Random tidbits Bdale thinks are worth documenting.

Bdale Garbee
bdale@gag.com

Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS.

em18.2 kernels
Latest kernel builds for ia64 seem ok. Biggest change in .2 is turning on the qlogic fibre channel driver. Forgot to turn ACPI serial port discovery on in .1, fixed now. Had to disable the BT878 video input driver since it won't build for some reason. Don't really care since that card won't physically work in a zx2000 and I've replaced it and the video card with a cheap ATI Radeon 7500 All-In-Wonder I picked up at CompUSA. Haven't tried using the tuner on it yet, but have high hopes of making it work.

[/bdale/debian] permanent link

Floppies
I wonder if 1.2meg floppy drives will work with the Ampro Little Board to read my old 80-track 720k disks? I'm pretty sure my favorite drives used to be the Teac FD-55F, they appear to be unobtainable now. I also remember using some interesting two-thirds height Remex drives, 3 of them in a stack with the Ampro on top. I have no idea what I did with those drives, they probably got sold with a PC or something?

[/bdale/retro/z80] permanent link

Feature Creep
Big discussion via email yesterday motivated by Chuck about whether we can add a capability to use the Can-Do modules as a bit pipe between a CPU in the experiment module and the IHU. The end result is that yes, we can do it.

My proposal is that we implement byte-wide in and out busses. Two of the "spare" outputs and two of the analog input channels get taken over to serve as request/acknowledge handshake lines. The remaining analog inputs and the remaining two digital outputs continue to behave as they would in "normal" mode. Data is always sent in blocks of 8 bytes. The module's stream addresses for this capability are the same as for the command/control protocol but with the high order bit flipped, so that this bit-pipe function runs at lower priority than command and telemetry.

[/bdale/amsat/cando] permanent link

KDJ11-D/S Arrives!
The Decserver 550 CPU board that I bought via eBay arrived today. Looks to be in fine physical condition, no idea if it works of course. As expected, it has 1.5 megabytes of RAM and an 18Mhz crystal. That's enough to run 2.11, which is my goal.

Also supposedly on the way is the BA-11 expansion box I bought via eBay, and a network card Phil offered me. Will have to rummage the flea at Dayton to see if we can find a suitable disk controller. What I really want is a card that will do MSCP to SCSI disks...

[/bdale/retro/pdp11] permanent link