15 Oct
2012
15 Oct
'12
6:46 p.m.
On Oct 15, 2012, at 8:57 PM, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove wrote:
If I can get some more money, I'd be willing to
contribute -- for a
QBUS version though; preferably with the ability to be an RH11+disk
controller (workalike) with an RM05 or two.
I only have a QBUS machine, so I'd be developing for that. However,
Unibus has very similar drivers, and I imagine the circuitry for the
board would be 90% identical. My general plan was for an FPGA or
CPLD for the bus management with a microcontroller for the meat of
the controller (the "personality"), which has the benefits of making
the software separable from the underlying bus and also making
modules writeable by anyone with access to a GCC stack, not just
people with FPGA software licenses.
What I'd really like to see is something that
could replace a TM11 or
RH11+9-track tape drive controller and drives with modern CF or SD
cards instead. Would make it easier for those of us who don't have
9-track to install software off of 9-track.
That's the sort of thing any of these types of systems would excel
at. My end goal is to build a card that can be ANY QBUS card (CPU,
memory, peripheral, etc), but baby steps. Among other things, that
requires a lot more pin real estate on the controller for both
directions of most of the signals. A disk/tape/other peripheral
emulator (like udisk) is a somewhat easier first target.
- Dave