DEC RL02 anyone need one?

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Wed Jun 4 13:18:23 2003

> On Tue, 3 Jun 2003, Tony Duell wrote:
>
> > > On 2003.06.03 18:31 Al Kossow wrote:
> > >
> > > > If anyone has a copy of the RL02 Technical Manual, I'd like to borrow
> > > > it to add to the documentation archive.
> > > Do you mean: "RL01/RL02 User Guide" EK-RL012-UG-005?
> > > (It contains installation, operation and detaild RL11 and RL8A
> > > programming information.)
> >
> > No, there's a separate technical manual, which includes fairly complete
> > circuit descriptions, PROM dumps, FRU replacement procedures, and so on.
> > It's a very useful document.
>
> 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

The RLV11 prints contain a ROM dump. I don't think the RL11 prints do,
but there's a rather complete timing diagram from which it's possible to
deduce much of the ROM contents...

The drive bus info can be deduced from the RL01 technical manual and/or
the appropriate printsets (RL11, RLV11, RL01, RL02, etc). It didn't take
me long to work out a design for a test box that does things like read
out the drive's status, position the heads, select upper or lower head, etc.

> are detailed enough to contain a 'protocol description'.

An alternative approach (and one that I'd probably try) would be to use a
real RL11 (or similar), a Unibus (or as applicable) RAM card, and a
home-made bus master/arbiter that could tall the RL11 to read a sector
(using DMA into the RAM card) and could then read out the RAM to the host
computer. Doing something like that would let your PC (or whatever) talk
to just about any small DEC disk drive using the appropriate Unibus
controller.

-tony
Received on Wed Jun 04 2003 - 13:18:23 BST