IBM channel-attached DASD emulation

[Mike Ross]

On Dec 26, 2015 5:16 PM, "Guy Sotomayor" <ggs at shiresoft.com> wrote:
>
> I
>
>
> On 12/25/15 5:55 PM, Mike Ross wrote:

>> (To digress briefly - a modern reimplementation of something like the
>> Setasi Massbus disk emulator would also be very useful; Rich - weren't
>> LCM working on something like that?)
>>
>>
> Again, I've looked at it.  I think the biggest problem is that there
isn't a spec per-se
> on Massbus.  A lot of reverse engineering will be required to make it
work properly
> in all cases.  It'll be a lot of reading (and fully understanding) the
drive schematics and
> then trying to generalize it.
>
> TTFN - Guy

Another approach would be reverse-engineering the Setasi itself. That's a
known production-quality Massbus emulation, based on a 486 PC with one
custom card doing the Massbus interface... A card driven by a Xilinx FPGA
which could possibly be 'read out'...?

Crying shame time... Back in the mid 2000s I was in contact with John
Jones... ex DEC hardware guru and the guy behind Setasi. I agreed to buy
all the remaining bits of Setasi from him... Several units, doc, software -
and his development PC with all source and design files.

Then I had a bout with cancer, and by the time I picked up the threads
again he had given up on me and chucked it all in the dumpster :(

Mike