On Tue, 4 Jan 2000, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 03, 2000 at 01:57:13PM -0800, Brian D Chase wrote:

> > It's a pretty simple design without DMA capabilities, but it does open the
> > door to using really cheap IDE drives for storage.  It's a non-MSCP
> > device so a new device driver would have to be written for NetBSD, but I
> > don't imagine that would be a horrible task given the interface details
> > illustrated in the example code for the other operating systems.  I'd even
> > be willing to take a crack at it.
> 
> I'd be happy to help you (or anyone else :) with this if you can get the
> hardware.

So I guess one of the fist items on our list would be to get a few working
prototype boards.  If we can get a NetBSD driver running on this hardware,
then we can better assess the actual interest in something like this. I've
sent mail to Dmitry to see what it would take to acquire some sample
boards from him.  Worst case, it should be possible to just strip a dead
Q-Bus module and use it as a base for constructing a working controller. I
mean, as long as you've got the finger tabs and a circuit board base on
which to build.

Going through the README.TXT in the waq.zip, the component list has
DD1...DD7 listed as "Soviet 559IP3, (four bus transmitters/receivers per
package, not sure about DEC equivalent - check 8641)".  Does anyone know
what these are and what you could use as substitutes?

Also, are there are any EE/digital circuit wizards out there who want to
take a look at reimplementing the logic using commodity FPGAs?  At least
one person has offered assistance in creating FPGAs to consolidate the
design.  I'd have figured that such an option would be too pricey for a
small project like this, but maybe that's not the case these days :-)

-brian.
--- Brian Chase | bdc@world.std.com | http://world.std.com/~bdc/ -----