On Thursday, March 24, 2016 at 5:44 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote: > On 2016-03-25 00:57, Christian Gauger-Cosgrove wrote: > > On 24 March 2016 at 19:20, Alan Frisbie <fris...@flying-disk.com> wrote: > >> Because it *could* be done? > >> > > I wasn't sure, since I never actually worked with the real hardware. I > > assume the UBA on the VAX provides a "normal" UNIBUS, right? In that > > case you could probably connect other "old" and "weird" devices to the > > VAX. RP11 (RP01, RP02, RP03 anyone?), TA11 (TU60 DECcassette), VT11... > > Of course. Yes, it's a normal Unibus just like any other Unibus. Which > is why I agree with Paul. While I don't mind default to have some stuff > disabled, anything you could hook up to the real hardware should also be > possible to enable in simh. Who cares if there is a driver for some OS > or not. What is there to say that not some just decided that they wanted > to write such a device driver.
It certainly is 'possible' in simh. If someone was that inspired to write a device driver for some unsupported Unibus device that existed in the PDP11 simulator but didn't exist in a VAX simulator, the effort to add the device to the VAX simulator is trivial compared to the effort involved in writing the driver. The process is documented in doc/simh_vmio.doc. The time involved is comparable to the time to shutdown and install a board into a real Unibus: 3 lines of code in the vaxNNN_defs.h file, and 2 lines of code in the vaxNNN_syslist.c file, and some minor tweaks in the pdp11_ZZ file (including vax_def.h when compiling for a VAX) and change to the makefile to add the new device. There are many Unibus devices in the PDP11 simulator which are unsupported (lacking a driver in any known OS) in the VAX simulators and they would just be clutter. If someone is really motivated to write a new, OS driver the process is pretty easy, so I'll leave it to them. That said, the TC11/TU56 has been added to the VAX Unibus simulators and confirmed that it works using the Andy Goldstein supplied driver. - Mark _______________________________________________ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh