Mike McDonald <mikemac@mikemac.com> wrote:
+---------------
|   For the three or four years, I've had this crazy idea to reverse engineer
| the underlying instruction set of my XL1201 and write an emulator in C.
| (Isaid it was CRAZY, didn't I!) I had come to the conclusion that emulating
| the instruction set was probably doable but adding support for all that
| "life support" was not feasable. By "life support", I'm meaning all of those
| hardware device interfaces like graphics, ethernet, keyboard, disks, ...
| Since I don't have the ability to generate a custom world load easily
| (I probably can't make it use X as the default console, for instance.),
| I'm pretty much stuck having to emulate those hardware devices, with only
| minor tweaking of the world load.
+---------------

Well, others have been doing similar things recently. For inspiration,
wander over to alt.sys.pdp10 and take a look at what a fellow named
Timothy Stark has been doing with an emulator for a DEC KL-10/KS-10.
He's got several versions of TOPS-10 & TOPS-20 up and running (well,
limping), using the binary installation tapes as his fixed "world load".
Quite amazing stuff!! [Plus, his emulator -- on an 800 MHz Pentium --
is running more than 5 times faster than a KL-10B!! Which caused some
bugs, actually...]

And yes, he had to emulate the I/O channels, tapes, disks, front-end
processor, terminals, etc., to get the system software to boot correctly.

So don't give up yet...


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 31-2-510		rpw3@sgi.com
SGI Network Engineering		http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.		Phone: 650-933-1673
Mountain View, CA  94043	PP-ASEL-IA