Create a VAX CPU with FPGA?

[Zane H. Healy]

At 1:17 PM +0800 3/4/05, Wai-Sun Chia wrote:
>I don't know about other listmembers, but I'd hazard a guess to say
>that we have more CPUs (either Qbus or Unibus) than peripherals. Like
>for myself, I don't even have a single bootable device for my 8/M,
>8/E, and my Unibus 11s (at least Qbus I have MFMs and DSSIs).

I'm one of the lucky ones, all of my main PDP-11's have SCSI 
adapters.  However, only one of my two -8's (/m & /e) have a disk 
controller, though I've not found time to get either -8 fully running 
:^(  One thing that really worries me is that the days of being able 
to get new SCSI disks that will work with a PDP-11 are coming to an 
end, if they aren't already over.  One of the vendors that is very 
good with getting 3rd party disks to work with VMS has reported that 
the new U320 drives don't sync down to Narrow SCSI right.

>So I think it'd be a boon to the collecting community in general to
>work on Qbus and Unibus interfaces to modern storage devices, either
>SCSI (which is abundantly and cheaply found) or IDE (means as a bonus
>we can use CF cards too).
>
>p.s. 9000, I'm watching your Qbus-SCSI project very closely..
>p.p.s. Any chance of doing a Unibus one? please.... :-)

What I'd really like to see is some sort of MFM HD emulator.  That's 
something that would be of use to more than just us DEC users.  For 
those of us that would use it with DEC HW, something that would 
emulate a RD51-RD54 would be great for those OS's that expect a 
specific HD type.

			Zane

-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |