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PDP-11 working system? how to use

Hunta said:
It pops up on eBay from time to time. This is the third CIS microassembly known to me. The other two are mine, bought on eBay :)
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it seems we have almost the same system, although when i do SHOW it gives me this.

PDP 11/23 PLUS Processor
512KB of memory
FP11 Hardware Floating Point Unit
Extended Instruction Set (EIS)
Commercial Instruction Set (CIS)
Memory Management Unit
Parity Memory
60 Cycle System Clock

Do you know how this information is generated because i thought my card was only 256k? i will have to double check what is going on there
 
I just realized this is a 22 bit qbus, and my board is 512k so all is good :) I will look into getting one of those zuluscsi after a play with this a bit and make sure everything is okay
 
I would be interested in your experience with the Zulu. That's next on my hitlist of stuff to do in the short term.

Dave
 
daver2 said:
I would be interested in your experience with the Zulu. That's next on my hitlist of stuff to do in the short term.

Dave
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Take a look at this thread: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/scsi2sd-question.1242764/ for some comments about the ZuluSCSI board(s).

I've got the RP2040 version and find it works well. Performance on my 11/34 w/ UNIBUS UC17 is reasonable, and configuring it is much easier than with the older SCSI2SD boards.

According to the source notes on github, the ZuluSCSI firmware is based upon the SCSI2SDv6 code base for the SCSI protocol handling code.
 
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So I suppose the first dumb question is "is an .img file the same as a .dsk file"?

If so, it just seems to be a matter of copying files (and renaming them) from my iMac to the SD card for use in the device...

If I get that confirmation, I will go and do that now and bring my 11/73 back home to try it all out...

Dave
 
daver2 said:
So I suppose the first dumb question is "is an .img file the same as a .dsk file"?

If so, it just seems to be a matter of copying files (and renaming them) from my iMac to the SD card for use in the device...

If I get that confirmation, I will go and do that now and bring my 11/73 back home to try it all out...

Dave
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Yes, the same. An exact byte for byte, block for block image of the device, starting from block zero. Same image/disk file you would use in SIMH, for example, as I do.

The file extension you use does not seem to matter. The ZuluSCSI doc's all refer to .img files, but I have them all as .dsk files from SIMH, so I just kept that extension.

Also as I noted, the file name pattern needs to be like: HDsu_nnn_?????????.??? with HD for fixed hard disk, s is scsi id, u is optional lun id, and nnn is the blocksize, should be 512.

So my RT11 disk image I used was named HD2_512_RT11v53_ra81.dsk for a fixed hard disk accessible on SCSI ID 2 and a blocksize of 512. The _512 might be optional, have not tried without it.
 
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daver2 said:
I would be interested in your experience with the Zulu. That's next on my hitlist of stuff to do in the short term.

Dave
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Im working on it, the good news is the scsi board came and it seems to be working. I was able to find the manual online and load the diagnostic program. The Zulu is on its way, I have never really dealt much with disc images since the CDROM days and that might end up being the part that stumps me for a while.. The way they make it sound is you just get the image and copy it to the SD card, sounds easy enough.
 
Scrub said:
Im working on it, the good news is the scsi board came and it seems to be working. I was able to find the manual online and load the diagnostic program. The Zulu is on its way, I have never really dealt much with disc images since the CDROM days and that might end up being the part that stumps me for a while.. The way they make it sound is you just get the image and copy it to the SD card, sounds easy enough.
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Yup, pretty much. See post #28 above. There are some restrictions on the format of the file name but that's it.
Copy it to the FAT32 formatted SD card, name it appropriately, and it gets mapped to the specified SCSI drive ID number.
If you want to play with other setup options, there is an optional ZuluScsi.ini file (text format) that you can supply to override the default behavior.
 
Scrub said:
Thanks guys, this helped a bunch. Removing that jumper j15 to j10 seems to have made some progress, now the machine says:
TESTING MEMORY
0256.KW
START?
if i halt it goes back to ODT, so what would be my next step?
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If you want to, you can upgrade the firmware eproms to a higher version which includes a little bit more comfort.
They are downloadable.
 
Wildfire said:
Well, add two more to your list :)
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TWO? Wow... congrats! These CIS chips are indeed rare... in-fact, most CIS stuff appears to be quite hard to find. I'm typically keeping an eye-out for CIS boards for the 11/44 (I've got half now, at least) - the only other "fully-populated" 11/44 that I've seen in recent history was the 11/44 on the Usagi Electric Youtube channel.

-Chris
 
cchhrriiss11 said:
TWO? Wow... congrats! These CIS chips are indeed rare... in-fact, most CIS stuff appears to be quite hard to find. I'm typically keeping an eye-out for CIS boards for the 11/44 (I've got half now, at least) - the only other "fully-populated" 11/44 that I've seen in recent history was the 11/44 on the Usagi Electric Youtube channel.

-Chris
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Hmmm, i have to look if my defective 44 has those cards...
 
AK6DN said:
Yup, pretty much. See post #28 above. There are some restrictions on the format of the file name but that's it.
Copy it to the FAT32 formatted SD card, name it appropriately, and it gets mapped to the specified SCSI drive ID number.
If you want to play with other setup options, there is an optional ZuluScsi.ini file (text format) that you can supply to override the default behavior.
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I created a image file as it says on the website, fsutil file createnew HD1.img 1073741824
it is probably working since when i try to boot from it now it halts back to ODT with 0000002.. It used to go to an infinite loop. I booted up the rt11 from the tu58em.exe fully expecting to see my new hardware, .show devices came up with nothing. So I think i have narrowed it down, I need to find a copy of rt11 that has DU.SYS before i can move files on.. unless there is some modern way to do this by editing the image directly. Am I on the right track here?
 
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