Photorealistic frontpanels for DEC PDP simulations under SimH

Hi Rob, See here http://retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone/169-blinkenbone-architecture-overv… and adjactent pages. I use photos of each button and each lamp, in every state. So first operation is taking picture of a real panel. Then I use Photoshop, to cut out all the lamps & switches into separate layers - a photoshop script scales them to different screen reloutions, and names the resulting images with <resolution>_<controlname>_<state> - Photoshop generates also a text file with coordinates of each control, so they can be painted at right position later. I tried other approaches, but this has best quality. Even scaling the images at run time was not as perfect as scaling with Photoshop. To get a clickable image of the panel I use a Java program. It paints the current control states onto screen, and decodes mouse-click positions into activated switches. I choose Java with the old AWT framework, because graphic is relatively easy there, and it is platform independent. The graphic should follow SimH onto as much different platforms as possible. So I have a simulator written in C (SimH) and a Java display. Both communicate over an network interface, written with RPC (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_Procedure_Call) RPC is a 1990's technic, so very fast on today machines. if you look at https://github.com/j-hoppe/BlinkenBone you find the Java sources at projects/09_javapanelsim, and the image directories (example for the PDP-11/70) at projects/09_javapanelsim/resources/blinkenbone/panelsim/panelsim1170/images The extensions on SimH-side reside in projects/02.3_simh/4.x+realcons/src/REALCONS/ and as small extensions in scp.c and the *_cpu.c sources of the simulated machines. Every change is marked with "#if USE_REALCONS", so I know what to merge into new SimHs. I do not use the "frontpanel" interface of SimH, as my project was ready before this was introduced. I confess my approach is maximal over-engineered, but I want to be as good as possible, and I'm enhancing it since years. best regards, Joerg Am 28.03.2018 um 14:19 schrieb Rob Jarratt: