31 Aug
2020
31 Aug
'20
4:58 p.m.
Wow Mattis this looks great, fantastic work!
I will see if I can solder up a unit from what you have up on github on
a perf board (I should have a few bluepills kicking around) and see if I
can assist in some way with testing on a 3174-61R I have.
Unfortunately its the only one I have and I have a few 3270 terminals so
I would like to keep it in my ownership.
But they definitely do show up, a lot more often than it seems the
terminals do nowadays.
I have the Ethernet controllers for my 3174-R61 which I know people
generally use for communications with things like Hercules but as those
are much less common it would be nice to see if we can verify this works
on these terminal controllers and make using 3270 terminals with
Hercules more accessible to people!
If you'd like me to work with you on testing this let me know. I'll
definitely see if I can try it out myself anyway.
Either way, fantastic work and thanks for putting everything up on github!
-Connor K
On 8/30/2020 02:23, Mattis Lind via cctalk wrote:
I have been working on a project for some time to
connect a IBM3270
compatible Alfaskop terminal with its IBM 3274 compatible cluster
controller to the Hercules mainframe emulator.
Yesterday I eventually succeeded. I was able to login to TSO on my Hercules
system that ran MVS 3.8j.
Here are a couple quick video clips:
https://youtu.be/H1Sxt7xjn4Y
https://youtu.be/CFfB3yCN9OI
To achieve this I created a small piece of hardware I called SyncDongle,
essentially it's just a few level converters, connectors and a STM32F103
blue pill.
On the hardware I run a small piece of firmware, BSCBridge. It bridges
between the sync serial BSC used by the Alfaskop cluster controller and the
BSC variant that the 2703 emulation inside Hercules is using.
More information here: https://github.com/MattisLind/alfaskop_emu
and here http://www.datormuseum.se/peripherals/terminals/alfaskop
There are good chances that the SyncDongle/BSCBridge combo could work with
a 3274 or 3174 controller as well but I haven't tested since I don't have
one. But no guarantees given, though. If someone has a spare 3174-51R,
-61R, -81R or -91R I would be very interested in it.
Actually there is a good chance that it could work with general BSC use.
Maybe for NJE between Hercules and a real IBM machine? Or 2780/3780 RJE
terminals? Or other third party 3270 terminals using BSC.
The BSCBridge firmware only supports non transparent mode at this point, it
works fine with Alfaskop since it does not support anything else. Maybe a
showstopper for 3174 with 3279 terminals? SHouldn't be that difficult to
add transparent mode if needed.
/Mattis