What is coming
This site replaces the separate UniBone and QBone project pages on retrocmp.com with one manual covering both cards. It is being built in phases, and this page says honestly where it has got to.
Written
Section titled “Written”- Start here — what QUniLator is, choosing a card, getting one, installing the software, the acceptance test, and what changes for an operator arriving from QUniBone Classic.
- The card — the card itself, fitting it to a backplane, bus drivers.
- Background — the PDP-11, UNIBUS and QBUS.
- Configurations — the catalogue and the format a catalogue is published in.
- Operating — the web interface, screen by screen.
- Walkthroughs — three machines taken from a bare card to a running system, each verified on hardware and carrying the version it was checked against.
- Tools — the MCP server, which gives a model the run of a machine.
Being written
Section titled “Being written”The operator’s guide. The tour of the web interface and the three walkthroughs are written. What each walkthrough had to explain in passing wants a page of its own, and those come next:
configurations and autostart · disk and tape images, and sharing them over SMB, FTP and SFTP · the console, emulated and bridged · emulated memory and the address map · networking · running XXDP diagnostics · updating QUniLator
More walkthroughs follow the same rule as the first three: written from a run on real hardware, and re-run from the written text before they are published.
The debug workbench — memory and disassembly views — is in the source but not yet in a release, so it has no page here. It gets one when it ships.
Planned
Section titled “Planned”A device reference, one page per emulated card — what it is, its parameters, what the guest sees, and which DEC diagnostic it passes. Generated from the source rather than hand-maintained, so it cannot drift from what the software actually does.
A compatibility matrix — guest operating system against device, with status and a link to the notes. The project knows a great deal of this and it is currently scattered across commit messages and design documents.
A developer manual — the theory of operation, building from source, writing a device, the emulated processor cores, the REST and WebSocket API reference, and debugging.
Redirects from retrocmp.com. The old article URLs are cited in mailing lists and forum threads and should not rot. Until they are in place, the original UniBone and QBone pages remain the reference for anything not yet migrated here.
The configuration catalogue
Section titled “The configuration catalogue”The catalogue on this site is ahead of QUniLator. Two pieces are in progress in the QUniLator repository:
- #81 — a configuration
carries its own documentation, in named fields, travelling inside the
.qcfg.zipasreadme.md. This site already stores and renders exactly those fields. - #64 — QUniLator subscribes to catalogues and imports from them, instead of an operator finding a URL and downloading a bundle by hand.
Until #64 lands, the catalogue entries here are downloaded by hand and fed to the import dialog. The format is published now so that anyone wanting to run their own catalogue can build against it rather than wait.
Helping
Section titled “Helping”The manual is Markdown in git, and every page has an Edit this page link at the bottom. Corrections are welcome, and so are photographs — particularly of UniBone in a live machine, which the project is short of.
If you have UNIBUS hardware, reports are especially valuable: UniBone builds and packages from the same source as QBone but has not been exercised on real hardware in this codebase.