Other PDP11 simulators

From: Gordon JC Pearce <gordon_at_gjcp.net>
Date: Sat Oct 2 06:55:51 2004

Zane H. Healy wrote:
>> Are there any PDP11 simulators that run "right down on the iron" of a PC?
>>
> As far as I know, there isn't anything that runs directly on the PC
> hardware, they all require an OS. However, John Wilson mentioned
> something this week on the PDP-11 mailing list that sounds like he's
> planning on running directly on the PC HW in a future version.
>

You *could* write one that just booted up and became a PDP-11 emulator.
  It would be quite a lot of work - serial ports are easy to program,
and you could get away with BIOS calls for disk handling maybe, but you
could basically forget about any kind of network support. Far simpler
to use one of the free Unixes. If you were really, really concerned
about not letting anything else run on the machine, you could say
something at a Linux kernel boot prompt like:
boot: linux init=/usr/bin/simh

and simh would run in single-user mode. This would, of course, be silly.

Gordon.
Received on Sat Oct 02 2004 - 06:55:51 BST