Hi Everyone,
I'm looking for a decent primer on Unibus termination. I'm a little
confused about M9300, M9301, M9302 and M9312. Which is to be used
There are actually more terminaorts than that ;-). I seem to recall
seeing a combined terminator and Unbius jumper, I think that goes in an 11/40
Anyway...
Unibus is done properly. What I mman by that is that both ends of the bus
are terminated. So there should alway be 2 terminators, no more and no
less, in the system.
The original scheme was to use M930 cards. These are dual-height boards
of short length Originally they used discrete resistors, later on, they
used DIL resisotr packs. But they're much the same thing. In an 11/45,
for example, one goes at hte front of the CPU backplane, another goes in
the Unibus Out slot of the last backplane/device on the Unibus.
FWIW, this terminator is also used on the RK05
The M9301 and M9312 are bootstrap/terminator boards. As well as
containign the termination resisotrs, they also ahve boot ROMs on them.
One of these goes at the CPU end of the bus in soemthing like an 11/34
The M9302 goes at the 'far end' fo the bus in such a machine. Again it
carries the termination resisotrs, but alos a little logic to assert SACK
f ia grant signal gets to it. I forget the reaosn for this, but it is the
reason why machines with such a termintor will give bus errors if the
grant chain is open. One trick i didn't metnion (and which the guy with
the 11/04 might try) si to replace the M9302 with aan M930 ans ee if the
bus error goes away. If it does, then you have a grant problem (not
necessarily an open connection on the backplane). Actually, for small
systems, just thje CPU backplane or the CPU and 1 device backplane, you
cna often get away with not fitting that terminator, at least for
testing. So if you have this bus error probklem, just pul lthe M9302 and
see what happens.
-tony