On 07/05/2012 09:00 PM, Paul_Koning at
Dell.com wrote:
On Jul 5, 2012, at 7:35 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
...
Oh, and I saw some additional discussions about the CIS option for the F11. Unless I
remember wrong, and understood things wrong, it is not just a simple PROM. It's a
coprocessor, which have logic in addition to whatever microcode the coprocessor need.
So no way of just duplicating a PROM to get a CIS.
Not unless someone could dig up the details. If it *is* just a PROM, even if it's an
oddball bipolar model with different interface specs, it should be easy to reproduce that
with a small FPGA. Any reasonable modern FPGA is way faster than a 1980s era bipolar
ROM, so modeling the interface timing should be easy. And level conversions should be
doable.
So a sort of daughterboard? That's a good idea.
I'm pretty sure the F11's manuals are out there, but I haven't gone
digging for them. From that, and possibly even just from the KDF11-Bx
schematics, one should be able to glean the important parts of how to
interface to the microinstruction and microaddress buses.
Then all we'd need is a copy of the actual code.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA