building a PDP11 from the things you find at home

From: Ethan Dicks <ethan_dicks_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu Jul 26 20:13:09 2001

--- Jerome Fine <jhfine_at_idirect.com> wrote:
> >Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
> > [Snip]
> >
> > Where I see emulation as useful is when you need a laptop version of the
> > system, or you just don't have a chance of getting the hardware...
> While I probably don't really understand someone who's goal is using the
> original hardware, on the other hand, I find that any software development
> under an emulator is much more straight forward, much easier AND MUCH
> FASTER.

I agree with that. Even though I have a raft of PET hardware, it was
several times faster to hack the Infocom ZIP program from the C-64 to
the PET under VICE on my SPARC5 than to do it on the real thing. I used to
develop software on the C-64 and Apple ][ back in the day when they were
tops in the home. We had one C-64 for editing/printing, one for compiling
and one for running. I rolled my chair up and down the aisle, sneakernet
on wheels. I could get an edit/compile/test cycle down to a few minutes
that way. For the ZIP port, I had emacs open to the source, a shell
window for a cross-compiler, and a VICE window with a Zork-I disk image
mounted as drive 8 and the local directory mounted as drive 9. The
things I could have written in 1984 if I'd had that developement
environment!

The proof, of course, is that it works on the real thing. So far, I haven't
gotten around to that because I have no working BASIC 3.0 PETs and the code
I have doesn't work under BASIC 4.0 (zero page conflicts with the kernal)
Someday, though, I'll dig out my oldest PET (the one I got new in grade school)
and put the finishing touches on it. For some odd reason, all I've picked
up in the way of PETs since then have been 8032s and maybe one fat-40.


-ethan



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Received on Thu Jul 26 2001 - 20:13:09 BST

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