Tom Hunter wrote:
Jos, I am curious why you are developing a new PDP-11
simulator? There are
a few other existing simulators or emulators.
Thanks
Tom
Tom, glad you asked :-). There are several reasons for wanting to build another simulator.
The first reason is that none of the other simulators provides what I'm looking for.
With simh e.g. I'm missing the feeling of really being at the controls of the system,
using the original ODT commands and seeing the lights of a disk drive flashing. Then, my
simulator should be able to use the original boot rom code and run the original XXDP
diagnostics, all as realistically as achievable. Ultimately one should have the feeling of
owning his/hers own PDP-11, albeit in the form of a simulator.
The second reason is that - as a once professional software engineer - I want the
simulator to have a maintainable architecture and maintainable code, written in a modern
programming language. And lastly, it's just awesome to delve in the PDP-11
architecture and very satisfying to write software.
Jos