PDP-10s

On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 18:57 +0000, Ethan Dicks wrote: I'm working on a generic disk emulator. It started out as a massbus device emulator but once I got into the design, it seemed that it would be pretty easy to substitute a "unibus" personality in place of the massbus interface and be able to emulate any unibus disk controller as well. For massbus, you'll be able to hook it up to an existing massbus controller (RH11, RH70, RH20) and it'll look like the appropriate devices (it also provides for dual ported drives). When used for unibus, take a BC11A cable and run it over to the emulator. The emulator will emulate an entire "string" of 8 drives. An IDE disk will be used for the actual storage. It uses a 520MHz XScale CPU for the "smarts" (probably overkill but I'd really hate to get close and realize I'm out of CPU). It'll have ethernet to allow for loading/saving disk images (which will be compatible with the various emulators). This is a fairly complex project and I'm just starting on the prototype. The biggest problem has been how to deal with the surface mount components so that the "average" person can build one up if they wish. There *will* be multiple PCB's. I'm trying to keep it somewhat modular (CPU complex board, drive emulation logic, massbus I/F, unibus I/F). I haven't worked up the packaging yet (I want to get at least the prototype working first). I started this for my own KL10 and 11/70s as the RP06s are big and somewhat unreliable (and certified media is $$$'s). It won't be particularly inexpensive (I expect it to be in the range between 1-2 certified RP06 packs...$800-$1500). Is anyone else interested in something like this? -- TTFN - Guy