Ersatz-11 V6.1

After a long delay (it's hard to make big release-worthy improvements after 19 years of development), Ersatz-11 V6.1 is done. The free demo/hobby version is at: http://www.dbit.com/demo.html This release's additions are mostly about weird LSI-11-based microcomputers: - Terak 8510/a. This is a desktop machine with a standard LSI-11 CPU card and non-standard everything else. The highlight is the 320x240 graphics display. Runs RT-11/85 and UCSD p-System. Works in the DOS, Win32, OS/2, and stand-alone versions of E11, but not Linux (due to linker problems). Probably has plenty of rough edges since I've never even seen a Terak machine in real life. For one thing it only works with QX:-bootable disks (no QB: FDC emulation yet). - DEC PDT-11/130. LSI-11 chipset in a busless machine built into a modified VT100, with two TU58 tape units below the monitor. Runs RT11 SJ or FB, with more free memory than other MMU-less machines since it has a reduced I/O page (so 60 KB of main memory instead of 56 KB), and the guts of the TU58 driver are in ROM. DEC's PD.SYS driver is very small since it's just a shim. A reimplementation of the ROM code is supplied (since the original is copyrighted by DEC). - DEC PDT-11/150. As above but in a big desktop cube with two RX01s for storage. Again, comes with replacement ROM code to make PD.SYS work. The manual has an appendix that shows how to write "E11.INI" config files for all three of these micros. There's also a new built-in text editor; see the EDIT command in the manual. This was kind of an insane amount of work for just one new page of documentation! You already know how to use it (press PF2 for the keypad help screen if there isn't already a hardcopy scotch-taped to your monitor). It's mainly for editing your E11.INI w/o having to leave the emulation (or boot an OS in stand-alone E11), but it's an adequate basic text editor (it's a VT100ified 32-bit port of the DOS editor I've used for everything since 1983, including writing E11 itself). Another new feature that's just a rough cut is that the SET THROTTLE DELAY=d INTERVAL=i command can now take FILE=foo[.TIM] instead of DELAY=d. This way you can feed it a file (e.g. foo.tim) which contains 65536 little-endian 32-bit longwords, each of which is the average execution time of the corresponding PDP-11 opcode in nanoseconds. So now instead of adding a fixed d-microsecond delay every i instructions, E11 maintains a running total of execution time, and every i instructions it checks the actual current time and delays as needed to match. There's a lot of overhead in banging on the timer chip so often though, so for now the execution speed comes out slower than it should. The main fetch/dispatch loop is recompiled at runtime when the SET THROTTLE command is issued, so at least the overhead from this code vanishes when it's not enabled. Other new stuff: ASSIGN xxx /MAC:aa-bb-cc-dd-ee-ff works for *all* Ethernet devices (was just UDP:) so you can override the real port's default MAC address. And there's a new keyscript command that should have been there eons ago: "LASTSIMILARYEARBEFORE 2000" (you can use other years but why would you?) converts the current year captured by GETTIME to the last one before 2000 that had all the same days of the week, so you can kludge your way around non-Y2K-compliant PDP-11 OSes (this is for entering the current time/date with one keystroke at boot time if that's not obvious). John Wilson D Bit