[Simh] Converting VMS BACKUP saveset file to SIMH tape file

[Armistead, Jason]

Hi

I have a number of VMS BACKUP savesets that were created as disk files on my 
VAX host, and then FTP-ed in BINARY mode to a PC.

What's the easiest way to convert them into SIMH magtape files so that they can 
be accessed by VMS running within SIMH as tape-based savesets ?

I'm trying to avoid having to FTP the savesets into my emulated VAX's disk 
filesystem.

Are there any VMS BACKUP command qualifiers I should use to make the savesets 
"more compatible" when they're converted to SIMH magtape files ?

Thanks in advance

Jason

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[Simh] Largest VAX / PDP disk sizes

[Armistead, Jason]

According to 

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/vax.html

and

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/pdp11.html

Both mention the RA73, which is a 2Gb drive (that I'd really love to use with 
SIMH !)

I am trying to run the MicroVAX 3900 flavor of SIMH, but when I try to put SET 
RQ2 RA73 in my VAX.INI file I get an error
parameter
vax.ini> set rq2 ra73
Non-existent parameter

And I end up with a 159 Mb RD54 drive instead when I boot VMS and do a SHOW 
DEVICE DUA2: /FULL

According to both the VAX and PDP11 pages on the SIMH site, the RA73 is listed 
as supported, but when I dig into the SIMH source code and look at PDP11_RQ.C, 
in the it has an X next to it which means not implemented.

What's this all mean ?

Is it just a documentation bug, and those web pages shouldn't mention RA73s ?

Is there a technical/software reason why SIMH doesn't support these drives ?  

Is no-one able to fill in the question marks in the RCT column of the table in 
PDP11_RQ.C which also has blanks for RD32, RD33 and RA70 drives ?  I managed to 
figure out that RCT stands for replacement and caching table (a reference in 
the VMS I/O User's Reference Manual to DEV$M_RCT).  We ought to strive to 
improve the comments in the code to expand this (I found no 

On a side-note, the PDP11 web page shows the capacities of these drives as a 
range.  The VAX page lists the capacities as 12KB for VAX 780 and 200-1960MB 
for VAX 3900.  The 12KB entry for VAX 780 seems like a typo perhaps.

Regards,
Jason
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Re: [Simh] Largest VAX / PDP disk sizes

[Armistead, Jason]

Tim

 

Doing a bit more digging, it looks like if I just use the SIMH “RAUSER” disk 
type, and give it a size large enough for my needs, I’ll be OK.  The 
precompiled SIMH binaries for Windows include 64 bit file support so I can go 
bigger than 2Gb without any problems.

 

I also came across a archived post from Bob Supnik lamenting the lack of 
information for the RA70, RA73 and the other disk I mentioned.  Kind of bizarre 
that no-one knows the details.  I half expected a former Digital employee or a 
NOPSIG member might have known the answers or been able to put their hands on a 
product technical / service manual, or that someone with a still-running system 
might have been able to provide the answers.  Thank goodness for MSCP !

 

Thanks

Jason

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Re: [Simh] Converting VMS BACKUP saveset file to SIMH tape file

[Armistead, Jason]

Hi Rob

Is there source available for this program ?  I'd like to understand how it 
ticks under the hood.

Thanks,
Jason

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Rob Jarratt
Sent: Sunday, 28 March 2010 3:00 PM
To: 'Edward Berry'; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Converting VMS BACKUP saveset file to SIMH tape file

The program I wrote will take a binary file and make a SIMH .TAP file out of
it. I have used this to make BACKUP tapes from BACKUP files I have on the
PC.

I have posted the executable and its DLL here:
https://cid-fc758a5a91b91301.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/Public/VirtualTap
e. please note that the program requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to be
installed.

To be honest I have forgotten how to use it. I think you select the name of
the .TAP file, select a label and then press the Write ANSI button to select
the files to put on tape.

Regards

Rob

> -Original Message-
> From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-
> edge.com] On Behalf Of Edward Berry
> Sent: 28 March 2010 19:25
> Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Converting VMS BACKUP saveset file to SIMH tape
> file
> 
> Rob Jarratt wrote:
> > I have some C# code which may do this. If I can find the code would
> you
> > like to give it a go?
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > Rob
> 
> I would also be interested in getting the code if it resurfaces!
> Does it make a disk file to mount on simh, or a saveset to FTP into
> the simulated filesystem and read as a disk-based saveset?
> 
> 
> I've been dd'ing the savesets from exabyte tapes written by VMS
> to linux (which I realize may not be the same thing as FTP'ing a disk-
> based saveset)
> This requires dividing the file into blocks (see simh_magtape.pdf
> on trailing edge website). For small savesets I was able to use
> Helbig's enblock.c:
> 
> http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/enblock.c
> with some description at
> http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2003-June/000612.html
> 
> but for large files it was flakey - saveset came out a different size
> each time I ran it.
> Then I found that using fortran to read the saveset image unformatted
> with the correct record length and write it out again, has the same
> effect of blocking the records.
> 
> Then the saveset had to be combined with its header and footer (also
> dd'd
> from the vaxtape), and if it was not the first saveset the header had
> to be prepended with the tape label from the first set. I realize
> this is quite different from what the original poster is doing,
> but in case anyone needs to restore vax tapes to disk images for
> simh I'll put the procedure and code below.
> 
> 
> ===
> ==
> Restoring vax tapes for simh on a linux machine
> Tape drive for reading the tapes: exabyte eliant
> 
> script for reading tape files to disk (cd to an empty directory before
> running)
> ---
> ddvaxtape.csh:
> #!/bin/csh -ef
> #mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
> mt -f /dev/nst0 setblk 0
> foreach nmbr (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
> \
>   23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30)
> dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=80of=hdr${nmbr}.dat
> if $nmbr == 1 then
> head -c40 hdr${nmbr}.dat |awk '{print $1}'
> head -c160 hdr${nmbr}.dat |tail -c80 |awk '{print $1,$2}'
> else
> head -c40 hdr${nmbr}.dat |awk '{print $1,$2}'
> #cat hdr${nmbr}.dat |awk '{print $1,$2}'
> endif
> #dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32768 of=saveset${nmbr}.dat
> dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=65536 of=saveset${nmbr}.dat
> head -c428  saveset${nmbr}.dat |tail -c135
> #head -c444  saveset1.dat |tail -c151
> echo
> #dd if=/dev/nst0bs=0  of=saveset${nmbr}.dat
> dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=80of=tail${nmbr}.dat
> mt -f /dev/nst0 status
> #if $status break
> end
> exit
> If the tape has more than 30 savesets, after it finishes
> create a subdirectory and run the program again there
> without the rewind instruction.
> 
> To list the savesets in each file:
> grep EOF tail*.dat
> 
> tail10.dat:EOF1RAXISD1. BCD3  0001001100 91353 91353
> 001208DECVMSBACKUP
>   EOF2F3276832768 M 00
> tail11.dat:EOF1RAXIS2.BCK   BCD3  00010011000100 92024 92024
> 001208DECVMSBACKUP
>   EOF2F3276832768 M 00
> tail12.dat:EOF1BCIIA.MRCBCD3  00010012000100 92025 92025
> 000311DECVMSBACKUP
>   EOF2F3276832768 M 00
> 
> This produces 3 files for each saveset: hdr##.dat, saveset##.dat, and
> tail##.dat
> The first header is longer because it starts with the tape label.
> The saveset##.dat files can be listed and extracted on the linux
> host using the vmsbu utility.
> 
> To use with simh they need to be blocked and recombined with tape
> label, head, and tail.
> http://www.ba-stuttgart.de/~helbig/os/v6/enblock.c will block small
> files
> (or maybe files with sma

Re: [Simh] convert VDISK to VDK VS

[Armistead, Jason]

Claude

 

How about just using BACKUP in Charon and then restoring it in SIMH ?

 

Since you’re going from Alpha to VAX, I’m assuming this means you’re not 
converting a system disk with Alpha EXE files …

 

Jason

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Claude B. Méthot
Sent: Friday, 16 April 2010 4:28 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] convert VDISK to VDK VS

 


 How can we convert SRI Charron/Personal Alpha VDISK to SIMH VDK format?
 
Claude
 
 

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Re: [Simh] Difference Disk Bug Fix

[Armistead, Jason]

Rob (and others)

 

Is there someone specifically creating binaries for these SIMH variants ?

 

I’m currently unable to build it (more a question of time to configure the 
necessary Windows build environment), but would definitely like to try the 
difference disk feature when emulating a VAX/VMS environment.

 

Any ideas ?

 

Thanks,

Jason

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Rob Jarratt
Sent: Monday, 31 May 2010 4:38 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] Difference Disk Bug Fix

 

Following the recent discussion about determining disk capacities, I have fixed 
the difference disk feature to work with all disks now, hopefully! If you use 
the old code with disks like the RP04 you will find that it gives you errors.

I know that the package of files has been posted on SourceForge, I am not sure 
what the process is to update it though. For reference, the code is also posted 
to 
https://cid-fc758a5a91b91301.skydrive.live.com:443/self.aspx/Public/SimHDiff.zip?authkey=2xTv8!xdQYg%24
 

 

Regards

Rob

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[Simh] SIMH future releases / Sourceforge project (was RE: NetBSD5.0.2)

[Armistead, Jason]

So what *IS* the future for SIMH ?

 

Reading the last few posts, it appears that Bob Supnik is apparently not, for 
whatever reason, able to release SIMH versions at the rate he used to (prior to 
taking the job @ Unisys ?).  Now we have a somewhat ad-hoc Sourceforge 
repository, but there’s seemingly no roadmap going forward, just a bunch of 
patches gleaned from posts to the SIMH mailing list.

 

How do we plan to keep SIMH alive, well maintained, and vibrant into the future 
?  At the moment, known bugs and lacking functionality generate traffic on the 
mailing list.  Who “owns” the content on the SIMH web site, and who is 
responsible for keeping it up-to-date also ?

 

Jason

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Jason Stevens
Sent: Thursday, 2 September 2010 6:54 AM
To: Rick Murphy
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] NetBSD5.0.2

 

I've been maintaining the sourceforge stuff... And I've been collecting patches 
from people or posts, and putting them on the site, as before that I've been 
providing builds for anyone outside of the linux/win32 environments.. (speaking 
of which work FINALLY got me some OSX access so I'll be updating with some 
10.6.3 binaries...!).

 

Send me what you have, and I'll add it to the sourceforge page.

On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 6:43 AM, Rick Murphy  wrote:

At 06:14 AM 9/2/2010, Jason Stevens wrote:

The direct link is here:




http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/files/Unofficial%20Patches/3.8.1/simh_vax_cpu_idle.zip/download



I've placed all that I can in the 'browse all files'


I have a question - is there ever going to be another official SIMH release, or 
is just going to be unofficial patches from here on?

I supplied Bob a set of corrections for the PDP8/FPP8A simulation code back in 
April of 2009, under the assumption that it'd show up in a 3.8-2 sometime but 
there's been no new releases since then. There's also nothing on the SIMH 
webpage pointing to the Source Forge project.

I'm sorry if I missed the history (apparently my mail server was blocking mail 
from this list due to some spam-blocking reason that I've now stopped, but 
what's going on with SIMH? Do I submit my patches to the sourceforge project 
now, and if so how do I do that?
Thanks,
   -Rick

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Re: [Simh] SIMH future releases / Sourceforge project (was RE:NetBSD5.0.2)

[Armistead, Jason]

Michael Kerpan wrote:

> There comes a time in the life of many long-term open source projects
> when the original maintainers can no longer be as active as they once
> were. The joy of open source, though, is that if that happens the
> community can continue to update the software. While if there continue
> to be no official releases, we may have to make some efforts to start
< to take our patch collections and turn them into better-tested
> versions, the fact that we have tools like Sourceforge available makes
> that task less daunting than it might otherwise be.

I agree with what's been written by Michael.  I think that time of life may 
have arrived for SIMH, and it's time to figure out the process that needs to be 
adopted going forward.  All of the who, what, when, where, why and how 
questions need to be figured out.  People on this list have particular 
expertise and knowledge from working for the companies who produced these 
systems, or from using the systems extensively, some have access to system 
documentation and/or real hardware, others have access to the various host 
platforms, host OS's and build environments, etc.  This needs to be captured 
and then leveraged to best ensure SIMH's ongoing success.

Would it be useful to have a documentation wiki with restricted/authenticated 
accounts for edit access (mainly to prevent spam bots) ?  The mailing list 
archives are there, but perhaps not as friendly to search and cross-link 
information that can be gleaned from mailing list postings.

Jason
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Re: [Simh] SIMH future releases / Sourceforge project

[Armistead, Jason]

Previously, Nigel Horne wrote:

>> and SIMH, originally, was not "open source" in the sense that any 
>> responsible programmer could contribute.
>> The quality of the software and the ultimate decision on released 
>> functionality was always in the hands of Bob S.
>> And a mighty fine job he did!

And then later, Wilm Boerhout wrote:

> This discussion is not (was not originally) where it's stored (although 
> others above have pointed to viable alternatives) but who is 
> responsible: Bob Supnik or the "open source community". I vote for Bob.

Just to be perfectly clear, I am a HUGE fan of Bob Supnik's work on SIMH.  
Booting OpenVMS on SIMH still brings a grin to my face when I think back about 
wrestling with a shiny new MicroVAX 2000 and loading MicroVMS 4.5B from about 
80 floppy disks back in 1989.  Bob's (largely single-handed) vision and 
dedication is what brought SIMH and the retro-computing it allows us all to 
enjoy, to the point where it is today.

Having said that, I also don't want to see SIMH become stagnant if Bob's 
available time to devote to SIMH may become (or perhaps already is) limited.  
And I don't want to see multiple forked versions of the code start to spring up 
because people are impatient waiting for patches to be incorporated in the 
mainline, or for their favorite new whiz-bang OS to be supported as a host.  I 
am not voting "against Bob", but rather, my vote is "for SIMH" *and* for 
maintaining it to the same high standard as Bob intended.  If that means having 
a core team that ensures Bob's blueprint is followed, fantastic.  If Bob wants 
to tell us all to "take a hike", I've got to respect that too.

Bob, if you're out there reading this thread, your devoted SIMH fans would love 
to hear your thoughts !!!

Regards
Jason
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[Simh] SIMH test suite / target CPU speed control

[Armistead, Jason]

While discussing SIMH futures, Vince Mulhollon wrote:

> I use a bash script that automates:
>
> wget's some relevant papertape or whatever of diagnostic routine
>
> runs a short expect script on simh pdp8 or whatever that executes the
> diagnostic routine and saves the disk images etc.
>
> md5sum the resulting output, and compare to the "golden" correct
> answer.

One potential problem would be accounting for any variation in the execution 
behavior, e.g. if the time-of-day clock was read from the host or if network 
interactions occur (assuming networking is enabled).  That would prevent you 
from getting repeatable modification dates on the SIMH target's disk file 
systems, and also the content of log files e..g  the OpenVMS OPERATOR.LOG.  So, 
the resultant disk images would differ in non-trivial ways.  Even if you could 
seed the time-of-day clock before running your SIMH test suite, any other 
process running on your host OS (and these days, there are many), would cause 
jitter in the elapsed execution time, again affecting timestamps. Even under 
DOS, I once observed a Toshiba Tecra laptop (Pentium 233) which had about a 10% 
variation in the number of simple increment operations it could do between the 
55msec BIOS timer ticks - my conclusion was that the effects of all the 
background hardware ISRs implemented on a modern PC in the BIOS ar
 e non-trivial, e.g. battery management, network, USB, and who knows what else, 
even under good old DOS.

> For over a decade I've dreamed of a simh with 
> real time execution, so it runs and I/O operates at "real time" speeds,
> or perhaps a configurable multiple thereof.  I've always believed the
> current idle loop detection system is an architectural and scalability 
> dead end, the solution to a PDP-8 running at 100 times real speed and 
> hogging the host CPU 100% is to force the PDP-8 to run at "configurable 
> real speed" and ignore that its hogging a whopping 1% of the host CPU 
> in the idle loop.

The last time I looked, the arcade machine emulator MAME achieves this using 
the x86 Performance Counter functionality, and by knowing the clock cycle cost 
of each machine language instruction.  It then lets the emulated CPU run for 
some number of expected cycles, then idles itself until it's ready to do 
another chunk of instructions.  For example, if you can do 100msec worth of 
emulated instructions in 1msec on your shiny new multi-GHz CPU-equipped PC, you 
simply idle for 99msec.  To the observing user, if the time quanta is set 
right, it's not observable that it's not truly realtime.  For MAME, I think 
this is normally synchronized to the video refresh rate since that's what 
someone playing an arcade game is observing.

One of the challenges is retrofitting machine cycle counting into SIMH.  Some 
of those complex VAX instructions like the CRC instruction could take a 
variable amount of time to complete.  If you truly want to be cycle-accurate, 
you need to know all the gory implementation details.  If you wanted a "near 
enough is good enough" approximation and had an instruction which took between, 
say, 6 and 10 cycles to execute, you might split the difference and say that 8 
cycles is an OK average.

Jason
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Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements

[Armistead, Jason]

Göran

Given that TI obsolete the TMS9900 range of CPUs probably 20 years ago, using 
their 1-bit serial I/O scheme, know as Communications Register Unit (CRU), is 
probably not a great idea.  It never really caught on outside of TI's own 
product lines, and it still required (up to) 12 bits for the address bus used 
to select CRU bits (up to 4096 input and 4096 output bits), plus the 3 CRU 
signals CRUIN, CRUOUT and CRUCLK.

Using a modern PC as a starting point, maybe you'd be better off with a 
USB-based device which writes out to a SPI-like serial bus.  Parallel ports are 
disappearing (and now almost totally non-existent on notebook PCs and even 
their docking stations), and CANbus is too specialized to each vendor (and thus 
difficult to find drivers for every OS, especially Unix/Linux-based ones).  
Companies like FTDI have some neat USB I/O controller devices (some that are 
nicely programmable) and could be adapted to your needs using simple control 
instructions across the USB channel.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Göran Åhling
Sent: Friday, 10 December 2010 3:47 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements

Hi!

One solution to consider, besides a bunch of small CPU's of personal 
choice each having USB-interface and N signals I/O (thus requiring some 
USB-hub's), or alternatively using the same way of thinking, but a 
CAN-bus starting with a RS-232 to CAN converter from the PC would be:

Use the PC parallel port (bidirectional). For output, have a decoding 
circuit (in plain logic or in an embedded CPU of favourite...) and the 
required number of 8-bit latches. Use a RESET control signal to reset 
the counter, thereafter sending out 8-bit words on D0-D7, having the 
strobe select the proper latch to take next strobe to store the data. 
This will not look like a shift-register, but more like a parallel 
printer... 64 bit to write out would require 8 writes. One could also 
imagine a "general" card with "LPT-in" and "LPT-out" that after reset 
swallows the first 4 characters to come (and make 32 bits available for 
outputs) and sends the rest of a stream "down the line". Next card in 
line would take the first 4 characters that arrive into it ...

The cards would be identical to each other to design!

For input, a similar method might be usable, but here, I'm not sure 
which signal to use for strobing "next register".

This should all be quire reasonable to implement though!

In the good old days. Texas instruments made the 9995 CPU,  which I 
think had some kind of serial 1-bit I/O-interface bus, and they sold 
quite some different I/O-chips to attach. I never really learnt how this 
was designed and set-up, but friends of mine who played with these 
things were impressed (by then). I don't know how much of this that is 
still available to the open market of electonics... If anyone else in 
the list can give a 30 s class, I'd really appreceate it!

All my best,

Göran


On 2010-12-07 16:05, Pontus Pihlgren wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 09:21:43AM -0500, Ken Cornetet wrote:
>> Keep in mind that the printer port on regular old PCs can be used for a few 
>> lines of general input and output. I used to do this on a regular basis back 
>> in the DOS days. Looks easy under linux too: 
>> http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/IO-Port-Programming.html
> It's a solution I'm considering, but I have a concern. Besides the
> PDP-15 panel I also have a PDP-12 panel. The PDP-12 panel has arround
> 120 lights. So while I think it will be possible to control them by
> cascading shift registers, I'm worried it will be to slow.
>
> Having more I/O pins and narrower shift registers would speed things up.
>
> I would love to be proven wrong here, in which case I can dig out a
> Pentium III with parallel port and start experimenting.
>
>   - Pontus.
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Re: [Simh] EXTERNAL: Problem booting an emulated VAX-11/780 from a Massbus disk drive

[Armistead, Jason]

So now the real question from this discussion becomes …

 

“How do “we” (initially Bob Supnik and perhaps the SIMH users/contributor base) 
track the “core” and “per platform” SIMH requirements ?”

 

which then leads on to the whole issue of test cases for requirements 
validation, functional allocation, etc. and also to a discussion about how much 
of this ought to be documented right inside the SIMH source code (given that 
many SIMH users may never have access to the hardware manuals or operating 
system source listings (in this case, for various flavors of VMS), and what 
degree of “assumed knowledge” (and prerequisite DEC reading materials) is 
required to actually understand the source fully.

 

One day, (hopefully not for a VERY, VERY long time), Bob won’t be around to ask 
these questions about SIMH’s implementation or about the original DEC 
hardware/software he based the VAX implementations on.  If we’re truly going to 
keep SIMH going long past that point, we need to come up with a plan to make 
sure that the SIMH software has well-documented requirements.

 

Jason

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Hittner, David T (IS)
Sent: Tuesday, 25 January 2011 3:55 PM
To: Peter Allan; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] EXTERNAL: Problem booting an emulated VAX-11/780 from a 
Massbus disk drive

 

Congratulations, you have found a “Devil in the details”!

 

Over the years, VMS driver internal implementations have changed substantially. 
What you are experiencing is that VMS V4 appears to interact with the RP 
controller (not just the RP06 drive) differently than later versions of VMS. It 
 appears that there was a substantial driver standardization/rewrite effort 
that occurred around the VMS V4/V5 era from the later driver comments that I 
have seen.

 

The way to find the exact problem is to either walk your way through the VMS 
driver with the VMS source code, and see where the controller simulation is 
behaving differently than expected, OR put some breakpoints in the simulated 
read/write routines, and try to intuit the correct controller behavior from 
what you see happening from the driver. The second way is harder, but sometimes 
it’s the only way if you don’t have source code.

 

In many hangs, the problem turns out to be a timing issue – the controller 
simulation is responding too fast or too slow, based on the behavior that the 
driver expects to see. VMS may be hung waiting for an interrupt that has 
already fired or a register value that has already been overwritten - that is, 
the simulation is “too fast” and needs to delay things with a timer.

 

I’ve just finished debugging a similar problem in the VMS DEUNA driver, where 
later versions of VMS work fine, but the earlier VMS V3/V4 drivers left the 
controller not functional.  Using the second method (because I don’t have any 
VMS sources earlier than 7.2), I watched the DELUA registers and intuited that 
the problem was incorrect behavior in the DEUNA SELFTEST command, since that’s 
the point where the VMS driver quit trying to work with the card. My DEUNA 
patch will appear in the next full release of SIMH.

 

If you can’t debug the problem yourself, you can always ask someone in the SIMH 
community to step up and take a crack at it.

Or ignore the problem and use your RA81 workaround.

Good luck.

 

Dave Hittner

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Peter Allan
Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 3:00 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: EXTERNAL:[Simh] Problem booting an emulated VAX-11/780 from a Massbus 
disk drive

 

I started this thread over on comp.os.vms in case anyone knew of VMS cause of 
my problem, but it seems to be a problem with simh.

have been trying to set up the VAX780 emulator in simh to boot VMS 4.6 from an 
RP06 disk drive and I have failed.

My tests have been the following.

I installed VMS 4.6 (and 4.0 and 4.2) on an RP06 drive. When I try to boot from 
the RP06, then VMS starts up, displays a line like 

VAX/VMS Version  KG  15-Jun-1987 10:00

and sits there forever. The "KG" is because I have not yet been able to apply 
the mandatory update. Clearly the 780 is booting from the disk since it 
displays the one line message.

If I boot with the command

b rp0/r5:1

then I get into SYSBOOT, but everything appears to be fine. Typing "CONTINUE" 
returns to the hung state.


Next I tried installing VMS 4.6 on to an RA81 disk drive. This works fine, so I 
copied the contents of the RA81 to an RP06 drive using stand alone backup and 
tried booting from the RP06, but still the system hung during the boot process. 
So the problem appears to be with the RP06 drive, not with VMS or with the 
installation procedure.

I tried changing the RP06 disk type to all other possible Massbus disk types 
(RP04/05/07, RM02/03/05/80) and installing VMS 4.6. These all act in the same 
way as the R

[Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7

[Armistead, Jason]

Has anyone built an EXE of SIMH with networking support which will run properly 
under Windows 7 64-bit ?  Or, perhaps somehow has the current SIMH EXEs running 
under Windows 7 64-bit as-is
 ?

We're beginning the inevitable corporate move from XP 32-bit to Windows 7, and 
64-bit seems like the preferred option rather than 32-bit.

Has SIMH been compiled specifically for 64-bit Windows platforms, and is there 
a Visual Studio project environment (or perhaps another alternative 
environment) that I can get from somewhere to give this a go for myself ?

Thanks
Jason

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Re: [Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7

[Armistead, Jason]

Jason

I'm running VC 2008 Express, but could probably grab the VC 2010 Express 
edition if that's what you're using.

I'm not entirely sure when Microsoft started being able to generate 64-bit EXEs 
in their toolchains, but since I started writing my reply I also did some 
Googling and it seems that I may need to get a fully-blown version of Visual 
Studio Professional 

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/deeptanshuv/archive/2006/04/11/573795.aspx

but then I read posts like

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/4ce313a3-cb5f-43fc-bbb9-50233f8ed11b

which seem to indicate I may be OK.

Sigh !  Too many toolset options compared with what I was used to under OpenVMS 
VAX / Alpha !

Cheers
Jason

-Original Message-
From: Jason Stevens [mailto:neoz...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, 2 May 2011 9:14 AM
To: Armistead, Jason
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7

I'm pretty sure I've done it at some point

I've done a VC 2005 project on older source here..

http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/files/simh%20source%20code/simh%203.7-3/simh-3.73-vc2005.zip/download

I guess I could update it, is Visual Studio 2010 ok?  I need to do a
'proper' Itanium version at any rate....

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Armistead, Jason
 wrote:
> Has anyone built an EXE of SIMH with networking support which will run
> properly under Windows 7 64-bit ?  Or, perhaps somehow has the current SIMH
> EXEs running under Windows 7 64-bit as-is
>
>  ?
>
> We’re beginning the inevitable corporate move from XP 32-bit to Windows 7,
> and 64-bit seems like the preferred option rather than 32-bit.
>
> Has SIMH been compiled specifically for 64-bit Windows platforms, and is
> there a Visual Studio project environment (or perhaps another alternative
> environment) that I can get from somewhere to give this a go for myself ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Jason
>
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Re: [Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7

[Armistead, Jason]

Thanks for all your help Jason.  It's these sorts of offers for help that I've 
always loved about the DEC user community.  8-)

I'm using VS 2008 Express, so let's stick with that, and I'm running Windows 7 
64-bit on an Intel Core Duo CPU PC.

Of all the SIMH emulated hardware, I only need the MicroVAX 3900 with Ethernet 
support.  I've always had a special place for the MicroVAX range since I first 
started working with a MicroVAX 2000 back in 1988 (even if I wasn't keen 
loading MicroVMS 4.5B onto it from a stack of nearly 80 5.25" floppies !!!).

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Jason Stevens [mailto:neoz...@gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, 2 May 2011 9:59 AM
To: Armistead, Jason
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7

I'm using VS 2010 professional... As far as I remember the express
stuff is 32bit only.  The platform SDK's come with all kinds of stuff,
including cross compilers, I think they are free...?

Like this one for 2003...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyId=A55B6B43-E24F-4EA3-A93E-40C0EC4F68E5&displaylang=en

While this one is for 2008 / .net 4.0
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=6B6C21D2-2006-4AFA-9702-529FA782D63B

I don't have any MS Makefiles (nmake is.. weird.) but looking at the
makefile you can usually figure out what you want along the lines of
...

cl -DVM_VAX -DVAX_780  -I VAX -I PDP11 -I. -Ox  -c scp.c
cl -DVM_VAX -DVAX_780  -I VAX -I PDP11 -I. -Ox  -c sim_console.c
cl -DVM_VAX -DVAX_780  -I VAX -I PDP11 -I. -Ox  -c sim_ether.c


etc...

Microsoft started on the 64bit train some time back in 2001 on the Dec
Alpha of all things... Then when Compaq bought Dec, it saw the Alpha
as a threat to it's high end Pentium stuff and killed the Alpha NT
port.. But it was developed internal, lots of SDK's have the
Alpha64/DEC64 tags in them so clearly it is where is started.. And of
course the long road to the Itanium, then finally the x86_64.  I've
recently acquired an Itanium, and it's not as bad as I'd thought, but
the compilers are far less forgiving then the x86_64 stuff.

What platform do you need?  I'm sure I can cook up a nmake package file for you.

On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:32 AM, Armistead, Jason
 wrote:
> Jason
>
> I'm running VC 2008 Express, but could probably grab the VC 2010 Express 
> edition if that's what you're using.
>
> I'm not entirely sure when Microsoft started being able to generate 64-bit 
> EXEs in their toolchains, but since I started writing my reply I also did 
> some Googling and it seems that I may need to get a fully-blown version of 
> Visual Studio Professional
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/b/deeptanshuv/archive/2006/04/11/573795.aspx
>
> but then I read posts like
>
> http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/Vsexpressvc/thread/4ce313a3-cb5f-43fc-bbb9-50233f8ed11b
>
> which seem to indicate I may be OK.
>
> Sigh !  Too many toolset options compared with what I was used to under 
> OpenVMS VAX / Alpha !
>
> Cheers
> Jason
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Jason Stevens [mailto:neoz...@gmail.com]
> Sent: Monday, 2 May 2011 9:14 AM
> To: Armistead, Jason
> Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
> Subject: Re: [Simh] Running and compiling SIMH under 64-bit Windows 7
>
> I'm pretty sure I've done it at some point
>
> I've done a VC 2005 project on older source here..
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/files/simh%20source%20code/simh%203.7-3/simh-3.73-vc2005.zip/download
>
> I guess I could update it, is Visual Studio 2010 ok?  I need to do a
> 'proper' Itanium version at any rate
>
> On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Armistead, Jason
>  wrote:
>> Has anyone built an EXE of SIMH with networking support which will run
>> properly under Windows 7 64-bit ?  Or, perhaps somehow has the current SIMH
>> EXEs running under Windows 7 64-bit as-is
>>
>>  ?
>>
>> We’re beginning the inevitable corporate move from XP 32-bit to Windows 7,
>> and 64-bit seems like the preferred option rather than 32-bit.
>>
>> Has SIMH been compiled specifically for 64-bit Windows platforms, and is
>> there a Visual Studio project environment (or perhaps another alternative
>> environment) that I can get from somewhere to give this a go for myself ?
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Jason
>>
>> ___
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>>
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Re: [Simh] EXT : Unable to connect to ethernet

[Armistead, Jason]

Thanks for such a technically solid reply David.  While this issue doesn't 
affect me (and I'm just a lurker in relation to this thread's topic), your 
expanded description of the root cause and effects ought to be added to the 
FAQ.  I've no doubt that many others either have or will wrestle with this 
issue at some point in the future.  To me, that makes it "FAQ-able".

Jason

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Hittner, David T (IS)
Sent: Tuesday, 17 May 2011 11:02 AM
To: Robert F. Thomas; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] EXT : Unable to connect to ethernet

If the standard XQ MAC of 08-00-2b-aa-bb-cc is used, and the virtual NIC is 
attached to a wireless controller, then any packets which are not addressed 
to/from your "registered" PC's wireless MAC address may be legally dropped out 
by the wireless router to conserve bandwidth.

The only way to debug a wireless router connection to run WireShark on the host 
PC and watch the packet traffic, while also running WireShark on a wired PC on 
the network to see if you see all the packets traversing the wireless link 
correctly. It almost never does what you think it will, because wireless 
routers are allowed to drop non-essential packets to conserve bandwidth, and 
non-TCP protocols tend to get axed, because home routers usually don't need to 
deal with non-TCP packets.

You can 'fake' the simulated NIC's MAC to be the same MAC as the PC's wireless 
NIC MAC to fool the wireless packet dropping, but this will only work if you 
are not running decnet phase IV or decnet phase V in compatibility mode, since 
decnet phase IV forcibly changes the hardware MAC to a decnet-encoded value. 
This technique will always work if you're only running TCP/IP on the simulated 
system, since the simulated NIC will see all the (matching MAC) IP packets, and 
throw out the incorrect IP-addressed packets. If you're running decnet phase V 
not in compatibility mode, this technique will still work, but decnet phase V 
will eject a lot of unknown protocol messages to the console - just set term 
opa0: /nobro/perm to shut it up, or use NCL to disable the warnings.

Some router/wireless card combinations will work flawlessly to route 
non-registered MAC addresses, most won't.

Wireless Ethernet "looks like" Ethernet .. but it isn't Ethernet.

Dave

-Original Message-
From: Robert F. Thomas [mailto:r...@asthomas.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2011 8:53 AM
To: Hittner, David T (IS); simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: RE: EXT :[Simh] Unable to connect to ethernet

I thought that I had.  I did make many attempts.  The host system adapter's
MAC address was specified as the XQ0 MAC address, etc.

Sincerely,
Robert F. Thomas

 355 Providence Highway 
Westwood, MA USA 02090
(  Office Phone - (781) 329-9200
* mail to: r...@asthomas.com
 
-Original Message-
From: Hittner, David T (IS) [mailto:david.hitt...@ngc.com] 
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 3:40 PM
To: Robert F. Thomas; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: RE: EXT :[Simh] Unable to connect to ethernet

You need to *carefully* read the SIMH FAQ section regarding wireless
Ethernet.

SIMH wireless networking is a lot harder to configure correctly than wired
Ethernet because it just "looks like" Ethernet, and because many wireless
routers suppress "unregistered" simulated MAC addresses to control
bandwidth.

Dave Hittner

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com]
On Behalf Of Robert F. Thomas
Sent: Monday, May 16, 2011 3:04 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: EXT :[Simh] Unable to connect to ethernet

I omitted vax.inc:

set rq0 ra90
set rq1 cdrom
att rq0 vms.dsk
att rq1 vax071.iso
att xq0 eth1
set cpu 128M

Sincerely,
Robert F. Thomas

 355 Providence Highway 
Westwood, MA USA 02090
(  Office Phone - (781) 329-9200
* mail to: r...@asthomas.com
 


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Re: [Simh] VAXstation 2000

[Armistead, Jason]

Thanks for the walk down memory lane Stephen !

 

I remember loading up MicroVMS 4.5b onto a shiny new MicroVAX 2000 back in 
1988.  The total set of floppies came to about 80.  I know this because I had 
to install it twice. What started out life as a standalone MicroVAX 2000 with 
4Mb RAM, a single 31Mb RD52 disk, a TK50 and 4 terminals, eventually became a 
fully expanded system with 2 * 159Mb RD54s, 16 Mb of RAM (thanks Clearpoint 
!!!), a DHT-32 8-line asynchronous expander, DESVA Ethernet option and ran 
OpenVMS 6.2 as part of a mixed VAX and Alpha cluster.

 

The MicroVAX 2000, despite its relative slowness compared to the later VAX 
4000-300, MicroVAX 300 M76, AlphaServer 400 4/266 and AlphaServer 1000 5/300 
nodes that we used, will always have certain soft spot in my heart.

 

On the subject of loading VMS or MicroVMS into the emulated VAXstation 2000 in 
SIMH, can it be booted from across the Ethernet ?  I honestly can’t remember if 
it was possible.  We only ever booted it from floppies for the initial, RD 
disks for regular operations, or from the TK50 for standalone backup.

 

Regards

Jason

 

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Stephen Hoffman
Sent: Thursday, 26 May 2011 1:15 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] VAXstation 2000

 

On Date: Wed, 25 May 2011 22:15:53 -0400, Michael Kerpan  
posited:




Given that IIRC, VMS does its hardware detection during install, how

did you go about getting the system to see the hardware present in the

VaxStation and forget about the stuff in the Vaxserver 3900?


VMS implements the system and device configuration at bootstrap.  The platform 
console finds and loads the primary bootstrap VMB, APB or IPB image into memory 
(from the system disk or from external console storage (and remember 
CONSCOPY.COM   or EXCHANGE to update the console media), 
depending on the VAX), and the primary bootstrap then uses the console and its 
own pieces including the primitive file system to find and to get SYSBOOT into 
memory, and SYSBOOT loads enough additional parts to kick off the rest of the 
bootstrap.

The original MicroVMS stuff might have caused some confusion around the 
implementation details here, as that was a subset distribution specifically for 
storage-constrained MicroVAX processors. In various cases including the Local 
Area VAXcluster (LAVc) support, the system manager ended up loading full VMS 
onto the box.  And the MicroVMS distribution was discontinued when the MicroVAX 
storage became sufficient for a (potentially tailored) VMS installation.  

This generic nature of the VMS bootstrap also plays into the DEFAULTS settings 
for the system parameters, too.  The SYSBOOT (and SYSGEN) defaults are just 
good enough to get most any VAX box to boot far enough to run AUTOGEN and fix 
the parameters.  (While there have been a few parameter "bugs" here over the 
years that could cause problems booting some boxes, these settings and this 
behavior holds for most VMS and OpenVMS releases.)

The advent of CDs and TK50 as bootable VMS installation media was a substantial 
improvement over what was available prior to that, too; installing all of 
MicroVMS and ancillary pieces could involve thirty and often more floppies.

The older VAX-11 processors differed substantially from one model to the next 
and which required some effort to implement the processor support, where the 
KA610 MicroVAX I series then kicked off the so-called subset VAX systems; those 
newer VAX systems that lacked various architectural mechanisms from the earlier 
VAX-11 series including the PDP-11 instruction set.

I'd expect that the initial approach used for development here was to load a 
MicroVMS or VAX/VMS disk image into an emulation that presents itself as a 
VAXstation 2000, and booting it.  The version would have to be new enough to 
support the VAXstation 2000 hardware.  

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Re: [Simh] {Simh] A few more bugs found

[Armistead, Jason]

Just thinking out loud ...

Has anyone run SIMH through any form of static code analysis tool, and would it 
perhaps uncover some more previously-undetected bugs ?

In suggesting this, I realize that these static analysis tools often generate a 
lot of "noise" in their output too, but it might catch some of these issues 
that have escaped our eyes to date.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Bob Supnik
Sent: Wednesday, 21 March 2012 4:10 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] {Simh] A few more bugs found

I'm only going to comment on my own code.

2. id_pas.c - this is real. The tests should be against TTUF_MODE_8B. 
Will be fixed in 3.9.

4. pdp1_cpu.c, Ea_ch. Also real, the & should be && in that statement. 
Will be fixed in 3.9.

6. pdp1_stddev.c, tto_svc. Also real. The code will be restructured so that c 
is only referenced inside the else {} statement. Will be fixed in 3.9

9. i1401_iq.c. Also real. The return should be commented out as well. 
Already fixed in the 3.9 code base.

/Bob
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Re: [Simh] Extended SimH on BeagleBone controls real blinkenlight panels

[Armistead, Jason]

Why not go all the way and record video of each type of old hardware in action 
?  Obviously this makes no sense for blinkenlights, but it might be fun to 
watch tape drives spinning back and forth (a series of short sequences of video 
for each operation), or maybe someone opening up a disk pack and installing 
platters.  Of course, this would require yet another interface from SIMH to the 
video playback system.

It would remind me of those old movies where the computer rooms always had rows 
and rows of lights, and tapes running, together with the sounds of teletype 
printers spewing data out ...

Now, if we could just "skin" our favorite terminal emulator with a VT-220 case 
around the window area, we'd be all set in our virtual retro-computing world !

Wait, did I mention using 3-D glasses ??? LOL !!!


-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of dott.Piergiorgio d' Errico
Sent: Thursday, 19 April 2012 12:24 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Extended SimH on BeagleBone controls real blinkenlight 
panels

Il 19/04/2012 15:21, Bucher, Andreas (Andreas)** CTR ** ha scritto:
> Hi,
>
>> I just finished another "Blinkenlight" project: An extended SimH runs 
>> on a BeagleBone (credit card sized Linux platform) and controls real 
>> console panels of historical computers, or simulations of those 
>> panels. So the project is named "BlinkenBone".
>>
>> First implementation is re-animation of a PDP-11/40 console (KY11-D), 
>> others will follow. See documentation here:
>> www.retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone
>>
>> I think there are a few? a lot? other "SimH-blinkenlight" projects 
>> out there. Perhaps it is time to define the definitive "SimH - 
>> Blinkenlight" interface, so there's a standard for future work. My 
>> proposal is 
>> http://www.retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone/169-blinkenbone-a
> rchitecture-overview
>>
>> If you like to build this too, we will support you ... but it won't 
>> be cheap. And code deployment isn't organized yet, contact me on 
>> demand.
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> that's waaay cool ! Not really useful for practical computing, but 
> absolutely mandatory for the genuine look-and-feel of some ancient 
> "big iron" :-)
>
> I like your modular approach - it allows people NOT owning true 
> hardware blinkenlights to replace them with some software simulated 
> frontend instead ! Would be cool to have SIMH equipped with all kind 
> of genuine virtual (or real, for the purists) designs of the systems 
> it emulates ! Have a look for PINMAME, the pinball emulator software, 
> and you know what I mean :-) (wll, yes, a pinball machine's main 
> item IS the hardware you see, and the CPU is only some aid in behind, 
> while our emulated data processing systems are vice-versa - but anyway 
> ...)
>
> And - finally ... that's what I already suggested years ago (and only 
> got startled looks): Equip SIMH with some standard interface to 
> optionally drive "real" hardware components of the systems it 
> emulates, like console panels and stuff. I even went as far as to 
> suggest incorporating all other kind of events from inside the system 
> beeing signalled out - this could be used to generate sound events as 
> well !

Perhaps the startled looks came from people whose main interest is keeping 
running legacy software, an important thing in se, but driving real 
(reconstructed) hardware is equally important, if not for the recovering & 
preservation of software & source codes on DECtapes, tapes, removable platters 
&c

On the blinkenlighten project, I have indeed suggested (ands ends
rejected...) that ex and de command accept (and outputs) binary digits and 
space, (e.g. de 000 100 111 ) whose IMVHO is not only a convenient means when 
dealing with old big iron software, but also a convenient protocol (being 
*both* human and machine readable/writable) for a "blinkenlighten" protocol.

Seems that there's a consensus in starting working on graphics emulation after 
3.9.0 release and the sort of "retirement" (If I have understand
well...) of bob from the active development of SIMH.

I reckon that my perspective (of Historian of technology and "random hacking 
when the mood is in") differ from the other member of this fair ML, but it's my 
perspective (for the record my lack of frequent contribuition is because of the 
extreme dispersiveness in dealing with project (I suspect that my WIP list is 
in high 10s or low 100s, but I have never done a census of it...)

> Think about your DECbox emitting true 11/750 noises, perhaps with some 
> TE16 tape in the background, hehe :-)
>
> So, you better go ahead and digitize not only the Front Panels, but 
> also the sound of the remaining hardware that is alive, or sythesize 
> the sound of dead hardware and have it "proof-listened" by the few 
> people knowing the hardware that still are alive as well ...

I'm deaf and not much interested in that "ambient sound emu

Re: [Simh] Extended SimH on BeagleBone controls real blinkenlight panels

[Armistead, Jason]

Jörg Hoppe wrote:

>A BeagleBone with our "BlinkenCape" serves well as "serial-to-telnet" 
>converter.
>BlinkenCape has 4 serial ports, over which you can log in to Angstrom-Linux on 
>the BeagleBone.
>So
>
>1. You connect your historic equipment (VT100, ASR) to one of the 4 serial 
>UARTs,
>2. get the Linux prompt
>3. connect to one of SimHs user terminal via telnet
>4. then you have your serial device connected over a telnet tunnel to one of 
>SimH's user serial ports
>
>Feeling is much the way a LAT server works.
>But you can access any simulated machine this way, not LAT serving PDP-11's 
>and VAXes.

Has anyone thought about simulating/emulating one of the old DECserver LAT 
terminal servers ?  I half expected that with MAME/MESS already having 68000 
CPU emulation, this might not be beyond the realms of possibility, and might be 
implementable on a BeagleBone or a "plug" computer with USB-to-RS232 ports 
added as needed.

Jason
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Re: [Simh] Certainly a silly question

[Armistead, Jason]

It would be a useful enhancement if the host operating system could notify SIMH 
when it wanted to change a disk or CD image file over.  Maybe this requires 
SIMH to listen to a given port (emulated terminal serial I/O or via TCP/IP).  
Terminal ports might be easier for host scripting (something delivered with 
SIMH and installed on the guest OS).  Obviously, if we want to prevent the host 
from doing this, it should be configurable as such.

Done right, we could have the entire set of VMS layered product and 
documentation CDs, plus DECUS tapes, etc. all available for loading on an 
as-needed basis (or the equivalent for whatever guest OS takes your fancy).

This would seem better than dismounting the CD inside the guest OS, then 
pausing SIMH, changing the disk image over, restarting the guest again and 
mounting the CD again.  It also seems more manageable than creating dozens of 
disk devices, only to run out of, or be limited by, the host's limited number 
of  devices as Marc has.

And, if we have a good solid interface, then there's no reason people couldn't 
"roll their own" guest-side program to make it as fancy, or as simple, as they 
need it to be.

Something for the next SIMH version perhaps ?


~~ Jason

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Marc Chametzky
Sent: Friday, 4 May 2012 2:50 PM
To: Craig A. Berry
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Certainly a silly question

In my case, I would also have liked to have a simpler way to set up a series of 
disk volumes that were set up as an array of RRD40s for a CD collection I have 
mounted on my VAX (VMS). Right now, I'm filled up with DUA0-3, DUB0-3, DUC0-3, 
and DUD0-3, giving me 16 total volumes (used as
3 virtual hard drives and 13 virtual CD drives).

I think the limitation here is in the hardware devices available to VMS itself. 
The controllers being emulated (and thus the matching device
drivers) probably didn't support more than 4 devices per controller, so that's 
why we're limited in this fashion.

--Marc

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Re: [Simh] PIP10 on PDP-8 SIM

[Armistead, Jason]

I had trouble with Timothe’s link to the USPTO, but found this same patent in 
PDF form at

http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/dec/dectape/3387293.pdf

As a relative newbie who started my serious journey into computing with an 
Apple ][  I’ve never fully understood DEC’s fascination with word lengths that 
weren’t multiples of 2 (even though I dabbled with the PDP-11s at the local 
council my father worked at as a civil engineer – mainly to play Mugwump and 
Wumpus after giving up on trying to learn FORTRAN).  Maybe someone can give a 
brief history behind the 12-bit, 18-bit and 36-bit sizing of words.  All I’ve 
ever had to deal with are 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit processors and their 
O/S. (But yes, I do remember the 4004 !!!)

From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Timothe Litt
Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2013 9:03 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] PIP10 on PDP-8 SIM

The DECtape format as such, with all the headers and so on, is the same on all 
tapes. A normal PDP-8 formatted tape will have 129 (12-bit) words, however, 
while a PDP-10 (or any other 18-bitter) would have 128 18-bit words (if I 
remember right).
Pretty much right.  129 may be slightly misleading.  The format is 129, but the 
-8 used  only 128 of the 129 12-bit words/block for data.

The PDP-10 is 36-bit, not 18-bit.  A PDP-10 (actually, non-PDP-8) formatted 
DECtape would have 578 blocks of 128 36-bit words.  (256 18-bit words at the 
hardware level.)

Blocks 0, 1, 2 are for DTBoot (hardware read-in bootstrap), and didn't contain 
user data.

Block 100 is the directory block.  Thus 574 blocks for user data.  The 
directory holds up to 22 files, plus a map of which file owns each block.

The user data blocks have a one word header (LH = next block of file; RH = 
first block & words used in this block) + 127 words of payload.  This differed 
from disk files, where all 128 words were payload, so inattentive programmers 
could make a number of mistakes.  (E.g. random access block isn't word/128; you 
had to pay attention to the buffer's word count, etc.)

Data blocks of a file are (usually) not contiguous; this allowed the drive to 
stop and restart while reading or writing without having to reverse direction.  
The spacing depended on what blocks were free when files were written, and the 
data mode.  (Files written in 'core dump' modes were assumed to be read by the 
monitor without stopping, so the gap was smaller, allowing larger programs to 
be read without reversing direction.)

The gory details of the format are in the Monitor Calls manual (TOPS-10).

The PDP-11 used 18-bit format, but ignored the high 2 bits of each word (except 
when reading PDP-10 tapes; the hardware for that was tricky as the high bits 
had to be read with programmed IO; the low 16 were DMAed on the TC-11.)

The low-level formatting that established the mark track, end zones and block 
delimiters was done via a stand-alone diagnostic.  This differs between the two 
formats.  The directory block could be initialized under timesharing.

Directory structure given is for the PDP-10; other OSs used different formats.

>From an emulation point of view, the PDP-10's controller was the most 
>interesting; the driver does dead reckoning; that is, it will start a drive 
>spinning for a seek, disconnect, service other drives, and reconnect just 
>before the desired block is expected to be over the read head.  So real-world 
>timing matters.  The other controllers (and thus OSs) didn't support this.

Oh, all numbers above are radix 10.

The link for OS8 that I posted yesterday was via filewatcher; the direct link 
is ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-8/os8/ Sorry 
if this was confusing.

Of potential interest to low-level folks is 
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN/3387293

Hope this is useful.



This communication may not represent my employer's views,

if any, on the matters discussed.
On 18-Mar-13 16:26, Johnny Billquist wrote:
On 2013-03-18 17:44, Bob Supnik wrote:

I was trying to get a debug setup for PIP10, per Ian King's mail, when I
discovered that none of my OS/8 images have PIP10 on them. This
certainly explains why the feature has never been tested before. I
suspect that ReadAll and WriteAll either are not working at all, or are
not working when the DECtape format is 18b. Another possibility is that
PDP-10 DECtape format is not the same as 18b format, at the nitty-gritty
level (format of headers and trailers).

The DECtape format as such, with all the headers and so on, is the same on all 
tapes. A normal PDP-8 formatted tape will have 129 (12-bit) words, however, 
while a PDP-10 (or any other 18-bitter) would have 128 18-bit words (if I 
remember right).
The PDP-8, when doing 12-bit formatted tapes, just packs data in a way that is 
rather diffe

[Simh] Formally documenting PDP tape drive behavior (and other facets of SIMH and the systems it emulates)

[Armistead, Jason]

There has been a lot of interesting discussion about tape drives on PDP systems 
in the last week or so.  It's great to hear those familiar with the inner 
workings of these devices, or with access to the manuals, share their wisdom.

One question though - after the "old timers" are gone, would a newbie to SIMH 
be able to figure these same things out ?

Or, in other words, do the accompanying comments in the code and the SIMH 
documentation adequately capture the "nuggets" of the conversations that take 
place on this list ?  And do we provide enough in the way of "breadcrumbs" to 
allow a newbie to re-discover this same information ?

Capturing this knowledge is a hard thing to do, and with retrocomputing we are 
presently at a point in time where we can still rely on folks who designed, 
built, tested, operated and programmed these systems, and in some cases they 
still even have running systems available for experimentation and measurement.  
But what happens when that is no longer the case ?

Just food for thought ... let's make sure SIMH and its fellow emulators like 
MAME / MESS can still be enjoyed and understood by future generations.


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Re: [Simh] EXT : Questions regarding future simulator development

[Armistead, Jason]

On Wednesday, 10 April 2013 2:32 PM, Dell Setzer wrote:

> 
> On Wed, 10 Apr 2013, Hittner, David T (IS) wrote:
> 
> > To answer your questions:
> >
> > 1> Yes, you could detach the command channel from the simulation loop
> > 1> by
> > putting the command channel in a different thread. The problem then
> > becomes one of synchronization between the two threads to do the
> > [limited] amount of things that should be allowed while the simulation
> > loop is still running. You would also need to put in options to
> > enable/disable command-channel threading - some people do not want to
> > change the removable media "on the fly", and some older host systems
> > do not support pthreads. Someone may have already submitted this code,
> > or it may be in the next version of SIMH (4.0), it would be best to
> > check with Mark.
> >
> 
> There is another approach that could be used to do e.g.
> attaching/detaching devices, etc. without interacting with the simh> command
> prompt, and without running the SIMH command handler in a different thread. 
> One
> could have, for example, a "magic" I/O or memory location that causes the 
> simulation
> code to call various SIMH functions directly. So, for example, writing a 
> certain value
> to a certain memory location could cause the SIMH attach function to be 
> called,
> perhaps with parameters (e.g. disk image file pathname) pointed to by certain
> simulated registers. Success/failure status could be returned via a read to 
> the same
> location. A utility could then be developed to run under the simulated OS 
> that collects
> the parameters and tickles the magic location.
> 
> I have actually implemented this in a SIMH simulator I wrote for the
> MC6809 to run the TSC Flex operating system. A magic memory location allows
> attaching/detaching disk images, attaching/detaching files to simulated async 
> ports,
> etc. And a little utility that runs under the simulated OS allows this to all 
> be done from
> within the simulated environment. The attach or detach appears to the 
> simulated
> machine to occur between one simulated instruction and the next. This approach
> works like a charm in the simple-minded Flex environment, but it may or may 
> not be
> problematic on more complex simulated hardware...
> 
> ...dell


One problem with any attempt to attach/detach devices on the fly is that you 
have to do it at a time when the OS running inside of SIMH expects the change 
to occur.  On VMS, when you DISMOUNT a volume, the operating system finishes 
any I/O to the volume in a clean manner.  There's no chance you're going to 
corrupt the file system.  Once the dismount is complete, then it's safe to 
attach another virtual disk image (representing the new removable media) from 
the SIMH prompt and for the simulated VMS system to MOUNT the new volume.

As you say, Flex is a "simple-minded" system, and this is a workable 
implementation for your needs.  I would expect that your solution rapidly gets 
more limited (and dangerous) once background asynchronous I/O and multiple 
executing tasks/processes are involved.

Nevertheless, why not share your implementation (including the 6809 core) so it 
can be added to with the SIMH code repository ?  At the moment I don't see that 
listed as one of the simulators for the current version of SIMH.

Cheers
Jason
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[Simh] What does "DUP" stand for ?

[Armistead, Jason]

There's been a lot of discussion regarding KMC11 and DUP lately.

Can someone remind me what the acronym DUP stands for ?  I've done a SET HOST 
/DUP /DSSI before on a VAX4000-300 to set up the DSSI disks, but that was so 
long ago and I'm a bit rusty.

Cheers
Jason


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Re: [Simh] how to get eth connexion

[Armistead, Jason]

Gérard

SIMH has a console terminal connection.  This is activated after SIMH starts up 
by creating a Telnet connection to port 1 on your host (or else it times 
out).  That implies that the IP protocol be activated on at least one network 
interface on your host.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On 
Behalf Of Gérard Calliet
Sent: Wednesday, 6 November 2013 3:49 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [External] Re: [Simh] how to get eth connexion

Le 05/11/2013 13:55, Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm a écrit :
>> 2) I saw we need at least one ip host connexion alive to have a 
>> connexion for
>> >simh - I am on Windows with wincap -. Again, why ?
> I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'need at least one ip host connexion 
> alive'.  Are you saying that you need to be connected to a network?
Thanks to your help, I was able to communicate using a classic wire connexion. 
It works also with the only wire interface, used by Windows for ip traffic, and 
by simh for its (ip also) traffic.
If I disable the ip protocol for the interface, simh also cannot work.
My question is theoretical : why do we need an ip host protocol on the host 
interface for simh being able of work with this interface ? It's perhaps a 
window / wincap issue.
Don't worry about it : it is only to increese my knowledge. I do go on with 
wired and ip-ed solutions.

Gérard Calliet
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[Simh] Pop culture references to DEC and VAX

[Armistead, Jason .]

And now for a bit of a diversion after an otherwise fairly quiet week on the 
SIMH mailing list ...

Last week I was watching a DVR-ed recording of Arrow on the CW network 
(http://www.cwtv.com/shows/arrow ). The particular episode was "Beacon of 
Hope".  Just a few minutes in, as the last of the opening credits are 
finishing, one the main characters, Felicity Smoak, is working on a hard 
problem when her tech-geek offsider Curtis makes a reference to Digital 
Equipment Corporation and them spending $700K on the first VAX.  I had to hit 
rewind to make sure I heard that correctly.

Obviously someone who writes for the show is fond of old computer systems from 
the good-old days when DEC rule the minicomputer space, or they did a little 
bit of Googling and perhaps just plucked the $700K figure out of thin air !



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Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Armistead, Jason .]

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is that the guest OS being run 
under SIMH might not take kindly to data changing on these new devices that are 
being proposed.

I would expect the guest OS doesn't expect things to "magically happen", 
because it (quite rightly) believes it is the only thing that is capable of 
doing that.  So any sort of data from the device that is cached by the guest OS 
(maybe directory entries, block allocation data, or parts of a file that was 
recently read) would suddenly risk becoming invalid.  That's a sure-fire recipe 
for chaos.

On something like a SCSI-clustered VMS system, while there were multiple hosts 
attached to a common SCSI bus, there was also cluster communication taking 
place another communication channel like Ethernet to ensure that all nodes had 
a consistent view of what was going on with each SCSI disk.

Dual porting is a tricky thing, but doing it without properly notification 
mechanisms or processes to ensure on-device and in-memory consistency is asking 
for trouble !  Having the guest OS shut down, then making changes to the 
contents of the new device, and then restarting the guest OS via a reboot with 
no further changes from an external source would be one way of doing this in a 
purely process-driven fashion.  This is essentially what SIMH does when 
attaching devices prior to starting the guest OS.

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Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

[Armistead, Jason .]

OK, so maybe my example was a bit more high-level than what folks are 
discussing, but even for a "bunch of bits/bytes" device, synchronization still 
has to be considered here (just as it would for access to common data when 
writing a multi-threaded program).

As long as the guest OS has exclusive access to the device (preventing the host 
OS doing reads or writes) , or the host OS has exclusive access to the 
underlying host file representation (preventing the guest OS from doing reads 
or writes), then things are OK.  The minute that both try to access it, with 
one reading and the other writing, it all falls apart because there are lots of 
ways to corrupt the data stream mid-way through either operation.

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Ken Cornetet
Sent: Wednesday, 20 April 2016 1:43 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [External] Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

The guest OS wouldn't care, because the guest OS wouldn't see it - there isn't 
a guest OS file system on the disk. The *only* thing reading or writing the 
bits in the guest world is the custom utility program.

For all I know, there may be some guest OSes that insist on having a native 
file system on a disk device. RTE and unix (the only two simh OSes I am 
familiar with) are perfectly happy to have a disk with no file system and let 
you access it as a collection of blocks. 

If an OS insists on a native file system on the disk, then this scheme wouldn't 
work.

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Armistead, 
Jason .
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 1:31 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Way out idea for simh

One thing that I don't think has been mentioned is that the guest OS being run 
under SIMH might not take kindly to data changing on these new devices that are 
being proposed.

I would expect the guest OS doesn't expect things to "magically happen", 
because it (quite rightly) believes it is the only thing that is capable of 
doing that.  So any sort of data from the device that is cached by the guest OS 
(maybe directory entries, block allocation data, or parts of a file that was 
recently read) would suddenly risk becoming invalid.  That's a sure-fire recipe 
for chaos.

On something like a SCSI-clustered VMS system, while there were multiple hosts 
attached to a common SCSI bus, there was also cluster communication taking 
place another communication channel like Ethernet to ensure that all nodes had 
a consistent view of what was going on with each SCSI disk.

Dual porting is a tricky thing, but doing it without properly notification 
mechanisms or processes to ensure on-device and in-memory consistency is asking 
for trouble !  Having the guest OS shut down, then making changes to the 
contents of the new device, and then restarting the guest OS via a reboot with 
no further changes from an external source would be one way of doing this in a 
purely process-driven fashion.  This is essentially what SIMH does when 
attaching devices prior to starting the guest OS.

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[Simh] Thoughts on combining individual scanned pages

[Armistead, Jason .]

One tool that I have found useful in the past is tiffcp, which is part of the 
tools in the libTIFF distribution.

http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/tools.html

tiffcp makes it easy to combine multiple TIFF images into a single TIFF file.

tiff2pdf makes it easy to convert that multi-page TIFF fine into PDF.

Hope this helps when archiving documentation from these old systems


Jason



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[Simh] Now trending on Google News: stories about the humble floppy disk !

[Armistead, Jason .]

Interesting to see stories like these appearing on Google News today:

"US nuclear force still uses floppy disks"

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36385839

"The long legacy of the floppy disk"

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36389711

Long live the floppy disk, retrocomputing, and SimH, but I think the US nuclear 
arsenal is probably due for an upgrade !

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Re: [Simh] Unable to locate boot file

[Armistead, Jason]

Maybe looking at the HP documentation might help.  This link is for VMS 8.4, 
but I think it’s still pretty similar to 5.5-2 (which I ran many years ago on a 
VAX4000-300 system).  If you’ve got the VMS documentation set (Grey Wall back 
then !) at hand, that will probably help if you revisit the steps for setting 
up satellite booting.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/84final/4477/4477pro_022.html



From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Parrott
Sent: Monday, 20 June 2016 5:10 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Unable to locate boot file


Thanks Mark,



The system disk device name appears to be the same:



Simulated MicroVAX 3900:



$ show logical disk$vmsrl5

"DISK$VMSRL5" = "ORION$DUA0:" (LNM$SYSTEM_TABLE)

$ show dev d



Device  DeviceError  VolumeFree 
  TransMnt

NameStatus Count  Label
BlocksCount   Cnt

...

ORION$DUA0:  MOUNTED   0 VMSRL52508868  247 1

...







Physical VAX 6220:

--

$ show logical disk$vmsrl5

"DISK$VMSRL5" = "ORION$DUA0:" (LNM$SYSTEM_TABLE)

$ show dev d



Device  DeviceError  VolumeFree 
  TransMnt

NameStatus Count  Label
BlocksCount   Cnt

...

ORION$DUA0:  MOUNTED   0 VMSRL5990411  253 1

...





I agree that there may be some additional difference between the two (simulated 
vs physical) but I am not sure where else to look.  Any other ideas?



Thanks again.


From: Mark Pizzolato mailto:m...@infocomm.com>>
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 3:28 PM
To: Daniel Parrott; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: RE: Unable to locate boot file


Hi Daniel,



This is a good bug report.



I think that the problem you are having now is very much related to the 
problems you’ve already solved.



> 1) there is some other config script that needs to be run when using disk 
> images from one VAX system (physical 6220) to another (simulated MicroVAX 
> 3900)

> 2) SimH on Windows 8 does not really support MOP or DECserver stuff?

> 3) there is some permissions issue with the boot file (sysboot.exe?), but 
> since it is off a disk image (which should be a one-to-one exact copy), how 
> so?



Notice that you’re getting the load message for

File = DISK$VMSRL5:, Operating system, Ethernet address = 
08-00-2B-23-9A-F4



I suspect that the logical name DISK$VMSRL5 may not be consistently defined.



The system disk device name on the MicroVAX 3900 may have changed from what it 
was on the original 6220.

The output of:

$ SHOW LOGICAL DISK$VMSRL5

and

$ SHOW DEV D



Will likely illuminate some relevant details.



-Mark



From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Daniel Parrott
Sent: Monday, June 20, 2016 1:16 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] Unable to locate boot file



I have two physical systems, a VAX 6220 and a VAX 4000-300.  The latter system 
is set up to do a network bootstrap off the 6220 using an EZA0 network device.



First, using vddriver and backup/image, I generated and retrieved disk images 
of the RA92 drives from the 6220.  With these disk images, and specifying 
MicroVAX 3900 on the SimH simulator, I am able to boot up an emulated version 
of the 6220 on my laptop.  So far so good.



My first goal is to get the physical VAX 4000-300 to do its network bootstrap 
off the emulated 6220 rather than the physical 6220.  By the way, I am running 
SimH 4.0 on Windows 8, it seems to work OK.



The first problem I ran into was that the simulator presents a different 
network adapter to the emulated 6220 than it is accustomed to seeing.  It 
typically sees a "BNA-0" interface, but the simulator uses "QNA-0", as derived 
from the XQA0 device.  So, I found out that I needed to run netconfig.com.  
When I ran that script, it brought the circuit online.



But when I tried to do network boot of the physical VAX 4000-300 off the 
emulated 6220, it kept saying 'retrying network bootstrap'.  So evidently that 
was not sufficient.  Then I came to discover that the 6220 uses DECserver, and 
there is a dsvconfig.com script.  Once again, because the simulator presented a 
different network device than the 6220 was accustomed to seeing, the 
configuration had to be updated.  So okay, I ran the dsvconfig.com script, and 
made it aware of the fact that it is now a "QNA-0" device rather than a "BNA-0" 
device.



So after running both netconfig.com and dsvconfig.com on the emulated 6220, the 
physical 4000-300 no longer says "retrying network b

Re: [Simh] VT240, VT340 and DS200/300 HW specs info

[Armistead, Jason]

A DS200 fits in a standard 19 inch rack.

Refer to page E-2 of the DS200 hardware installation guide for precise 
dimensions and weight:

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/dec/ethernet/decserver_200/EK-D200C-IN-001_DECserver_200_Hardware_Installation_Oct86.pdf


From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of khandy21yo
Sent: Tuesday, 11 April 2017 11:02 AM
To: Gregg Levine; Brian Wheeler
Cc: Simh
Subject: Re: [Simh] VT240, VT340 and DS200/300 HW specs info

DS200 is about the size of an IBM PC-XT. Not as heavy though.
Lousy fans on most of them. They always gave me problems.



Sent from my Galaxy Tab® A

 Original message 
From: Gregg Levine mailto:gregg.drw...@gmail.com>>
Date: 4/11/17 8:02 AM (GMT-07:00)
To: Brian Wheeler mailto:bdwhe...@indiana.edu>>
Cc: Simh mailto:simh@trailing-edge.com>>
Subject: Re: [Simh] VT240, VT340 and DS200/300 HW specs info

Hello!
It's okay. How big is it?
-
Gregg C Levine gregg.drw...@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."


On Tue, Apr 11, 2017 at 9:51 AM, Brian Wheeler 
mailto:bdwhe...@indiana.edu>> wrote:
> All of this talk reminds me -- I've got a DS200 in my basement that I don't
> need any more.  Does anybody want it?  Free for shipping from 47408.
>
>
> Apologies for the off-topic-ness since this is real hardware :)
>
> Brian
>
>
> On 04/11/2017 09:18 AM, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
>
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 6:25 PM, Richard 
> mailto:legal...@xmission.com>> wrote:
>
> In article 
> <01d2b0ef$c2cd4330$4867c990$@verizon.net>,
> "Tim Stark" mailto:fswo...@verizon.net>> writes:
>
> DS200 uses 68000 processor with AM7990 (LANCE) and 4 2681 DUARTs.
>
> DS300 uses 68020 processor with TC23SC241AP and 8 2681 DUARTs.
>
> DS500 uses KDJ11-SD processor (11/53) with CXA16/CXB16 devices.
>
> What are these?
>
> DECserver, aka a terminal/console server. Older ones are LAT only,
> newer ones do Telnet as well.
>
> Pat
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Re: [Simh] DEC VT emulators on MAME

[Armistead, Jason]

Tim

Malcolm had previously indicated that E80 was a Xicor X2804AP-45 chip.  That 
would make it a 512 byte (4096 bit arranged as 512 * 8)  EEPROM, rather than an 
NVRAM, with an access time of 450ns.

Link to datasheet 
http://pdf1.alldatasheet.com/datasheet-pdf/view/103364/XICOR/X2804A.html

This chip should be easily readable by almost any PROM/EPROM/EEPROM programmer, 
but if it's only got settings as you suspect, then hopefully the firmware would 
be able to identify a blank device and just set up defaults.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Tim Stark
Sent: Sunday, 16 April 2017 1:24 AM
To: malc...@avitech.com.au; 'Cory Smelosky'
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] DEC VT emulators on MAME

Malcolm,

Ok, thanks for let us know.  I now found video docs for VT340 (dragon system - 
vipers and adders).  Each chip hold one bitmap plane individually. VCB02 
graphics card uses the same chips. 

I misread schematics.I believe that E80 is NVRAM chip for just settings - 
512 x 8,  not 512K x 8.  Firmware is in ROM cartridge.  

E49 dump should be labelled as 236E6.bin for CG rom. 

Does anyone have a copy of CRT 9007 video controller docs for VT220 terminal?

Thanks,
Tim

-Original Message-
From: malc...@avitech.com.au [mailto:malc...@avitech.com.au] 
Sent: Saturday, April 15, 2017 9:43 PM
To: 'Tim Stark' ; 'Cory Smelosky' 
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: RE: [Simh] DEC VT emulators on MAME

I've now pulled apart a spare non-working VT340, for the ROM dumps. This 
terminal has a faulty power supply and very significant screen burn, so I 
wasn't planning on repairing it anyway.

On my board, E80 is a XICOR X2804AP-45 which is soldered in place. So I haven't 
removed it or dumped its contents.

E49 is a 27256 EPROM.  I have dumped the content of that ROM and it is now 
available here -> 
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__avitech.com.au_-3Fp-3D1818&d=DwIGaQ&c=ilBQI1lupc9Y65XwNblLtw&r=CeQuuq99aEH_1RE1yGnGXY4AbMg6_1cjkYeJjaT-sd4&m=YpwywTuCsVKkSvuZSul6C6BTase_SV-J2yCTQkZVeBQ&s=WAvNJXtV69LsjK_LBZBMcmtmo-gwnd1OPsJy0_seTI0&e=
  

That page also has pictures of the VT340 internals.

Tim - I will write to you separately to arrange sending the VT340 logic board 
to you.

Malcolm.

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Re: [Simh] DEC VT emulators on MAME

[Armistead, Jason]

Malcolm

After looking at the photos you took of the ROM cartridge internals I think you 
might be better leaving them in-place and making up an adapter from the edge 
connector to a 28 pin socket that you could plug into an EPROM programmer.  By 
the looks of it, there's no chip selection/data buffering logic on the PCB, and 
it's just the EPROMs and some decoupling capacitors.  If you activate the 
appropriate chip select and output enable lines of the EPROMS one at a time, 
you can make sure just a single chip is talking to the EPROM programmer and the 
rest would be dormant.  The pinouts of the 27C256 chips should be readily 
available.

Good luck !

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of 
malc...@avitech.com.au
Sent: Tuesday, 18 April 2017 9:25 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] DEC VT emulators on MAME

Just a quick update: I've broken open the VT340 ROM cartridge.  Inside are 5 x 
surface-mount N27C256 ROMs.

Some pictures of the ROM cartridge are now included on this page -> 
http://avitech.com.au/?p=1818

Is there anyone who has the tools, time and interest to remove these ROMs and 
dump the contents?  If so, please let me know and I will pay the cost of 
shipping to get this cartridge to you.

Malcolm.

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Re: [Simh] Problem with MT_ASTLVL on the VAX-11/780

[Armistead, Jason]

Johnny Billquist wrote:

>However, this might be different on different CPU models, so I suspect this 
>should be applied with care.
>He was testing VAX/VMS V4.5, which is pretty ancient. The models supported by 
>that version would probably only be the VAX-11 models. (And yes, I include the 
>86x0 in the VAX-11 series.)

MicroVMS 4.5B was available for MicroVAX 2000 circa 1987.  I remember loading 
it from a large stack of between 50 and 70 RX33 (?) floppies ...  what fun !

I believe that the first "Micro" versions of VMS started with MicroVMS 4.4 when 
the MicroVAX family was added.
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Re: [Simh] Simulator development: Advice on system timing

[Armistead, Jason]

If you need accurate device timing, then perhaps something like the core of 
MAME/MESS is a better choice than SIMH.  All those retro arcade machine games 
in MAME depend on counting cycles in order to give realistic game behavior for 
the human who is playing them.  If they ran twice as fast, they'd be unplayable 
(or at least, very challenging), so everything is carefully handled to ensure 
it runs smoothly at a realistic rate.

Maybe not the answer you're looking for, but it is one alternative.

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Paul Koning
Sent: Thursday, 26 October 2017 2:16 PM
To: Seth Morabito
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] Simulator development: Advice on system timing


> On Oct 26, 2017, at 1:55 PM, Seth Morabito  wrote:
> 
> Hello all, and especially those who have written or are writing 
> simulators,
> 
> I'm battling system timing in the 3B2/400 emulator I'm working on. As 
> with any system, particular activities such as disk seeks, reads, and 
> writes must be completed within certain margins -- if they happen too 
> early or too late, an interrupt will be missed. But the "fudge 
> factor", so to speak, seems pretty tight on the 3B2, possibly because 
> it runs at a system clock frequency of 10MHz.

In most systems, odd things can happen if interrupts happen too soon.  If an 
I/O completes essentially instantaneously, then software that relies on being 
able to start I/O, then do some more stuff, and count on that completing before 
the interrupt -- even though interrupts are enabled -- will break.

The correct description for such software is "defective" though there certainly 
is quite a lot of it in the wild.

For this reason, simulators need to delay interrupts by some number of 
instruction times, and SIMH makes that easy.  But it doesn't normally matter 
that the timing is not exact, all that's needed in most cases that the 
interrupt is held off long enough to work around the sort of poorly written 
code I mentioned.  So if you base your delays on average instruction times and 
average I/O latency, you'll normally be fine.  In the 3B2 case, with 10 MHz 
clock and an average of 8 cycles per instruction, that's 1.25 MIPS.  A disk I/O 
might take 20 ms (1/2 rotation at 3600 RPM), so that would be 25,000 
instruction times.  Quite likely you could crank that number way down and have 
the code still run.

If you want to have realistic timing, that's a different matter.  You'd find 
yourself tracking the cylinder position and charging for seek timing.  The 
DECtape emulation does that, and it matters because some operating systems 
(TOPS-10, VMS) do tape position prediction based on elapsed time.  But that's 
an unusual case.

paul


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Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Armistead, Jason]

Zane

The program that Johnny is thinking of is VMSPTC

http://www.digiater.nl/openvms/decus/vax86a/bnelson/vmstpc/vmstpc.c

Note sure if this is the latest, but it came up in the first set of Google 
search results for "VMSTPC"

Good luck
Jason


-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Johnny Billquist
Sent: Thursday, 25 January 2018 5:48 PM
To: Zane Healy; Tim Shoppa
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

Zane - unless I remember wrong, there is a tool from DECUS to copy tapes to a 
file image, and then get that back to a tape again. The RSX version is called 
TPC, and I'm pretty sure it also exists for VMS.

Using that, pull your physical tapes into files, copy the files over to the 
simulated machines, and write them back out to simulated tapes there.

   Johnny

On 2018-01-25 16:17, Zane Healy wrote:
> Just to be clear, I’m looking to backup a physical machine, to a 
> virtual tape drive, such that I can restore the data to either SIMH or 
> a Physical machine.  I don’t need to extract files.  I can extract 
> files (and I have with some of the most critical) via NFS to my Mac.
> 
> Except for legacy hardware, most tapes I dealt with in the 90’s were 
> in the 20-40GB range.  Current tapes now are multi-Terabyte, but not 
> something most of us can afford to have at home, which is why I’m 
> looking to go this route.
> 
> Zane
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 25, 2018, at 5:39 AM, Tim Shoppa > > wrote:
>>
>> A couple of the tape image utilities I wrote or updated in the 1990s 
>> have that limit. Let me see if they are still in the SIMH utility 
>> tree. They never would’ve bitten me back in the 90s because the 
>> biggest reels I ever dealt with were 3600 feet at 6250 BPI, less than
>> 250 Mbytes.
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> On Jan 25, 2018, at 8:23 AM, Johnny Billquist > > wrote:
>>
>>> Hmm. None of the tools I wrote ever had that limit. They just 
>>> process records and don't give a damn about absolute disk or tape position.
>>>
>>> Johnny
>>>
>>>
>>> Tim Shoppa mailto:tsho...@gmail.com>> skrev: (25 
>>> januari 2018 00:53:34 CET)
>>>
>>> Many common tape image tools as of two decades use 32-bit
>>> integers to carry offsets around and will be limited to 4Gigabyte
>>> tape image sizes.
>>>
>>> I don't think this is a fundamental limit to the tape image
>>> formats used by SIMH, just a common limitation of the tape image
>>> tools you might find from 20 years ago.
>>>
>>> Tim.
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 5:02 PM, Zane Healy >> > wrote:
>>>
>>> What type/size of tapes does the VAX emulation support?  I
>>> was looking through the doc’s and it wasn’t obvious to me. 
>>> Is there a size limit?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Zane
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>  
>>> 
>>> >> g-2Dedge.com_mailman_listinfo_simh&d=DwIGaQ&c=ilBQI1lupc9Y65XwNblLtw
>>> &r=CeQuuq99aEH_1RE1yGnGXY4AbMg6_1cjkYeJjaT-sd4&m=Tuv134HGgnWc1vxno4w
>>> peUgonHLScwAzyLK3tGM--Wo&s=KG58MZsCGTQPkaifTTlluf-_bo-FOhuQ7JJUEBB3H
>>> vk&e= >


-- 
Johnny Billquist  || "I'm on a bus
   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive! ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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Re: [Simh] Assorted ramblings was: Re: VAX Tape Emulation?

[Armistead, Jason]

Clem and all

Your knowledge of this and many other obscure (and not-so-obscure) subjects 
from the “early days” never ceases to amaze me.  If only there was a way to 
capture all these anecdotes  into one coherent “Wikipedia of computing history” 
…  Many of these stories are absolutely fascinating, and often amusing too.  
Whether it’s the “he did / she did *THAT* … (which still lives on today)” or 
“we had to do this because of ” or “we cobbled this 
together with a few parts lying around in the labs at ”, 
they are great to read.

Keep sharing the stories !  Long live the glory days of computing !

Thanks
Jason A.

From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Thursday, 25 January 2018 6:44 PM
To: Mark Pizzolato
Cc: SIMH; Larry Baker
Subject: [External] Re: [Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?



On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 4:57 PM, Mark Pizzolato 
mailto:m...@infocomm.com>> wrote:
I think the documentation comment “cannot write variable-length blocks and do 
not allow skipping forward over records between read operations” was written 
when talking about the common cartridge tapes that were available on 80s and 
90s Unix workstations.  I don’t recall the name.
That was not UNIX, that was the QIC standard.   Yes, those were blocked at 512 
bytes.   Apollo's domain systems had a b*tch of time with them because their 
standard disk block was 1056 bytes​


  These things only supported fixed block size operations and not variable 
record lengths (i.e. 80 byte tape labels, then different sized data records, 
etc.).
​Right the 80 byte ANSI label, then different length data records.  UNIX 
handles that fine, even with RMT.​  FYI: My grad school housemate, Tom Quarles 
(of SPICE3 fame) wrote the ANSI tape and bunch of other tape support that most 
UNIX systems used, explicitly so he could read/write VMS tapes for the DEC guys 
who were doing some of the funding of the USB CAD lab.   Leffler (who wrote 
rmt) used Tom's tape stuff for the original debug of rmt.



  Given that the remote tape drive was a drive which could do variable length 
record activities, I think MultiNet’s rmt support actually worked well.  I 
don’t remember testing it though.  Whether someone should try to do that now to 
backup simulated VMS systems is another subject I may write about a little 
later.

​Understood.   I was just suggest​ing trying to keep another emulated system 
out of the scheme and going directly to the remote device either through DECnet 
or rmt or maybe even using a NAS as virtual tape files.   It just seemed 
running a Linux with a tape and then running an emulated VAX on top of that 
seemed like an extra layer of indirection if there was an easier path.


​
ᐧ
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Re: [Simh] Terminal Emulator

[Armistead, Jason]

Another good terminal emulator was WRQ's Reflection 2.  Of course, it was not 
freeware/shareware, but it ran well, and had its own file transfer protocol 
built in.  For VAX/VMS hosts, once you uploaded a minimalist bootstrap program 
(a simple copy-paste operation of a DCL script that embedded some VAX MACRO 
code that it assembled IIRC), it then copied an actual VAX EXE that could do 
the heavy lifting of file upload/download long-term. Worked very well and we 
were loyal Reflection users all the way through from DOS 3.x in the late 1980s 
through to the days of Windows 2000 (circa Reflection V7.x for Windows IIRC).  
Nowadays the Reflection suite is owned by MicroFocus.

Fun times ...

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Richard
Sent: Friday, 26 January 2018 1:15 AM
To: SIMH
Subject: Re: [Simh] Terminal Emulator

I used PROCOMM on an 8088; I never used telix.
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Re: [Simh] anyone know how to convert/translate turbo pascal to vax pascal?

[Armistead, Jason]

Dan

What exact version of Pascal compiler are you using ?  (presumably you are 
using OpenVMS 7.3 on a VAX  as the operating system)

What is the exact message the complier gives concerning the writeln() function?

Can you generate a simple “proof of concept” and share what you are doing ?

Looking at the HP Pascal for OpenVMS Language Reference Manual (for V5.8/V5.9) 
it is supported

http://h30266.www3.hpe.com/odl/i64lp/progtool/pasi6461/pasi64rm.pdf

It’s hard to “suspect” that types and records are also non-existent, along with 
writeln().  They’re part of what makes Pascal, well …, Pascal !


Jason


From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Dan Gahlinger
Sent: Wednesday, 7 February 2018 6:22 PM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [External] [Simh] anyone know how to convert/translate turbo pascal to 
vax pascal?

since I did all that work recreating "castle" from the vax to the pc
using turbo pascal (then free pascal)
I'd like to "port" it back to the vax,
but the vms 7.3 pascal compiler doesn't recognize "writeln"
and I suspect things like types and records and case statements wont work 
either.

anyone have any ideas?

Dan.
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Re: [Simh] swtp6800-swk.zip

[Armistead, Jason]

Bill

Have you ever given any thought to emulating the Intel iPDS system running 
ISIS-II ?

They were the white and black portable little brother of the MDS family.  We 
had one once, which we called Big Blue because of its sheer physical size.  
Those MDS 8" floppies were really something.  Going to 5 1/4 inch on the iPDS 
was so much nicer, but man, could those iPDS disk drives make some noise when 
the disk had an error and it did a track 0 recalibration of the heads.  You 
*KNEW* that you had a bad disk !!!  Fun times ...

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Bill Beech 
(NJ7P)
Sent: Tuesday, 6 March 2018 3:37 PM
To: mikestra...@gmail.com; simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] swtp6800-swk.zip

All,

I corrected the SWTP-6800 simulator so it will now boot correctly.  The problem 
with the 'E' command will take more time. I am currently in the middle of 
rewriting the Intel Microprocessor Development Systems (MDS-i and II) 
simulators.

Bill


On 2/22/2018 3:06 AM, Mike Stramba wrote:
> Bill,
>
> I downloaded your www.nj7p.org/Computers/work/run-work_v00d.7z
>
> Going by the name of your file :
> run_MinGW_SWTP-6800mp-a.bat
>
> ..does that mean you are running MingGW ?
>
> I have two machines, one with Win7, the other Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
>
> On both OS's, after starting the sim, then attempting "D" (boot), I get :
>
> fdccmd: File error
> fdccmd: File error
>
> PC=6000 SP=A042 IX=2400 A=05 B=40 CCR=D2 Invalid Opcode, PC: 6000
>
> This is with both
> SWTP 6800, V2, MP-A2 CPU Board simulator V4.0-0 Betagit commit
> id: 202e49cf
> SWTP 6800, V2, MP-A2 CPU Board simulator V4.0-0 Betagit commit
> id: c4e55d0f
>
> Mike
>
> On 2/21/18, Bill Beech (NJ7P)  wrote:
>> Mike,
>>
>> This is an old build of the simulator and an even older version of 
>> the run-time package.  The current support package is on my web site at:
>>
>> www.nj7p.org/Computers/work/run-work_v00d.7z
>>
>> The current version of SIMH is on the GitHub site.
>>
>> This version logs on as follows:
>>
>> D:\Development\0GitHub\run\swtp6800>call
>> ..\..\simh-nj7p\BIN\swtp6800mp-a swtp6800mp-a.ini
>>
>> SWTP 6800, V2, MP-A CPU Board simulator V4.0-0 Beta git commit id: 
>> 202e49cf
>>
>> $
>>
>> The error with the SIMH "E" command still occurs with this version.  
>> I will look into it when I review the simulators in the next week or so.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> Bill
>> On 2/19/2018 4:56 AM, Mike Stramba wrote:
>>> I'm trying to run 
>>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__simh.trailing-2D
>>> edge.com_kits_swtp6800-2Dswk.zip&d=DwIGaQ&c=ilBQI1lupc9Y65XwNblLtw&r
>>> =CeQuuq99aEH_1RE1yGnGXY4AbMg6_1cjkYeJjaT-sd4&m=i482CoHQsLAGJrFB3hPvl
>>> mzqewjQFE5faffbdhhHmmE&s=5eTOTsaA1SSyKbwDOI6PLAMMqrOE9o55BPyV6G4R_8E
>>> &e=
>>>
 swtp6800mp-a2.exe swtp6800mp-a2.ini
>>> SWTP 6800, V2, MP-A2 CPU Board simulator V3.9-0
>>>
>>> PC=E1AB SP= IX= A=07 B=00 CCR=D0 Invalid Opcode, PC: E1AB
>>>
>>> And .. (never have seen this in any other SIMH emulator)  :
>>> sim> e e1ab
>>> Unit not attached
>>> sim> e -m e1ab
>>> Unit not attached
>>> sim>
>>>
>>>
>>> --- -swtp6800mp-a2.ini  ---
>>>
>>> set bootrom 2708
>>> attach bootrom swtbug.bin
>>> set mp-a2 mon, lo_prom
>>> set cpu hex
>>> set cpu itrap
>>> set cpu mtrap
>>> reset
>>> set mp-b2 bd0, bd1, bd2, bd3, bd4, bd5 att dc-40 6800boot.img att 
>>> dc-41 6800work1.img set dc-41 rw att dc-42 6800work2.img set dc-42 
>>> rw att dc-43 6800work3.img set dc-43 rw g 
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>>> -2Dedge.com_mailman_listinfo_simh&d=DwIGaQ&c=ilBQI1lupc9Y65XwNblLtw&
>>> r=CeQuuq99aEH_1RE1yGnGXY4AbMg6_1cjkYeJjaT-sd4&m=i482CoHQsLAGJrFB3hPv
>>> lmzqewjQFE5faffbdhhHmmE&s=1s1Q5qh99202HVhSLwD9jL4QGaTZc7ZOdx3U6MOFCI
>>> M&e=
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>> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__mailman.trailing-
>> 2Dedge.com_mailman_listinfo_simh&d=DwIGaQ&c=ilBQI1lupc9Y65XwNblLtw&r=
>> CeQuuq99aEH_1RE1yGnGXY4AbMg6_1cjkYeJjaT-sd4&m=i482CoHQsLAGJrFB3hPvlmz
>> qewjQFE5faffbdhhHmmE&s=1s1Q5qh99202HVhSLwD9jL4QGaTZc7ZOdx3U6MOFCIM&e=

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Re: [Simh] SIMH mailing list will be migrating to groups.io in next month

[Armistead, Jason]

Many thanks Tim for your selfless years of dedication to SIMH.  We appreciate 
your efforts and are equally frustrated by the impact “bad actors” have had on 
the Internet and all who use it.

PS: Maybe once the migration to groups.io is done, there is an opportunity to 
donate a copy of the mailing list archives to BitSavers or some other computer 
history project just so that there’s a permanent backup “for posterity”.  It 
would be a shame to lose the collective wisdom of this list over such a long 
period. I am constantly impressed by everything that people have contributed to 
the SIMH community, especially the detailed discussions of all sort of 
technical nuances and stories of the people, life and times at DEC and other 
companies/organizations during those early foundational years of computing 
history.


From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Tim Shoppa
Sent: Wednesday, 3 October 2018 3:49 PM
To: SIMH
Subject: [External] [Simh] SIMH mailing list will be migrating to groups.io in 
next month

I have hosted the SIMH mailing list from my home server since December 2003.. 
That is almost 15 years now.

In the past several years, increasing spam and fishing attempts especially 
through Chinese and Russian internet services have overwhelmed my ability to 
run a home E-mail list server. A few years ago I summarily banned large swaths 
of the internet potentially making mailing list participation impossible to 
large parts of the world. At the same time, my home e-mail server does not send 
authenticated E-mails so they aren't acceptable to many E-mail addresses that 
are subscribed.

I am planning to re-host the mailing list at 
groups.io,
 which is a popular E-mail *and* web based platform, in the next month.

I will still be overall list-owner and moderator. (Fortunately the list is 
techie enough that I hardly ever have to do any moderation).

Archives of 2003-2018 SIMH mailing list traffic will continue to be available 
through my home server but all new mailing list traffic will be through the 
groups.io
 mail or web interfaces. I will still be list-owner and overall moderator.

Thank you all!
Tim Shoppa
trailing-edge site owner and SIMH mailing list administrator

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Re: [Simh] Transferring the licence file to the VAX emulator - THE FIX

[Armistead, Jason]

Maybe a brief discussion of this topic could be added to the SIMH FAQ.  It 
seems like a key piece of information to help others kick-start their attempts 
to run VMS/OpenVMS under SIMH.

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Brian
Sent: Monday, 17 December 2018 11:52 PM
To: SIMH@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [External] Re: [Simh] Transferring the licence file to the VAX 
emulator - THE FIX

On 12/17/18 8:28 AM, Brian wrote:

OK, thanks to all who helped. As I found from a website to which I was
directed, and as Mark also said, the solution was to copy the file off
the CD-ROM and then

SET FILE/ATTRIBUTE=(RFM=STM) VMSLICENCES.COM

Then run the commands again, and it all worked perfectly.

I guess I've forgotten a lot more about VMS than I thought in 30-odd
years. :( This could be an interesting (re-)learning curve...

Brian.

> Hi all,
> 
> Please bear with me for what I'm sure is a beginner question, but it
> has me beat. :(
> 
> I've set up SIMH, built it all, got my kits for OpenVMS and have
> installed the system. So far, so good.
> 
> The problem I'm having is in getting the licence file I received under
> the Hobbyist scheme onto the VAX. I had thought that 'burning' it into
> an ISO on my Linux box and then mounting that image would work. It
> does, but not completely.
> 
> According to the e-mail, the licence file is in the form of a VMS
> command file. On my Linux box, this looks just fine. However,
> irrespective of whether I use Linux or Windows line endings, when I
> transfer the file onto the VAX as above, all the lines run together
> and the file format is trashed. If I edit the file on the VAX, I can
> see the LF or CR/LF characters in the editor, just as they should be.
> 
> Maybe I've forgotten more about the VAX than I think. WHAT does it
> expect to see as a line terminator? If I know, then I can fix the file
> on my Linux box and transfer it over again, but if neither Linux nor
> Windows line endings work, I've no idea what I need to try. Or am I
> missing something, and there's some fundamental flaw with the whole
> idea of transferring text files via an ISO image?
> 
> I really don't want to have to enter all the licence data
> interactively, or fix a couple of thousand line endings in the editor!
> There must be SOME way of getting the file onto a new setup?
> 
> Thanks for any assistance,
> 
> Brian.
> 
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[Simh] In the DEC world, what was ZK3 ?

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

One of the recent discussions on this list mentioned "ZK3"

I remember it also appeared in numerous DEC publications, with e-mail addresses 
"@zk3.digital.com", and, I think, in some DEC documentation (though I may be 
wrong on that point)

What exactly was ZK3 ?  I'm gathering it was possibly a building on the DEC 
campus in Nashua NH.

What did the initials "ZK" stand for ?  And what was done there ?

Just curious !


Jason

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Re: [Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

So now that Alan has TPC working, where and how do we document all this, i.e. 
the symptoms, the underlying SIMH design & behavior vs the expected RSX 
behavior that cause it to manifest itself as a problem, and the DEP TS TIME 
solution, in an easy-to-find way so the next person doesn't have to go through 
this pain ?

There is an awful lot of collective wisdom from the contributors to this e-mail 
list, but unless someone diligently searches the mailing list archives and gets 
lucky, it's not easy for a user to solve their own problem, even if it's been 
seen several times previously.

The SIMH FAQ on the trailing edge web site (in PDF) has not been updated in 3 
years, and the DOC version on GitHub was last updated a little over 2 years 
ago, and I wonder whether a better "living" form of documentation like a Wiki 
would be a more useful solution. i.e. when a system-specific usage-related 
problem is discovered (and hopefully fixed), the cause, effect and solution is 
distilled into an appropriate new or existing Wiki page.

As I read the e-mails on this list, I am in constant awe at the depth of 
knowledge that many contributors have - in this particular case Mark and 
Timothe did the heavy lifting to help Alan, but there are many others whose 
first-hand experience "back in the day" drives SIMH user problems to a 
solution.  How do we preserve everyone's legacy of product knowledge for future 
generations who will use SIMH long after they are gone ?  To me it's as 
important as preserving the knowledge of the hardware SIMH simulates.

Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Alan Frisbie
Sent: Thursday, 21 May 2015 8:16 PM
To: m...@infocomm.com
Cc: SIMH@trailing-edge.com
Subject:  Re: [Simh] Problem with reading tape with PDP-11 SIMH

Mark,

> Please follow Timothe Litt's suggestion and get back to me with the 
> minimal value of DEP TS TIME which produces reasonable results for the 
> original TPC problem you saw.

Here are the results:

5000 - TPC works fine
2500 - TPC works fine
1800 - TPC works fine
1500 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
1350 - TPC works fine, RSX reported tape drive errors
1200 - TPC hangs
0- TPC hangs

To be safe, I think I'll use 2000 from now on when using TPC.

Thanks a lot for all the help.   It saved me a lot of
debugging and head scratching.

Alan Frisbie
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Re: [Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Out of curiosity, I did a bit of Googling, and found a link to the following 
Digital Technical Journal article from 1992 that explains GEM in detail.  It 
also gives the biographies of a number of the key players involved with GEM – I 
wonder how many Clem still has sitting in his office these days.

http://www.linux-mips.org/pub/linux/mips/people/macro/DEC/DTJ/DTJ808/DTJ808PF.PDF

Jason

From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Clem Cole
Sent: Tuesday, 7 July 2015 4:17 PM
To: Henry Bent
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com; Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm
Subject: Re: [Simh] Booting the vax750 simulator.


On Tue, Jul 7, 2015 at 3:49 PM, Henry Bent 
mailto:hb...@oberlin.edu>> wrote:
It appears that it comes with VAX C, which is part of the base Ultrix packages.

​That makes sense.   As I said, I'm would suspect it was driven by VAX Fortran 
project, but once that was done any of the DEC languages would have used it 
since GEM tried to be common for all.

GEM was an amazing project.   N front ends, Y backends.  A compiler suite 
designed to last for 20 years.   Needed to span a 16 to 64 bits, parallel, 
vectorization etc.N included Fortran, Bliss, C, C++, Pascal, ​Cobol, Ada, 
Basic and I believe others now forgotten.   Y was PDP-11, Vax, MIPS, Alpha, 
Itanium, x86, 68K, Prism and again probably others which I have forgotten.

Clem

BTW:  Intel owns all of the IP and the few members of the GEM team that have 
not yet retired (we will lose Mr. Fortran on July 15).   IMO:  Sadly, guess 
which compiler technology Intel uses, something developed locally to benchmark 
the x86 or GEM?   As Rich Grove (father of GEM) once said to me, the DEC DNA 
lives, and has slowly been injected into the Intel technology.

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Re: [Simh] DEC floppy disk interleave questions

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Dying RFxx disks might be due to failure of FLASH memory in the controllers 
(either onboard the CPU or external chips).  The charge in the memory cells in 
FLASH memory chips doesn't last forever, and slowly bleeds away.  Early devices 
could fail after 10 years.  Newer FLASH parts are better, but the lifetime is 
not infinite like it was with PROMs/EPROMs.

The folks at CMU and LSI Corp wrote a good article about this:

http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~omutlu/pub/flash-memory-data-retention_hpca15.pdf

And to Alan's floppy archiving plans - Just remember to regularly "refresh" 
your CD collection.  Those CD-R disks don't last forever either!  If it was me, 
I'd be creating at least two copies.

Cheers
Jason

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Hans-Ulrich 
Hölscher
Sent: Thursday, 16 July 2015 9:16 AM
To: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] DEC floppy disk interleave questions

>
>  > if you want to image your disks and floppies for use with simh,  > 
> there's an easy way to do it.  All you need is a (Micro-)VAX  > having 
> the appropriate drive(s) running VMS.
>  > MOUNT/FOREIGN
>  > COPY/LOG  yourimagename.img
>  > DISMOUNT
>  > Don't worry about the error message at the end of the COPY process  
> > - that's normal, just that copy discovers the end of media.
>  > You get an image containing all the blocks of your device in  > 
> logical order - VMS will take care of the device details.
>
> That sounds like the really easy way to do it.   Does it copy
> track 0 of RX01/02 floppies?

Every bit that is readable normally from VMS, hiding only strange sector orders 
and bad block information.
Images from bootable devices are bootable within simh (as long as there's a 
suitable bootable simh device)

>
> I finally got a MicroVAX 3300 up and running again.   Most of
> my RF3x drives seem to have died while in storage.  Now I have to see 
> if any of the RX02 drives will still work.

So are my RF3xs :-((
My DSSI-VAXen run on HSD coupled RZ disks in BA350 boxes now.

>
>  > Will you make your images available?
>
> Absolutely!   I'm still working on the 9-track tapes, after a
> several-week pause due to my Alpha XP1000 dying and me taking time out 
> for a couple of all-weekend endurance races (24 Hours of LeMons -- the 
> fruit, not the town in France).
>
> I plan to put all my DEC media images on CDs so I can easily
> make copies.   Each tape/floppy image will be accompanied by a
> text file with the label and other information, and a .JPG photo
> of the media and label.   I've done about 300 tapes so far, of
> which 82 are DEC.   I have another 300 or so to do.   I should
> be done in a couple of months.
>

I'm very keen on your software pool, many thanks for preserving it!

As you probably know I'm mainly after old VMS software (everything pre VMS V5)
 

Regards

Ulli




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Re: [Simh] vector images

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Surely it is possible to extract files from SETUP.MSI without running the 
installer.  Someone must have the tools to do this (either commercial or 
freeware perhaps ?).

Another alternative is to run a virtual Windows OS image inside something like 
VirtualBox, thus avoiding any problems “destroying” your day-to-day Windows 
host system (if you even have one).  I you didn’t specify what Windows version 
the rimh altairz80 emulator requires, so this may or may not be possible.  
Other alternatives to VirtualBox might be something like the Bochs IA-32 
emulator.

From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Kevin Handy
Sent: Thursday, 16 July 2015 8:50 PM
To: Dennis Boone
Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com
Subject: Re: [Simh] vector images

Yes, they are there, in a file called "setup.msi", and nowhere else.
So, as long as you ahve a windows machine that you don;t care if it installs 
older file on top of newer ones,  I had to re-install too many windows systems 
because of this, and finding all of the right install pckges, and figuring out 
the proprt order to reinstall them to get a working system was always a pain. 
msi is the old install format that comonly had this problem.
However, I think I have come up with a painful, roundabout way to extract the 
files, maybe. If not, I was just curious about its memory mapped video, ans if 
the flexwriter emulation was useful enough to bother with. If this doesn't 
work, I'll just have to give up on it.

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 8:44 PM, Dennis Boone 
mailto:d...@msu.edu>> wrote:
 > Many companies builf computers that  used this operating system, like
 > the altair, imsai, osborne, kaypro, and vector graPhics to name a
 > few.  Many years later, the rimh altairz80 emulator was written with
 > the abiliry ro emulate the vector graphic machines, but the only copy
 > of the necessary config and disk images was wrapped up in a miceosoft
 > install file called setup.msi.

1. Vector Graphic, no s.

2. Most of the stuff in the altairz80 kits is probably available from
vector-archive.org.

De

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Re: [Simh] Mark's mailbox full

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

I actually find it interesting how much it reveals about the target e-mail and 
account configuration

We know he's running VMS
We know he has a disk called $DISK3:
We know his user space is under $DISK3:[MARK]
And we know we've successfully filled his disk, thus denying some level of 
service and system functionality

In this era of hackers that feed off this sort of exposed data, I doubt any 
modern mail server would be game to post back so much configuration-specific 
information that could be used to aid in a targeted hacking attack.

Cheers
Jason A

-Original Message-
From: Simh [mailto:simh-boun...@trailing-edge.com] On Behalf Of Alan Frisbie
Sent: Friday, 7 August 2015 7:33 PM
To: SIMH@trailing-edge.com
Subject: [Simh] Mark's mailbox full

If anyone know how to get in touch with Mark Pizzolato outside of email, please 
let him know that he has a disk allocation failure:

> This is a report on the delivery status of your message.
> 
>   Message-ID:  <15080716022951_...@slug.flying-disk.com>
>   Subject: Re: [Simh] Problem with default builds
> 
>   --Failed delivery to:
>   Address: MARK+SIMH
>   Status:  error writing !AS
> 
> Reporting-MTA: dns;infocomm.com
> Arrival-Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 15:25:38 -0700
> 
> Final-Recipient: x-local;MARK+SIMH
> Action: failed
> Status: 5.2.0 (Other or undefined mailbox status)
> Diagnostic-Code: x-local;error writing !AS  %MAIL-W-WRITEERR, error 
> writing $DISK3:[MARK.MAIL]MAIL.MAI  -RMS-F-FUL, device full 
> (insufficient space for allocation)
> Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 15:25:40 -0700

Thanks,
Alan Frisbie
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Re: [Simh] VMS/VDE: Almost there

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Rich Alderson wrote:

>DECNET is available under RSX-11M and RSTS/E on PDP-11s, Tops-10 and TOPS-20 
>on PDP-10s, and under VMS (and possibly Ultrix, I don't remember for certain)
>on VAXen, and on VMS follow-on systems.  It is as far as possible agnostic 
>about what kind of system it was running on or connecting to.

Don't forget that DECnet was also available on DOS and Windows PCs via the DEC 
Pathworks, and later, Pathworks 32 product lines.

It was also available on Ultrix for RISC (e.g. DECstations with MIPS CPU) and 
OSF/1 aka Digital Unix for Alpha

DEC at one stage produced a DECimage scanning platform that coupled an 80286 PC 
running DOS + DEC Ethernet card, together with a Fujitsu scanner and Xionics 
interface card (to handle the CCITT G42D compression).  The resultant output 
was either TIFF files or DDIF (Digital Document Interchange Format) files.  
Everything was triggered from the VMS system talking DECnet to the PC.



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Re: [Simh] terminal multiplexers

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Patrick Finnegan  wrote:

>DEC's DECserver, Xyplex Maxserver, Annex terminal servers, and Xylogics (for 
>the ones I have touched and remember) all converted telnet into
> real RS/EIA-232 lines. (telnet client -> host serial, or serial terminal -> 
> host telnet server)

The early DECservers like the DECserver 100 & 200 models only spoke LAT 
protocol to host systems, and required a MOP boot file download to get up and 
running.  The early models had a Motorola 68000 CPU inside them, and just 
enough firmware in EPROM to do some basic startup diagnostics and complete the 
MOP boot.  The later DECserver 90M (introduced circa mid 1990s) was one of the 
first to support Telnet in addition to LAT, and had all their firmware on board.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECserver for a bit of an overview of the 
various models and capabilities.

I originally used DECserver 200s running LAT on our VAX/VMS systems, but I 
believe it was also available on PDPs (running RSX ?) and Ultrix / OSF/1 / 
Digital Unix, and nowadays there is even an open source LAT and MOP daemon 
implementation for Linux.

The DECservers 200s were rock solid performers in our engineering offices and 
on the factory floor.



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[Simh] The minutiae of hardware/software interactions affecting SIMH

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On the topic of Configuring DMC11 Devices, while discussing wait delays Mark 
Pizzolato recently wrote:

> Sounds reasonable.  I've got to see if I can find the reason the delay was 
> initially added and make sure a change like this is compatible.

What is the "SIMH strategy" for documenting such requirements ? i.e. where does 
this behavior get called out in the source code (or elsewhere) in a way that 
will allow future generations of SIMH users and maintainers to understand "why 
things are the way they are" or "why things need to be the way they are" ?

There is one reference to the DDCMP protocol manual in the source of 
pdp11_dmc.c, but that's about it.  Should references to other documents be 
added ?

Reconstructing and understanding history is easy when people familiar with the 
subject matter (especially those who lived it, in this case, at DEC) are still 
around to ask, but gets progressively harder as years go by without leaving a 
good trail of "breadcrumbs" for others to follow.

PS: I am constantly amazed at the sheer volume of knowledge and resourcefulness 
that contributors to this list have, which is one of the reasons I'd love to 
see as much of it preserved directly in the SIMH code base !!!


Jason

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Re: [Simh] Pascal 1.3 manual for RSX 11 4.6

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Al Kossow wrote:

> here is the SPD
>
> http://h18000.www1.hp.com/info/SP1418/SP1418PF.PDF

And the second page of the SPD even mentions "On-line Debugging Technique 
(ODT)" - the topic of one of our other recent SIMH mailing list threads !!!


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Re: [Simh] SIMH and physical hardware

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On 2/9/16 11:41 PM, Zachary Kline wrote:
> This is around 50% humorous, but it’s still a thing I’ve been thinking about 
> lately. From a newbie’s perspective, all SIMH machines are very similar. The 
> worst thing about emulation is that the “feel,” of the original hardware 
> doesn’t seem to be there. Simh can emulate tons of hardware from different 
> manufacturers, but none of that will tell me what it was like to actually use 
> the devices in a physical sense.
> As a blind user, I’m doubly interested in this kind of physicality because I 
> experience the world through touch and sound. I have little conception of the 
> shape or size of many of these notional machines, and they are all reduced to 
> various abstractions at a console prompt. It’s hard to imagine a thing I was 
> far too young to experience.
> I was reminded of an Apple II emulator I saw once, sadly not accessible, 
> which made the appropriate disk drive noises in use. Its kind of useless from 
> a  practical standpoint, but a lot of my interest in these machines isn’t 
> practical to begin with. I want to explore an earlier kind of computing, but 
> don’t expect to get a job with it or have anything beyond some entertainment.
> I really don’t know what, if anything, can be done to bridge this weird 
> disconnect. Actual hardware is probably gradually fading out, and in any case 
> probably wouldn’t be accessible from my perspective anyway.
>
> Any thoughts? Apologies for the disjointed post, it’s rather late. ;) 

Others have mentioned the familiar sound of disk drives and other devices.  In 
the world of SIMH, if the emulated system is running at a higher speed than the 
original hardware, the access times of such devices is also reduced (possibly 
quite significantly).  So what might have once been the slow clack-clack sound 
of floppy drive heads being stepped into position or recalibrated back to track 
zero, now becomes a much faster, higher-pitched sound.  Unless the simulated 
I/O device response timing matches that of the original hardware it emulates, 
attempting to play back recordings from physical hardware based on when and how 
SIMH access that device would be impossible to achieve, or be completely 
unsynchronized, or would need to be sped up, resulting in a "Vintage Computing 
meets the Chipmunks" sound !

PS: I always remember the sounds of an RD54 disk buzzing to life during the 
boot sequence of our trusty MicroVAX 2000, and the TK50 tape leader being 
picked up by the drive mechanism when first loaded.

Just my $0.02 worth
Jason
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Re: [Simh] Sounds

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On Thursday, 11 February 2016 12:23 PM Kevin Handy wrote:

> Nowodays, many people haven't even heard a dot-matrix printer grinding away, 
> let alone the huge mass of fans that seemed to make up most of an 11/70.
> Daisy weel printers are also extremely rare now. Line printers (drum, chain, 
> printronix) seem to be nonexistant any more, but were how most of us thought 
> about computers.

I always thought those band printers were the noisiest contraptions.  Always 
housed in their own sound-proofed box, they let out an awful noise when the lid 
was opened !
 

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[Simh] Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities source code

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel's 
history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any "Intel 
connected" people around here who might know what happened to the source code 
for Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86, CREF86 
and OH86).  The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.

I have used both the DOS-hosted and VAX/VMS hosted versions of these tools, but 
when Y2K was approaching I reached out to Intel to see if we could obtain the 
source code under some sort of license (given that these products weren't being 
sold anymore) that would allow us to modify it for Y2K just to tidy up the 
generated compiler listing files, linker map files, etc., which were the only 
real place dates and times were used.  The reply I got from Intel was basically 
stating that this was "lost" and no-one knew what became of it.  And now, with 
the switch to x64, Windows 7.x and later Windows incarnations no longer support 
running the old 16-bit DOS executables in a 64-bit environment, other than 
resorting to virtually hosted DOS using DOSbox, VirtualBox or similar.

PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge) used to build a widely-used operating 
system in the way its predecessor PL/M-80 was used to build the early CP/M 1.x 
and 2.0, so it never quite got as much attention as  "piece of computing 
history".

We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel's iPDS and MDS-80 development 
workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows 16/32-bit, 
as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit.  There were also PL/M-286 and 
PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never personally used 
them.

Interestingly, I just discovered that there was a PL/M-VAX version (see 
http://www.cpm.z80.de/source.html ) that was written in Fortran and emits VAX 
instructions.  From looking at that source it looks like that was something 
done by National Energy Software Center at the Argonne National Laboratory 
using Intel code from 1981 as a starting point.

I probably should have thought of asking on the SIMH e-mail list years ago !  
Perhaps someone on this list has connections at Intel (or used to work there) 
and maybe this source code really does exist in either the corporate archives 
or in some private or museum collection.

Cheers
Jason A.

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Re: [Simh] Intel's PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities source code

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

The PL/M compiler for CP/M was for 8080/8085/Z80 target, i.e. PL/M-80.

Intel did a lot of work to adapt PL/M for iAPX-86 processors 
(8086/8088/80186/80188 variants) and added support for the segmented memory 
architecture amongst other changes.  The last DOS version I had was V3.4 from 
1987.  There was a UDI shim that mapped Intel's own style of I/O calls to the 
underlying DOS equivalents.

On the VAX/VMS side, we also had Intel's PL/M-86 V3.4 from circa 1989 - that's 
when we got the MicroVAX 2000 that it was hosted on.  I learned to love loading 
MicroVMS 4.5B from a set of 50-ish floppy disks onto the RD54 system disk, and 
then installing the Intel tools from TK50 tapes.

When we switched from VAX to Alphas running OpenVMS 6.2-1H3 in the late 1990s, 
we simply DECmigrated the Intel tools and the translated EXEs ran perfectly 
fine.  Thanks to DEC for solving that problem for us !


On Mon, Feb 22, 2016, Kevin Handy khandy2...@gmail.com wrote:

> A deeper look at the site "http://www.cpm.z80.de/"; shows other PL/M sources, 
> such as a "VAX PL/M", ans a PL/M to C translator.

> The "Unofficial CP/M web site" has a PL/M compiler. I don't know if it's 
> close to anything you're looking for.  it'S  listed with the following 
> description
> Here is the source to the Intel PLM compiler. It is written in Fortran (66), 
> and is supposed to be pretty clean.
> It compiles correctly with gcc's g77 on Linux. However, it is not the version 
> required to compile CP/M 2.2 or 3.0. It works well, but lacks support for 
> external definitions and some PLM constructs, as required by the DR source. 

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 9:04 AM, Clem Cole  wrote:
below

On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 10:31 AM, Armistead, Jason BIS 
 wrote:
Sorry for this off-topic posting, but with all the recent talk about Intel’s 
history of x86 development, I was wondering whether there are any “Intel 
connected” people around here who might know what happened to the source code 
for Intel’s PL/M-86, ASM86 and iAPX-86 Utilities (LINK86, LOC86, LIB86, CREF86 
and OH86).  The manuals for many of these are on Bitsavers.
​I've wondered the same.​


 
 
 
PL/M-86 was never (to my knowledge)
​I thought Seattle Computer ​products used it to write some of DOS-86, which 
they later sold to Gates (which became DOS).  


 

 
We also used PL/M-80 under ISIS-II on Intel’s iPDS and MDS-80 development 
workstations, PL/M-80 under iSIM85 ISIS-II emulator on DOS/Windows 16/32-bit, 
as well as PL/M-51 under DOS/Windows 16/32-bit.  There were also PL/M-286 and 
PL/M-386 varieties, and possibly PL/M-48 (?) though I never personally used 
them.
I believe that all of the Intel tools were in FTN in those days - the 
assembler, tools and PL/x.
I once had some of them I looked a while ago, but I have long lost track of the 
sources.​


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Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32: hello-world in CAL32

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

On Feb 23, 2016, an anonymous user (li...@openmailbox.org) wrote:

> Thanks very much for the additional info. Your post was very timely since I 
> read in the notes that come with the PL/M cross compiler
> that is being discussed that it was a cross-compiler hosted on MTS and VM/CMS.

> I don't think I ever came across a cross compiler in the old days. It is 
> interesting to see that people used these odd combinations.

> I wonder if we should start trying to archive and document cross compilers 
> specifically.

> On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 01:01:28 -0500
> johns...@gregjohnson.org wrote:

> [very nice story snipped]

Cross compilers were great when your target system didn't have enough memory, 
storage, and possibly no actual operating system to support a locally-hosted 
compiler.  For a language like PL/M-86 which had no language specific I/O 
constructs beyond reading to and writing from I/O ports on the target CPU, it 
was perfect for writing applications for an OS-less embedded systems, but it 
needed a host.  Hosting on a VAX under VMS might be viewed as a little extreme 
when the target had less than 64K of EPROM and a few K of RAM, but it worked.  
The only complaint I had is that Intel limited the symbol table sizes somewhere 
in the linker (IIRC !), and you could exceed the maximum number of external 
symbols, thus requiring some splitting of modules and multi-step linking to 
resolve this dilemma.  I suspect the origins of this limitation was the MS-DOS 
environment with 640K of memory (Intel's tools didn't use a DOS extender), and 
that whoever ported the toolset to VAX/VMS never increased this limitation, 
even though VAX/VMS could support a lot more than virtual memory than DOS.

Assemblers were a little bit easier to host on a target - smaller code size in 
your editor, no optimization required, etc., though plenty of cross assemblers 
certainly existed for a wide range of targets, especially those that were 
embedded like Intel 8048 & 8051, Motorola 680x, etc.

A lot of the "classic" embedded cross compiler/cross assembler companies are no 
longer in existence, either gobbled up by larger companies, or simply going the 
way of the Dodo bird.  Names like Franklin, 2500AD, Avocet System, Adtek (from 
Japan) and Hi-Tech (from Queensland Australia), were pretty common players, but 
these days their products are no longer available, or if you're lucky they are 
end-of-life and provided as-is with no support, even if you buy them.  Intel 
created their own systems, like the Intel's iPDS-100 running ISIS-II, or 
Motorola/Freescale (now NXP) got 3rd party vendors like P&E Micro to do some of 
their tools and development boards.  It was a wild time !!!

PS: I'd love to see an iPDS-100 emulation in SIMH one day !!!


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Re: [Simh] Cross Compilers (and memories thereof)

[Armistead, Jason BIS]

Let's move this to a new thread subject of its own !

On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 12:04 PM, Davis Johnson  wrote 
(under old subject Re: [Simh] Interdata OS/32: hello-world in CAL32) :

> One that I remember was TI had a 9900 cross assembler written in FORTRAN (all 
> caps in those days). It was free to educational institutions.
> I talked a prof. into requesting it, but the available FORTRAN compiler 
> didn't like it.

Another now-defunct company, Microtec Research Incorporated (purchased by 
Mentor Graphics in late 1995), definitely had a TI9900 cross assembler written 
in FORTRAN from 1983.  We had the source code under license and compiled it 
under VAX/VMS (complete with CLI switches), and with a few custom tweaks, it 
was largely compatible with SDSMAC that ran on TI's 990 computer systems (now 
simulated via Dave Pitts' SIM990).  There was also a linker/loader that 
produced Tektronix HEX output (similar to TI's SDSLNK) as the final executable. 
 I was able to modify the code enough to get it to compile under OpenWatcom's 
Fortran 77 on Windows XP.





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