Reviving a VAX-11/750

2015-06-15 17:32 GMT+02:00 Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net>: Well. I am probably working on to much simultaneously. But this machine is 100 km away so it is just now and then I do something with it. Like this weekend. The real console tape tape drive is in questionable status although not tested. I tried to use the mockup I did based on the TU58 emulator by Bela T?r?k. But I wasn't successful (I had it working previously on an LSI-11 so I am not sure what is wrong - I guess that I told that it was working perfectly previously - well I was wrong). Then I compiled your fork of tu58em on github. And it worked perfect. I didn't need to use the special vax mode that you have implemented though. Ma?be it is required only by 11/730? The bad thing with the 11/750 is that is has so many socketed TTL gate array chips. Sockets are bad. And gate arrays are bad. In that sense I think the 11/730 is better since it is AFAIK based on mostly standard off the shelf chips. In a way I am happy that is indeed running the BOOT58 program and several of the diagnostics but it sure would be very interesting to know why this Translation Buffer / Cache diagnostic fails. Were there any listings available for the VAX diagnostics? The micro diagnostics run in the RDM module is pretty well described in a document on bitsavers. There are no details though. But for the native VAX-11 diagnostics I can not find anything. Next step would be to create a SCSI disk with a VMS installation on it. Hopefully I manage to do that using SimH. I don't have any nice TU80 to go with the machine so it is not possible to do an install from tape. I do have a lead on a TU81 PLUS, but it is some 900 km away currently... /Mattis