And now for something completely different: Andromeda SCDC

[Crawford]

Folks,

(sorry for the spam-like quality of my posts recently, I'm trying to get back into DEC stuff)

So, I had the luck to see an Andromeda SCDC Qbus SCSI card on da bay.. and I have poor impulse control around my birthday in November.

I have a shiny new(ish) blue Andromeda SCDC board. I wired into the SLU and got prompt, and configured some stuff (formatted a SCSI disk, set up floppies). I can (or could) boot from floppy, and see the hard disk DU0 and DU1 emulated partitions I set up. But I cannot boot from hard disk (I 'installed' XXDP as I would on a RQDX3).

Anyone have docs for this thing? It got good press back in the 90's but bitsavers remains mute on Andromeda Systems...

? ; - )

 

[Marty]

Hi All;
Maybe You should re-name this "Andromeda Strain"..
THANK YOU Marty

 

[RSX11M+]

So... the XXDP install went ok (...?) but what happens when you try to boot it?

Which version of XXDP is this?

 

[Crawford]

I was using XXDP 2.5 and had already run through and install on a RQDX3 and MFM drives.

Once I got the equivalent done with the SCDC, (INITIALIZE DUO:, R UPDAT/CREATE DU0 It would just hang at boot, after B DU0: . So maybe something in the handoff from the boot ROM to the sector read?

I realize that the SCDC is talking MCSP and controlling the SCSI side (same as RQDX hides MFM disk details). But it seems like it should work. The floppies 5.25 and 3.5 attached to the SCDC do boot okay.

Hopefully someone has a doc out there. It's mostly configured via an SLU menu, there are only 5-6 jumper onboard. Great design on this thing BTW, Xilinx CPLD's handle the bus and a 65816 (6502 16-bit enhanced cpu) runs the rest from EPROM.

? ; - )