Solid State Disk replacement for RD53, 54, RK05, RL02/02 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

10 Mar 2010

...
  There was a thread recently on the comp.sys.dec
newsgroup which ended up
 with the suggestion from David Riley that he would be prepared to build an
 FPGA-based board with a QBUS interface on one side and an SD interface on
 the other which anyone could then program to emulate any disk/controller
 they like. 
I should've known I'd miss something like this if I stopped following
the newsgroups... I've been working on something similar, which would
essentially be an SD and/or ATA-based MSCP adapter. The current design
is based on an ARM microcontroller handling MSCP and physical storage
and an as yet to be selected PLD of some description for the QBus
interface and DMA. It's still in the early stages, but I have a fair
bit of it worked out and have started on a prototype. I'm not a bit
fan of duplicated effort, so depending on how far David's project is
and the common goals, maybe there is room for collaboration or even
combination of projects to some degree.

...
  I have been in touch with him to see how much interest
he has
 had, because he needs a minimum number of about 10 to make it viable, but so
 far there has only been me and one other person showing an interest. David
 reckons they would come to a little over $200 each (possibly less if there
 is more interest). 
If it does MSCP and all the stuff I want my own project to do (or can
be easily programmed to do so) I'd want one - would save me a lot of
work ;-) At $200 a pop though, I would be more interested in two or
three unpopulated PCBs than a complete unit.

Cheers,

-- 
Steve Maddison
http://www.cosam.org/