With my new friend Claude, I've advanced the state of Terak emulation.
Working from Sergey Svishchev ("Shattered")'s fork of Open-SIMH,
we added support for double-density QB disk images and made
a number of other improvements.
We built a Python GUI for the emulator, making it easy to set the
volumes in the drives. Handles Terak, RT-11, UNIX V6.
Handles logical and physical sector layouts.
There's a disk browser and catalog system, recursively indexes
your folders of disk images, lets you add notes to disks and folders,
pictures of disk labels, rebuilds a static HTML version of the
catalog. Lets you easily find files, helps distinguish between
versions of files and where they are, looks inside p-System
libraries, has a p-Code disassembler, a p-System text viewer,
a CHARSET viewer, can view various Terak bitmap image formats like FOTO
and IMAGE, handles the MOVIE format, handles the vector renderings
from disks I got from Paul Haeberli. Saves things as PNG, MP4 or
SVG as appropriate. There's a movie recorder to save your full
interactive emulated session, too. There's an octal / hex viewer,
a dump as numbers tool, a "strings" tool, a dumper / disassembler
for p-Code, PDP-11, RT-11, and a.out / .o / .a .
There's an emulated Printronix P300 printer with graphics on the serial port.
Sound works, both beep and PCM. There's an emulated GSW / Plato music box
for the one demo disk on Bitsavers.
Along the way, Claude rediscovered a floating point bug that lived in
Supnik's SIMH from 2004 until 2023, but that hadn't been folded into
Sergey's fork.
I suspect Dave Plummer of YouTube's "Dave's Garage," (1.15M subscribers)
will be talking about Teraks soon, as he recently received a working one
and a spare from Prof. Tim Teitelbaum of Cornell.
I have not yet put it on the Github, but if you'd like a peek,
send me an email.
- John
https://www.threedee.com/jcm/
"Geek Site of the Day" October 16, 1996