10 Sep
2007
10 Sep
'07
9:33 a.m.
On Sun, 9 Sep 2007, Jerome H. Fine wrote:
Yes that seems to be the goal, but what will you do
with
RT-11 at that point? If playing games is the objective,
then RT-11 is not really being used except to start the
process.
I do this on our 11/10 with VT11/VR17 to play lunar lander (the visitors
and especially children like it!).
Based on the few responses, I guess that no one is
writing
any programs, let alone modifying any utilities. And almost
certainly, no one seems to be modifying device drivers or
the operating system itself. If anyone is actually interested
in that aspect, please let me know.
Don't say that. My "main" PDP11 in our museum is a 11/34 with all sorts of
peripherals. I've built a small interface to attach a PC to a DR11-C and
wrote a RT-11 device driver (works in FB and XM). On the PC side I have
virtual disk images of various sizes (up to 65536 RT-11 blocks) and on the
RT-11 side I have up to eight devices that map to these disk images.
Although the data path between the 11 and the PC is only 8 bits (I was too
lazy to make it 16 bits, that would have required two latches and logic
for multiplexing/demultiplexing) I achieve data rates of about 70kB/s. I
can transfer whole RK05 disk images in less than one minute (that's btw.
the reason why I built this interface) with COPY/DEV (in both directions).
And I can boot from the virtual disk...
The project isn't finished yet (no time, other projects, ...). The
protocol needs to be more robust and fault tolerant, and I need to
implement some kind of timeouts on both sides.
Ah, almost forgot that: Since there is no official way to format DECtapes
under RT-11, I've enhanced the modified TC11 formatter from the spring '76
sigtape to be verbose and tell the user what to do. I think this counts as
"modifying utilities", doesn't it? :-)
Christian