On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
>
> > >Patrick Finnegan wrote:
> >
> > > Is there a similar document for the RL8A, RL11, RLV11 or RLV12? I'd
> > > really like to get enough documentation together to build a controller
> > > that can work with other machines (maybe ISA bus, or more likely a
> > > microcontroller with a nice sized chunk of cache ram and a serial port) to
> > > facilitate getting data onto/off of RL02 disks. Really, I'm just looking
> > > for the microcode PROM dump, or specs on the drive<->controller bus that
> > > are detailed enough to contain a 'protocol description'.
> >
> > Jerome Fine replies:
> >
> > I don't want to rain on your parade, but just a suggestion - a motherboard
> > with an ISA slot is now almost impossible to find, new of course. And
> > a serial port is a bit slow.
>
> That doesn't bother me. I'm just looking for the simplest implementation
> that'll allow me to connect an RL01/02 to a PeeCee or other non
> [Q/UNI/OMNI]BUS machine. I'm not interested in practicality as much and
> the fun of running the thing. This is the same reason I want a (non slot
> load) 9track tape drive, and an RM0x-style 'washing machine' disk drive.
If you are serious about doing this I can offer a free PCI FPGA card (one of
our "blems") That would give you a 200K FPGA and 72 I/O lines.
Sounds like a fun project...
>
> > Far better would be a PCI slot, although how much longer they will last
> > is hard to know.
>
> I rather not play with something that 'speedy' yet. I'd rather work up
> from slow/narrow/simple bus (ISA) to fast/wide/complex bus (PCI) instead
> of jumping in head first.
>
> > BUT, if you are so inclined, FAR FAR more useful would be an MSCP
> > implementation for IDE (now EIDE) drives which are themselves threatened,
> > but should last for a few more years. Since the MSCP patent has expired,
> > there will not be a conflict with DEC/Compaq/HP. If you are so inclined,
> > ask for some help since a number of individuals have already considered
> > this - especially for an ISA slot.
>
> That would be interesting, but IDE disks are too small to play with. ;o)
> But it would be nice to stick a nice "small" 1-10GB disk on a QBUS machine
> of mine without using up my QBUS MSCP SCSI controller. As I remember
> though, the hard part about making QBUS things was finding the bus driver
> chips - unless you wanted to sever them off of working boards... which I'm
> not inclined to do at the moment.
There arent that many QBUS lines to drive. If I was to make a new QBUS card I
would use SOT-23 MOSFETs as the bus drivers, maybe with a 10 ohm series
resistor for output protection against VCC shorts and slew rate limited gate
drive...
>
> Thanks for the suggestions anyhow.
>
> Pat
> --
> Purdue University ITAP/RCS
> Information Technology at Purdue
> Research Computing and Storage
> http://www.itap.purdue.edu/rcs/
>
Peter Wallace
Received on Wed Jun 04 2003 - 09:57:00 BST