My knowledge of Qbus and Unibus is incredibly spars, but I would be
interested in knowing how this pans out. At the very least, I would
expect NetBSD to be able to see a keyboard attached to the VCB02?
Aaron.
Josh Dersch via cctalk writes:
So I had a random thought in the wee hours this
morning and I leave it
to you, the cctalk braintrust, to tell me exactly how stupid this idea
is:
I have a VAX-11/750, an Able QNiverter (UNIBUS->Qbus adapter), a
22-bit Qbus backplane, and a VCB02 (QDSS) 4-bit graphics boardset.
Theory: With an appropriately modified NetBSD driver for the VCB02,
such that it provides only 18-bit addresses to the VCB02's DMA engine,
I can get X running on the VCB02 on the 11/750.
That is, the configuration is: 11/750->Unibus->QNiverter->Qbus->VCB02.
Obviously the console functionality of the VCB02 won't work since that
requires support on the VAX side of things that won't be present, but
I think everything else should work. I've browsed the technical
manual and I don't see anything that should get in the way, I'll just
need to hack up the driver appropriately.
But this is something that randomly popped into my head (I was
inspired by a research paper, "A VAX Based Data Acquisition Computer
System at the Nuclear Structure Research Laboratory" wherein a Matrox
QRGB Qbus graphics board was lashed to an 11/750 in a similar
manner...
What say you all?
- Josh
--
Aaron Jackson
PhD Student, Computer Vision Laboratory, Uni of Nottingham
http://aaronsplace.co.uk/