RLV12 Emulator Introduction

The RLV12 Emulator is a Q-Bus card that emulates the digital RLV12 disk controller with up to four disk units attached to it.

The RLV12 disk controller was a Q-Bus card developed by digital to connect either RL01 or RL02 disk drives that supported removable RL01 or RL02 disk cartridges. Up two four disk drives could be attached to the RLV12 disk controller. The RL01 cartridge had a capacity of 5Mbyte and the RL02 cartridge had a capacity of 10Mbyte.

The RLV12 was a Quad Sized Q-Bus Card. The disk drives were connected via a 40-pin cable in a daisy chain and the last disk drive required a termination plug on it’s bus output.

The RL01 had 256 cylinders and the RL02 had 512 cylinders. Each cylinders had two tracks and each track had 40 sectors with 256bytes.

Instead of disk drives the RLV12 Emulator has an SD-Card interface to store the data. There are various methods to store RL01 or RL02 disk images on the SD-Card. These disk images can then be assigned to either of the four disk units.

In other words the RLV12 Emulator not only emulates the RLV12 controller but as well up to four RL01/RL02 disk drives.

The RLV12 Emulator us a Dual Width Q-Bus cards which due to restriction of the CAD Programm used is only Half Heigth. The Q-Bus card connects via a 34‐pin IDC cable to a breakout board where the user can then access the SD-Card, the programming interfaces for the CPLD and MCU and the serial interface to control the RLV12 Emulator.