Fwd: Just ordered QBone Dual for my 11/23+

[ROBERT MYERS]

Begin forwarded message:

From: ROBERT MYERS <rjm...@yahoo.com>
Date: March 5, 2026 at 9:15:41 PM CST
To: uni...@googlegroups.om
Subject: Just ordered QBone Dual for my 11/23+

I have a few questions about it, since my limited exposure with QBone has been on my 11/83 with PMI memory.

1) do you need to hammer it in like the original QBone?  Or does it play nicely with the BA11 backplane?

2) can any amount of memory be emulated (up to 4Mb?  I don’t know how much memory came with my 11/23+.

3) are emulated disk drives and tape drives done on the QBone Dual itself? I assume on board memory is sufficient for this task.

Sent from my iPhone

[Joan Touzet]

Hi Bob,

1) do you need to hammer it in like the original QBone?  Or does it play nicely with the BA11 backplane?

Nope, it's a much lower insertion force, especially because it is only a dual Flip-Chip form factor.

2) can any amount of memory be emulated (up to 4Mb?  I don’t know how much memory came with my 11/23+.

Yes, it can be used to emulate all, some, or no memory. The default scripts Joerg has written will attempt to probe the existing memory and fill in any gaps that are found.

3) are emulated disk drives and tape drives done on the QBone Dual itself? I assume on board memory is sufficient for this task.

Just like the QBone and Unibone, there is 512MB of DDR3L RAM available to the embedded CPU, in addition to the shipped 32GB microSD card for drive image storage. Q/Unibone has less support for tapes than disk drives (no TMSCP for instance), but this shouldn't be an issue in practice.

[マジエル 鈴蘭]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2026 at 1:51 AM Joan Touzet <decroma...@gmail.com> wrote:

3) are emulated disk drives and tape drives done on the QBone Dual itself? I assume on board memory is sufficient for this task.

Just like the QBone and Unibone, there is 512MB of DDR3L RAM available to the embedded CPU, in addition to the shipped 32GB microSD card for drive image storage. Q/Unibone has less support for tapes than disk drives (no TMSCP for instance), but this shouldn't be an issue in practice.

I'm kinda/sorta working on tapes; I have partially working TS11 code (enough to make RSTS/E V8 happy) but it has issues, and I have no QBus hardware to test against.

[Hans-Ulrich Hölscher]

Is your code available at GitHub or elsewhere?

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[マジエル 鈴蘭]

On Fri, Mar 6, 2026 at 9:03 AM Hans-Ulrich Hölscher <vaxo...@googlemail.com> wrote:

Is your code available at GitHub or elsewhere?

My working copy is at https://github.com/dseagrav/QUniBone/tree/ndev - I don't consider it "production ready", it was just adding stuff as a means of having RSTS bang on the unibone to confirm I didn't damage it when I broke my PDP-10. Added devices are the previously mentioned TS11 tape, DZ11 mux, network plumbing so multiplexer ports can accept TCP connections, LP11 printer (which just writes to a file, but the file can in theory be plumbed to a USB parallel adapter), RK611 controller and RK06/RK07 drives. When the PDP-10 is repaired I plan to add the Interlan NI1010A so I can run MINITS on the PDP-11.

[Jay Jaeger]

Wow,  Verrrry nice for you to have started down this path.  I have an 11/24 and an 11/34 each with an RK611, and two RK07s that I cable up as needed.  It would be great to have a way to keep my configuration without the spinning hardware some day.  Same for tape - I have had on my bucketlist to implement the much simpler TM11 - but I may never actually get to that particular bucket.

JRJ

[Peter Clark]

I'd be happy to help test - I've got an BA23 with 11/83 cpu, with QBone.   I could also test on my microvax ii w/QBone dual if you'd like.   Let me know what you'd like to me try out. 

Pete

On Friday, March 6, 2026 at 10:04:19 AM UTC-6 suz...@gmail.com wrote: