4 Jun
2003
4 Jun
'03
2:57 a.m.
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
There arent that many QBUS lines to drive. If I was to make a new QBUS card I
would use SOT-23 MOSFETs as the bus drivers, maybe with a 10 ohm series
resistor for output protection against VCC shorts and slew rate limited gate
drive...
On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
That doesn't bother me. I'm just looking for the simplest implementation
that'll allow me to connect an RL01/02 to a PeeCee or other non
[Q/UNI/OMNI]BUS machine. I'm not interested in practicality as much and
the fun of running the thing. This is the same reason I want a (non slot
load) 9track tape drive, and an RM0x-style 'washing machine' disk drive.
If you are serious about doing this I can offer a free PCI FPGA card (one of
our "blems") That would give you a 200K FPGA and 72 I/O lines.
Sounds like a fun project...
Patrick
Finnegan wrote:
Is there a similar document for the RL8A, RL11,
RLV11 or RLV12? I'd
really like to get enough documentation together to build a controller
that can work with other machines (maybe ISA bus, or more likely a
microcontroller with a nice sized chunk of cache ram and a serial port) to
facilitate getting data onto/off of RL02 disks. Really, I'm just looking
for the microcode PROM dump, or specs on the drive<->controller bus that
are detailed enough to contain a 'protocol description'.
Jerome Fine replies:
I don't want to rain on your parade, but just a suggestion - a motherboard
with an ISA slot is now almost impossible to find, new of course. And
a serial port is a bit slow. Far better would be a PCI slot, although how much
longer they will last
is hard to know.
I rather not play with something that 'speedy' yet. I'd rather work up
from slow/narrow/simple bus (ISA) to fast/wide/complex bus (PCI) instead
of jumping in head first.
BUT, if you are so inclined, FAR FAR more useful
would be an MSCP
implementation for IDE (now EIDE) drives which are themselves threatened,
but should last for a few more years. Since the MSCP patent has expired,
there will not be a conflict with DEC/Compaq/HP. If you are so inclined,
ask for some help since a number of individuals have already considered
this - especially for an ISA slot.
That would be interesting, but IDE disks are too small to play with. ;o)
But it would be nice to stick a nice "small" 1-10GB disk on a QBUS machine
of mine without using up my QBUS MSCP SCSI controller. As I remember
though, the hard part about making QBUS things was finding the bus driver
chips - unless you wanted to sever them off of working boards... which I'm
not inclined to do at the moment.
Thanks for the suggestions anyhow.
Pat
--
Purdue University ITAP/RCS
Information Technology at Purdue
Research Computing and Storage
http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/
Peter Wallace