QUniLator
Emulated DEC hardware on a real backplane. One system, two cards.
One name for the software, two for the cards
Section titled “One name for the software, two for the cards”QUniLator is the software. It runs on a BeagleBone Black and drives a DEC bus in real time, presenting emulated controllers, drives, memory and terminal lines to the machine around it.
It runs on two cards, and the card is what your backplane sees:
| UniBone | A quad SPC card for UNIBUS. Plugs into a PDP-11 with a quad SPC slot, and into PDP-10 and VAX expansion backplanes. |
| QBone | A quad Flip-Chip card for QBUS, on the A/B fingers. Plugs into any QBUS card cage, from an LSI-11/03 to a MicroVAX. |
The cards differ in the bus they drive and very little else: the same BeagleBone, the same software, the same web interface, the same disk images. So this is one manual. Where UNIBUS and QBUS genuinely part company the page says so, and the I have a control in the sidebar dims the passages meant for the other card — a reading aid, so nothing is ever hidden from a deep link or from search.
What it is for
Section titled “What it is for”| Keep a broken machine running | Emulate the subsystem that failed — memory, a disk controller, a terminal line — and the rest of the machine carries on working. |
| Supply what you never had | An RL02 pack, an MSCP disk, a DELQA on the LAN. Media are SimH-compatible files, so images move by network rather than by SD card. |
| Diagnose the bus | Trace bus traffic, stimulate a standalone device, dump a pack — the work a 56-channel logic analyser would otherwise be doing. |
| Build a machine that never was | Emulate cards in parallel up to a whole system, and hand the result to somebody else as one file. |
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- New to the project — What QUniLator is, then Choose your card.
- Card in hand — Installing the software and the Acceptance test.
- Looking for a machine to run — the configuration catalogue.
- Wondering what is not written yet — What is coming.