29 Sep
2014
29 Sep
'14
8:15 a.m.
On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 08:28:07AM +0200, Mattis Lind wrote:
I'll put it on the TODO list, any reason you think a new PAL is needed
on this board but not the qbus one?
Again, I'll put it on the TODO list. I must one of my UNIBUS machines
runnable first.
Lets work something out further on, I'm rather swamped now.
/P
The Viking card has two UART serial ports on the DB50
connector which is
split out by the cab-kit. It would be very easy to do your own. And without
the cab kit you cannot talk to the board which is very useful to do. The
pins used for the serial ports are 20,22, 28,30.
Ah, yes that is simple enough.
As far as I understand these signals normally are
ground signals. I guess
that the RS232 drivers has some kind of protection on the outputs and could
handle the short circuit to ground which would happen if you connect the
drive directly.
I think I'll go ahead and try to see if its working, perhaps make a cut
in the ribbon cable and leave them floating just to be sure?
Here is the manual:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96935524/Datormusuem/TD_Systems_Inc_-_9…
, page 5 describe the connector.
Thank you!
QDT is the disk tape, yes. Conversion between
different models is a matter
of accessing the serial console and enter a magic word and then a code for
the type of board. The PAL is pure address decoding so you could have QDT
enabled while the PAL is QTO for example.
Now I'm confused, Zane explicitly said that a new PAL is required, did
come to some other conclusion?
I also found
some other interesting cards, two Viking UTO, which I
interpret as Unibus Tape Only. Would these be possible to convert to accept
disk?
I think that the software / PAL is identical in these two. It is just a
matter of the bus interface logic that differs. Go ahead and try! I am
sorry I have no ability to program GAL / PALCE chips at the moment. In another box
was a CMD CDU-720/T. A Unibus scsi tape controller, same
question here, can you coax it to talk to disks?
I don't really know. But I have a CDU-720/M board which we could try to
copy the firmware from. Mattis: If you
want you can borrow and dump the 4.3 ROM if you like.
Yes, that would be nice!