RK-05 emulator kit arriving today - basis of my new disk emulator

 ON THE DELIVERY TRUCK

The kit from George Wiley is out for delivery today. All the surface mount components are already assembled thus the assembly of the kit is focused more on connecting boards and setting up the cabinet. 

THINKING ABOUT TWO PASS PROJECT

I will first assemble it as it was designed and make minor modifications to the code in order to use my Diablo 31 drive to archive various 2315 cartridges in my collection. The Diablo 31, like the RK-05, is derived from the IBM 2310 drive in the 1130 but has an improved but different interface to the controller. 

Just as one small example, on the Diablo/RK-05 one can request the drive to move to a specific track and the drive itself manages the movement across as many tracks as are necessary. The 2310 however only moves one or two tracks relative to its current position, either forward or backwards. This is why the changes for the 2310 emulation are more substantial. I have attempted to test them completely in simulation under Xilinx Vivado, but debugging will be needed on live hardware. 

Since I have the need to archive the contents of the disks and extract them from the 2315 cartridges to PC files, the Diablo with its interface that closely matches the RK-05 would be a good way to accomplish this. The essential change to the RK-05 emulator causes it to read what is on a real drive and capture it, instead of feeding data from a modern file into the machine. The emulator has a test function will will drive a real RK-05 - that is the basis for my changes. I need to study the test function in detail to see what must change and work out a plan. 

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