So what would it take to kick off a CS/80 simulator
project for Linux or NetBSD - or even Solaris ?
--
It is creeping up on my interest list. This sort of started when
I won what turned out to be an incomplete HP PASCAL 2.0 source
document set on ebay a few weeks ago. There is ALMOST enough
information there to start on a simulation of the HP 9000/200
series, which is the most simple of the 68K machines that HP
built. So I've been digging around seeing what I can learn about
the 200 and 300 series over the past few weeks (DIO cards, et al)
and what software can be found (I picked up some 5" floppies with
BASIC and PASCAL a while ago)
I've picked up a couple of early 3xx boxes to take a look at (310,
320 and 340) and I just got a 9836 and 36C.
This was about the last of the machines that HP provided any sort
of technical detail on (schematics in the DIO card manuals, etc.)
Since the same cards were used on the HPUX workstations, there is
some information on them in the NetBSD code.
This also would be useful for a future classic HP3000 simulation
of the 4x series, which were CS/80 only.
I tried emailing Peter Brown about the work he was doing on raw
reads of CS/80 discs under WIN98 a few years ago to see what he
was able to learn, but haven't heard anything back yet.