PDP-11/Hack

Project Background

Why does someone want to build it’s own PDP-11. This chapter has a little bit of background information, tells the story about the system and other trivia

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System Overview

The PDP-11/Hack is a self built PDP-11 using the DCJ11, a single chip implementation of a PDP-11. The system consists of Custom System Bus, CPU with Memory, Multifunction Board and a Disk controller

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System Architecture

The following blog describes the overall architecture and the design principles I used to build the system

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System Bus

The PDP-11/Hack uses a passive backplane as system bus. It uses Euro-CardEurocrat DIN 41612 connectors and is based on the ECB bus

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CPU Board with Memory

The heart of the system is the CPU board. In order to get the best performance the CPU board includes all the main memory and the system control logic.

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Multifunction Board

A multifunction board combines several options on a single board and was very common for small PDP-11 systems. This is the second version of the multi-fucntion board I designed for my PDP-11/Hack which has more features than the first version

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Harddisk Controller RLV12/Hack

For a fully functional PDP-11 system we need a disk drive. For the PDP-11/Hack I decided to build a complete RLV12 emulation as a disk controller including 4 RL01/02 units.

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New Harddisk Controller for PDP-11/Hack

After creating the RLV12 Emulator V2.0 for the Q-Bus I decided to build as well a new RLV12 Emulator for the PDP-11/Hack. It also features the break-out board interface and fixes the missing decoupling capacitors and it was built with universal disk controller emulation in mind.

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Update to CPU CPLD

The KDJ11-E had a built-in RTC using the DS1215 phantom clock chip. So I added one to my multifunction board. Now I wanted to make it available to the OS without proprietary program

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