I've updated my Wang 2200 emulator to version 1.1. It has been about
six months since the last update.
This release adds two signficant features:
1) disk support. You can now plug in disk controllers, each of
which can control two drives. Drives can be any legal size, and the
timing can model that of 5.25" or 8" floppies, or hard disks (even the
interleave factor is modelled). You can optionally turn of the emulated
timing and make it run as fast as possible.
2) when an error message is displayed on the screen (which are just
two digit codes), double click on that line and a detailed explanation
will pop up. the explanations come directly from the Wang BASIC manual.
Adding the first feature was a lot of work. I started with the
microcode dump from the disk controller and a document describing the
microarchitecture (believe it or not, the 2200 has a 4b ALU and the disk
controller has an 8B ALU). From there, I wrote a disassembler and
studied the listing until I thought I understood the protocol. I
implemented it and ironed the wrinkles out of my assumptions.
Please have a look if you are interested.
Web site:
http://www.thebattles.net/wang/wang.html
The emulator:
http://www.thebattles.net/wang/emu.html
Cool error message feature, in relaxing Wang green:
http://www.thebattles.net/wang/emu/html/error_help.gif
Release notes:
http://www.thebattles.net/wang/emu/relnotes.txt
The program is a Win32 executable. Source code is online.
Received on Sun Sep 28 2003 - 01:19:10 BST
