brew-your-own-unibus boards?

From: der Mouse <mouse_at_Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA>
Date: Mon Jan 19 22:25:34 2004

>> And, if I did manage to create a realiable IDE interface, would
>> anyone else want one?
> Yes!
> Also Qbus would be of very strong interest too.

Yeah, me too for Qbus. I have no unibus machines, but I'd buy one (or
even two, depending on price) for qbus.

But first, they'd have to work. I recall working on the qbus ide that
the chd.dyndns.org person (whose name I have forgotten at the moment)
was building, and I never did get the drive to work. Where the fault
responsible for this lay I never did find out, but the difficulty makes
me a bit cautious around such things.

I'm pretty seriously tempted to try my own qbus board construction.
The electrical interface is pretty simple; I'm tmepted to build a board
with the basic bus transceivers on it and a cable to some kind of
breadboard elsewhere. I haven't gone through the spec in detail yet,
but I suspect there are few to no places where the timing requirements
are so tight as to make this paradigm unworkable. Qbus is not all that
fast a bus, and as I recall there are very few places where peripherals
can't take their own sweet time about doing their thing.

To be bootable, it would have to speak MSCP, and that's nontrivial.
But even a dumb-as-dirt version would be worth buying to me; I'm
willing to get my first-level bootstrap over the net - or even ROM it
on the board.

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Received on Mon Jan 19 2004 - 22:25:34 GMT