udisk v0.3 up and running (generic unibus disk interface)

I've been away from my addiction^H^H^H^Hhobby for a 3-4 years now, but this summer I got rid of my old consulting office and moved everything into my living room (temporarily :-) Since the move I've been slowly trying to clean up old projects. One of them was the udisk disk controller emulator. In 2006-2008 I build a 4 layer prototype. The PCB had some flaws on the power plane, so I had to add a lot of wires for power but it basically worked. It has an ARM (atmel sam7s) and a CPLD on it as well as "correct" Unibus interface hardware. In 2008 I dabbled with it but never really got it stable. It would barely boot RT11. This fall I finally got serious. I dusted off the board and plugged it into my 11/34a. I used a logic analyzer and an arm jtag pod and really debugged it. I fixed a bunch of little issues in the CPLD state machines and cleaned up the arm code to be "correct" and took out all the hacks. The result is it's stable now and appears to be working correctly. The bus transactions look correct and clean.

I am itching to try bigger disks, so I might try a MSCP, we'll see. Those 2Gb CF disks... And I should run the XXDP diags on the controller. That should be interesting.

Once I have the new boards working, I plan to make up 2 "loaner" boards - I'll like someone with an older machine like an 11/05 or an 11/70 or 11/45 to try them out if they are game. And if of course I'm willing to sell them at basically cost if anyone wants them. With small quanity pcb runs the PCB's tend to be the most expensive part. I think the PCB + parts was about $300. As I recall I have new unibus interface chips for about 5x boards. I also have a number of scrap boards which I think I can use to "harvest" interface chips. I could also check the gray market again, who knows.