13 Oct
2012
13 Oct
'12
7:32 p.m.
Just curious, did anyone ever do a Unibus->IDE, etc... anything to
interface a modern drive to unibus?
I see from googling that Brad Parker had an excellent concept &
initial design. Basically a unibus controller that could impersonate
several different controllers & disks... Anyone know if this project
(or a similar one) ever was completed? I'd be most interested in
keeping the RL02 on the 11/45, but would love to have something larger
for builds that could be easily removed and thus keep the system
"original".
J
13 Oct
13 Oct
8:07 p.m.
What about just using a SCSI adapter? Thought the equivalent to a Webster ESDI controller
would be nice. I use SCSI on my /44 as well as my /23+ and /73. The /23 is limited to
RL01/02.
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 13, 2012, at 7:32 PM, Jay West <jwest at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Just curious, did anyone ever do a Unibus->IDE,
etc... anything to interface a modern drive to unibus?
I see from googling that Brad Parker had an excellent concept & initial design.
Basically a unibus controller that could impersonate several different controllers &
disks... Anyone know if this project (or a similar one) ever was completed? I'd be
most interested in keeping the RL02 on the 11/45, but would love to have something larger
for builds that could be easily removed and thus keep the system "original".
J
14 Oct
14 Oct
6:23 a.m.
On Oct 13, 2012, at 10:07 PM, Aracnet wrote:
What about just using a SCSI adapter? Thought the
equivalent to a
Webster ESDI controller would be nice. I use SCSI on my /44 as well
as my /23+ and /73. The /23 is limited to RL01/02.
Because unibus scsi controllers are hard to find (in my world) and
generally very expensive. Not to mention - sooner or later the
original scsi boards will die. It would be helpful to keep the
machines around longer if a "universal controller" existed that could
emulate any of the common historical controllers and storage.
See Brad Parkers initial efforts for "udisk"....
http://www.heeltoe.com/index.php?n=Retro.Udisk
I'm surely not the only collector who would be willing to pony up some
$$$ for such a project....
J
9:59 a.m.
[...non-ancient disk on Unibus machines...]
I'm surely not the only collector
who would be willing to pony up
some $$$ for such a project.... 
10:24 a.m.
On 14/10/12 12:59 PM, Mouse wrote:
Not quite the same thing, but years and years ago, there was someone
who was trying to build a Qbus IDE interface. (I know about it because
I was working on NetBSD kernel code to talk to it.)
At least two of these were completed and documented -- Chuck Dickman's,
and Dmitry Pryanishnikov's.
http://www.chdickman.com/qbus_ide/
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2000/01/03/0015.html
A version of the latter is mirrored here:
http://telegraphics.com.au/pdp11/
--Toby
[...non-ancient disk on Unibus machines...]
I'm surely not the only collector who would be willing to pony up
some $$$ for such a project....
It never went anywhere as far as I could tell. I never saw the
hardware and don't know whether the issues I was seeing were hardware
bugs or me being confused or what. I don't know whether the person got
busy with other things or fed up with my not producing working code or
what, but it sure would have been nice.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
10:21 a.m.
New subject: SDI? MSCP? - Re: unibus to modern disk interface?
On 14/10/12 9:23 AM, Jay West wrote:
On Oct 13, 2012, at 10:07 PM, Aracnet wrote:
When I contemplated this project, I was thinking of MSCP. But the other
day looking at one of my MicroVAX IIs (not Unibus of course) with an
idle KDA50, I wondered why people don't create faux-disks that emulate
the SDI interface. Not the same solution by any means, but are the SDI
controllers at least more common in QBus and Unibus setups?
Or, if recreating the controller rather than just an SDI disk, most
likely it would be simpler to emulate the KDA/UDA than MSCP?
--Toby
What about just using a SCSI adapter? Thought the
equivalent to a
Webster ESDI controller would be nice. I use SCSI on my /44 as well as
my /23+ and /73. The /23 is limited to RL01/02.
Because unibus scsi controllers are hard to find (in my world) and
generally very expensive. Not to mention - sooner or later the original
scsi boards will die. It would be helpful to keep the machines around
longer if a "universal controller" existed that could emulate any of the
common historical controllers and storage.
See Brad Parkers initial efforts for "udisk"....
http://www.heeltoe.com/index.php?n=Retro.Udisk
I'm surely not the only collector who would be willing to pony up some
$$$ for such a project....
J
11:40 a.m.
New subject: SDI? MSCP? - Re: unibus to modern disk interface?
On 10/14/2012 01:21 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
When I contemplated this project, I was thinking of
MSCP. But the other
day looking at one of my MicroVAX IIs (not Unibus of course) with an
idle KDA50, I wondered why people don't create faux-disks that emulate
the SDI interface. Not the same solution by any means, but are the SDI
controllers at least more common in QBus and Unibus setups?
That would be great, but it would take a LOT of work. SDI is a fairly
complex interface at the electrical level; there's a good bit of analog
magic involved.
Or, if recreating the controller rather than just an
SDI disk, most
likely it would be simpler to emulate the KDA/UDA than MSCP?
MSCP is the system<->controller interface, so these are the same
thing. (remember DEC built a lot of different MSCP drives with
completely different physical/electrical interfaces)
But emulating MSCP at the register and command level is still a lot of
work. It has been done by an individual, and he got it to the point
where it'd boot VMS from a SCSI disk, but there were a few (likely
minor) bugs remaining. Then he just seemed to stop and disappear; I
don't know what happened. His website was on my network for a long
time, but I've had no contact with him for several years. It's kinda a
shame because he got 99% of the way there.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
12:22 p.m.
New subject: SDI? MSCP? - Re: unibus to modern disk interface?
On 14/10/12 2:40 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 10/14/2012 01:21 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Ah yes, silly me. It's a while since I've been looking at DEC stuff, but
I seem to have found motivation again.. :)
When I contemplated this project, I was thinking
of MSCP. But the other
day looking at one of my MicroVAX IIs (not Unibus of course) with an
idle KDA50, I wondered why people don't create faux-disks that emulate
the SDI interface. Not the same solution by any means, but are the SDI
controllers at least more common in QBus and Unibus setups?
That would be great, but it would take a LOT of work. SDI is a fairly
complex interface at the electrical level; there's a good bit of analog
magic involved.
Or, if recreating the controller rather than just
an SDI disk, most
likely it would be simpler to emulate the KDA/UDA than MSCP?
MSCP is the system<->controller interface, so these are the same
thing. (remember DEC built a lot of different MSCP drives with
completely different physical/electrical interfaces)
But emulating MSCP at the register and command level is still a lot of
work. It has been done by an individual, ...
This guy http://www.mscpscsi.com/ ? I studied the MSCP spec and as much
as I could find out about it, but it's the undocumented stuff that
worries me. I expect one would be spending some time with O/S sources.
Also, no hablo analog and digital electronics: That part was to be a
friend's domain. We looked at microcontroller and FPGA possibilities.
--Toby
-Dave
6:39 p.m.
New subject: SDI? MSCP? - Re: unibus to modern disk interface?
On 10/14/2012 03:22 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
This guy http://www.mscpscsi.com/ ? I studied the MSCP
spec and as much
as I could find out about it, but it's the undocumented stuff that
worries me. I expect one would be spending some time with O/S sources.
Yup, that's the guy. He did good work and got pretty far along!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
2:53 p.m.
New subject: SDI? MSCP? - Re: unibus to modern disk interface?
Toby Thain wrote:
I wondered why people don't create faux-disks that
emulate the SDI
interface.
There's almost no documentation available on SDI. A little bit can be
gleaned from RA81 docs, but not nearly enough.
but are the SDI controllers at least more common in
QBus and Unibus
setups?
Not all that common.
Or, if recreating the controller rather than just an
SDI disk, most
likely it would be simpler to emulate the KDA/UDA than MSCP?
The KDA/UDA *are* MSCP devices.
4451
days inactive
4452
days old
9 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
eric＠brouhaha.com -
healyzh＠aracnet.com -
jwest＠classiccmp.org -
mcguire＠neurotica.com -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG -
toby＠telegraphics.com.au