12 Nov
2011
12 Nov
'11
12:51 p.m.
On 11/12/2011 03:48 AM, Jochen Kunz wrote:
There are other things that I would like to see build into the FPGA:
A TS11 tape drive controller emulation that exposes a formated Pertec
interface on the pins of the FPGA. It would be trivial to build a level
shifter to drive a real Pertec interfaced tape drive to the FPGA.
The same for RX02, RL02, ...
I put an RK05 interface on my verilog pdp-11. It wasn't hard -
basically just a state machine for the ATA interface and one for the
RK05 controller. I uses a real IDE disk as the actual disk.
Wiring up an IDE drive to an S3 board is easy. I'm about to fab a few
pcb's since my wire wrap board is becoming a little tattered.
I did the same thing on my pdp-8/I; I made an RF08 controller which
uses an IDE drive as a backing store.
This is similar to what the POP-11 guys did - except they required that
the disk image be written to the IDE disk in a weird way. I did the
math in RTL so that a stock disk image could just be "dd'd" to the IDE
disk. (a technique I learned from Eric :-)
An RL02 controller should be straight forward. It has a few oddities
(like the error fifo) but nothing complex.
I never thought about using a real tape drive. interesting...
-brad