So, I have lately been using PDP11GUI to retrieve images of RK05 disk packs and
to write images to these packs on a PDP-11. This is awesome, but its a bit
frustrating that it takes a couple hours to read or write an image this way.
I do, however, have a couple of DR11-C parallel interface cards. It occurred
to me that it might be pretty straightforward to interface one of these to an
FPGA eval card, and this would give me a much higher-bandwidth way to move data
on and off the PDP-11 (in fact, the RK11 could even be run in
non-increment-address-mode pointed at the DR11-C, which would be pretty speedy.)
Another approach might be to interface the DR11 directly to a 1284-to-USB
adapter. This would only be eight bits wide, so you couldn't use the direct
RK11/DR11 NPR hack, but it would still be a lot faster than 9600 baud serial.
Before I put too much thought into either of these, I thought I'd ping here to
see if anybody else has already interfaced a DR11 in either of these two ways?
cheers,
--FritzM.
