I’ve been making several changes to MINC over the past months – nothing really major, but it does add up so I thought to post some things about it. The first thing on my mind is probably the biggest change – both in terms of changed source code as in impact: I’ve changed the signal names of most MINC modules on the Unibus component. So if you have made your own MINC system by adding modules to a top component, you’ll have some migration to do when I release the new version.
The old naming scheme was not very consistent – some names would include the number of the module, some would not, and none would directly refer to MINC. Time to clean up – the new names all start with ‘mnc’, then two letters for the module type (ad, kw, aa, di, do), then one digit for the module number. That’s all. There’s only one bit of small print to add: there are no signals brought out for the second MNCKW module; that’s because I’m not aware of software that uses those. Most obviously MINC BASIC doesn’t.
I’m still working on adding and normalising the configuration of output pulses from MNCKW, MNCDI and MNCDO; the original modules would mostly have 500ns negative pulses for strobe and reply signals with a front panel switch for inverting. That should also make it into the upcoming release. Not sure yet if that’ll be in December or early next year.