[cctalk] Terak news

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