18 Oct
2024
18 Oct
'24
7 p.m.
Hello to the group,
I have acquired some boards and a backplane for a PDP 11/23+. The disk
controller is an RQDX3 and I have a 3.5" drive that works as an RX50. I
have a greazeweasle so I am able to write RX50 images to 3.5 inch
floppies. I also have an RD32 MFM drive that also works.
Since I have an M8189 CPU board, I have a second serial port that works as
a TU58 device so I can use the tu58em emulator. I also have 512K of memory
and a DZV11. Using the TU58 emulator I have been able to get RT-11 up and
running on it.
My goal though is to try and get RSX11M (I have no FPP right now) on it,
but I am somewhat at a loss on how to get it installed. Anyone have any
suggestions on how I could do that? I have some .tap files and some RL02
images with various versions of RSX11M, but I don't know how to get them
onto my RD32 drive.
Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions.
And let me just say I love finally having a real PDP11!!
-Peter
18 Oct
18 Oct
7:42 p.m.
Start on the simulator first you can make a lot of turns quickly and know what to expect
when you work on the real hardware.
Kirk
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 18, 2024, at 4:00 PM, Peter Ekstrom via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hello to the group,
I have acquired some boards and a backplane for a PDP 11/23+. The disk
controller is an RQDX3 and I have a 3.5" drive that works as an RX50. I
have a greazeweasle so I am able to write RX50 images to 3.5 inch
floppies. I also have an RD32 MFM drive that also works.
Since I have an M8189 CPU board, I have a second serial port that works as
a TU58 device so I can use the tu58em emulator. I also have 512K of memory
and a DZV11. Using the TU58 emulator I have been able to get RT-11 up and
running on it.
My goal though is to try and get RSX11M (I have no FPP right now) on it,
but I am somewhat at a loss on how to get it installed. Anyone have any
suggestions on how I could do that? I have some .tap files and some RL02
images with various versions of RSX11M, but I don't know how to get them
onto my RD32 drive.
Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions.
And let me just say I love finally having a real PDP11!!
-Peter
8:11 p.m.
There are two versions of the TU58 emulator both from the same source I believe. They both
work well, but one has more de bugging features which are useful. I used raspberry pi
three I think. It had 2 USB serial ports. I set up a terminal server that just reconnected
to the USB serial port that is connected to the console serial port on the CPU card. I
don’t remember which software I used.
The simulator has debugging for the TU58 virtual driver. You can compare the outputs with
the debugging from the TU58 emulator on the real hardware too help with debugging.
The simulator has debugging break points. I believe if you set a point at location zero it
will break just after the first stage of the boot has completed. This was loaded from the
first (and second ?) block on the tape. The second stage isn’t too long after it’s done it
jumps up high to the actual RT 11 loader. I don’t remember any details about it after
that.
This is all from memory so if I’m getting anything wrong, I’m sure someone will clarify.
Kirk
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 18, 2024, at 4:50 PM, Kirk Davis
<kirkbdavis(a)me.com> wrote:
Start on the simulator first you can make a lot of turns quickly and know what to expect
when you work on the real hardware.
Kirk
Sent from my iPad
> On Oct 18, 2024, at 4:00 PM, Peter Ekstrom via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
>
> Hello to the group,
>
> I have acquired some boards and a backplane for a PDP 11/23+. The disk
> controller is an RQDX3 and I have a 3.5" drive that works as an RX50. I
> have a greazeweasle so I am able to write RX50 images to 3.5 inch
> floppies. I also have an RD32 MFM drive that also works.
>
> Since I have an M8189 CPU board, I have a second serial port that works as
> a TU58 device so I can use the tu58em emulator. I also have 512K of memory
> and a DZV11. Using the TU58 emulator I have been able to get RT-11 up and
> running on it.
>
> My goal though is to try and get RSX11M (I have no FPP right now) on it,
> but I am somewhat at a loss on how to get it installed. Anyone have any
> suggestions on how I could do that? I have some .tap files and some RL02
> images with various versions of RSX11M, but I don't know how to get them
> onto my RD32 drive.
>
> Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions.
>
> And let me just say I love finally having a real PDP11!!
>
> -Peter
7:43 p.m.
You may want to use simh (where you'll be able to mount tapes and RL02
images) to do the installation and generate an RD32 image. Once you have
the disk image, use vtserver (note - some versions are limited to 32MB
images, but there are some that remove that limitation - check if the
struct vtcmd in vtserver.c uses 2 or 4 bytes for the block number), or
PDP11GUI (Windows only) to transfer the RD32 disk image to your PDP over a
serial port.
On Fri, Oct 18, 2024 at 4:25 PM Peter Ekstrom via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hello to the group,
I have acquired some boards and a backplane for a PDP 11/23+. The disk
controller is an RQDX3 and I have a 3.5" drive that works as an RX50. I
have a greazeweasle so I am able to write RX50 images to 3.5 inch
floppies. I also have an RD32 MFM drive that also works.
Since I have an M8189 CPU board, I have a second serial port that works as
a TU58 device so I can use the tu58em emulator. I also have 512K of memory
and a DZV11. Using the TU58 emulator I have been able to get RT-11 up and
running on it.
My goal though is to try and get RSX11M (I have no FPP right now) on it,
but I am somewhat at a loss on how to get it installed. Anyone have any
suggestions on how I could do that? I have some .tap files and some RL02
images with various versions of RSX11M, but I don't know how to get them
onto my RD32 drive.
Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions.
And let me just say I love finally having a real PDP11!!
-Peter
9 p.m.
The RL02 images probably won't help without a real RL02. Likewise .tap
images won't help without a real TK50 or 70 tape unit.
I typically gen my own M and M+ off real RL02 packs, but this takes time
and is complicated. Thus I agree with the concept of build a RD32 image
in SIMH, install RSX to it, then copy it over to your real RD32 and get
rolling.
M 4.2 should be fine for you, however you probably want to get a FPP at
some point to more easily run FORTRAN programs. And with M you can
install Decnet 4.0 which can allow you to use the second serial port for
all sorts of fun shenannigans (I guess you could hook it to a serial
port on a Pi, then bridge via TCP to HECNet)
C
On 10/18/2024 7:00 PM, Peter Ekstrom via cctalk wrote:
Hello to the group,
I have acquired some boards and a backplane for a PDP 11/23+. The disk
controller is an RQDX3 and I have a 3.5" drive that works as an RX50. I
have a greazeweasle so I am able to write RX50 images to 3.5 inch
floppies. I also have an RD32 MFM drive that also works.
Since I have an M8189 CPU board, I have a second serial port that works as
a TU58 device so I can use the tu58em emulator. I also have 512K of memory
and a DZV11. Using the TU58 emulator I have been able to get RT-11 up and
running on it.
My goal though is to try and get RSX11M (I have no FPP right now) on it,
but I am somewhat at a loss on how to get it installed. Anyone have any
suggestions on how I could do that? I have some .tap files and some RL02
images with various versions of RSX11M, but I don't know how to get them
onto my RD32 drive.
Thanks in advance for any pointers or suggestions.
And let me just say I love finally having a real PDP11!!
-Peter
269
days inactive
270
days old
4 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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cz -
Kirk Davis -
Nadav Eiron -
Peter Ekstrom