am100 emulator, aka vam, aka virtual alpha micro, ...

For anyone interested, here is the 0.3 snapshot of my alpha-micro am-100 emulator. http://www.otterway.com/am100 This is the first to boot AMOS and run BASIC! Here's the $README... --------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------- /* AM-100.doc (c) Copyright Mike Noel, 2001-2002 */ PREFACE This software is an emulator for the Alpha-Micro AM-100 computer. It is copyright by Michael Noel and licensed for non-commercial hobbyist use

terms of the "Q public license", an open source certified license. There exist known serious discrepancies between this software's internal functioning and that of a real AM-100, as well as between it and the

manual describing the functionality of a real AM-100, and even between it and the comments in the code describing what it is intended to do! Notice that this software hasn't reached the 1.0 version yet. In fact it's a

way from it. It's not beta; it's alpha. Use it at your own risk! Reliability aside, it is not the intent of the copyright holder to use

software to compete with current or future Alpha-Micro products, and no such competing application of the software will be supported. Alpha-Micro and other software that may be run on this emulator are not covered by the above copyright or license and must be legally obtained

an authorized source. As this is written I have permission from Alpha-Micro to distribute AMOS

with the emulator so you can get that from me too - but it is subject to their terms and conditions. INSTALLATION Preferred installation is to compile the source on the target machine. Tested targets include Red Hat Linux (6.1, 6.2, 7.0, 7,1, and 7.2) and Microsoft Windows 98SE and 2000 using Cygwin 1.3.12-2 and 1.3.13-1.

Windows 98 is not a good target. Windows 2000 and Linux are both OK. Step Zero. You have at least 12 megs free space - right? We will assume you have downloaded the source and AMOS into a directory on your (running, known good) linux or cygwin system; those files being ./AM-100-0.3.tgz ./amos50.tgz Step One. Create a sub directory and untar the source. mkdir am cd am mv ../AM-100-0.3.tgz . mv ../AMOS50.tgz tar -xzf AM-100-0.3.tgz tar -xzf amos50.tgz Step Two. Compile the source. make Step Three. Run it! ./AM-100 Step Four. What's this message... "boot failed! Problem with 'dsk0-container' ?" dsk0-container is the name of the file that represents DSK0 in the emulator. Similarly, dsk1-container represents DSK1, and dsk2-container and dsk3-container do the obvious. Each container is 10 megs (19980 blocks). Since you might already have a dsk0-container, I've packaged the AMOS release as dsk1-container. If you have enough free space just copy dsk1-container to dsk0-container - if not rename instead. Then run it again! cp dsk1-container dsk0-container ./AM-100 Step Five. It booted - right? If not contact me & I'll try to help you figure out why... OPERATION The window you run this in (msdos? cygwin? xterm?) is probably defaulted to 25 lines x 80 columns. You need to shrink it to 24x80 (or vue and fix won't scroll correctly). One reason I don't like W98 is I haven't found a way to do that there... If you've other containers (dsk1-container, etal) you can mount and

them as you like. Can't change without restarting the emulator thou... All the control keys should work. Esc should work. The Arrow keys,

Delete, Home, End, PgUp, and PgDn should work - at least as I would want them to!! Watch out for ALT keys. ALT C means quit the emulator. ALT T toggles instruction tracing. ALT S toggles instruction stepping (which doesn't

in this release). See PS3.C for all the key mappings. Console output is to STDOUT. Traces go to STDERR. So if you want to try

trace but don't want it mixed with your screen, start the emulator with ./AM-100 2>AM-100.log Then all the trace output goes into a file. Watch out - it gets huge very very fast. Actually there is also a "user" trace facility, but I'm not ready to try and document it yet. There are some other tricks you can play with STDOUT and STDERR. One is

TEE the STDOUT so that all your console activity gets copied into a file. Like this: ./AM-100 | tee AM-100.lst or: ./AM-100 2>AM-100.log | tee AM-100.lst CUT and PASTE works with the STDOUT console window. Access them by

on the little icon on the left of the window bar. They are under 'edit'. So copy that big basic program off your real machine and paste it into

basic (or edit) (or whatever). DO NOT USE DIRSEQ. It scrambles directories. I will track that down and fix it for the next release. PERFORMANCE Performance has not been a design consideration. There are dozens of

it could be dramatically improved. My judgment is that's not worth the effort. But judge for yourself. On a Pentium 166 laptop with linux 6.2

seems pretty close to what I remember my AM-100 being able to do. The

that AMOS loops when it doesn't have work are converted into sleeps, so

pretty low impact even on an old slow box. Of course on a 2.4 gig p4 it screams. Certainly much faster than the AM-1000 I traded in my old AM-100 to buy, but I've no idea how it compares to modern systems. Maybe someone will run some benchmarks??? WHAT IS CHANGED/ADDED TO AMOS 5.0? Not much. The system.mon is a standard mongen of sysbsw.mon and my own

driver vdk.dvr[1,6]. I patched ps3.idv[1,6] to create ps3new.idv[1,6]. Ansi.tdv[1,6] is a hack of a vt100 driver I wrote years ago.

is a demonstration of bank switched memory. Spoolr.ini[1,4] is just a way to test lptspl with output to the console. Source for vdk.dvr, ps3new.idv and ansi.tdv are not provided simply

I haven't had time. vkd is a one-instruction link to the container file disk system in hwassist.c. ps3new is just a branch back to output all waiting chars at once instead of just one per clock tick - a performance improvement. Ansi.tdv is just an ugly hack for the tcrt calls - the more difficult input processing is handled in the ps3.c module of the emulator. WHAT DO I **KNOW** DOES NOT WORK? Aside from DIRSEQ most stuff seems to work. LISP and PASCAL may not work but I know so little about them I'm not certain. Format 11 instructions (floating point) have only been working a few days. They are probably really sick and I just haven't noticed yet. But enjoy basic until they bite you! I also have pretty good reason to think PS.V handling (and 'over/under

in general) is not quite right. What the book says is supposed to happen

at odds with what diagnostics check for and what known running programs

HOW TO REPORT A NEW BUG Send me an email (mike(a)otterway.com) telling me what you did, what

and why you don't think that should have happened. For example: "I

and ran xyz.bas and it crashed saying it couldn't open file aaa.bbb, but aaa.bbb was there like it was supposed to be and this program and file

on my real AM-100". So far I'm pretty prompt getting back to people who tell me about problems, hopefully that will continue... SOFTWARE DONATIONS Were you a software developer in the AM-100 heydays? Still have a copy of your pride and joy laying around? Why not let others remember with you! Let me post a copy for use with the emulator. All donations welcome! CREDITS A number of people have helped and/or inspired me to write this thing. There's Jim Battle, who's built web pages and emulators for several

including the Processor Technology SOL-20 (see http://www.thebattles.net/sol20/sol.html) . We share an interest in Processor Tech hardware and software and I really admire the way he has pulled all that arcane stuff together. There's Roger Bowler (etal) and the Hercules project (IBM mainframe emulator, see http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules). I spent a lot of my

as an OS sysprog, and what that team of people have done is just magnificant. Many design elements of my emulator come from them - I even borrowed their use of the Q license! There's Harvey, a guy who saved some of my old books for 20+ years in his garage. Some were manuals for my old AM-100! There's Mike, who still has

running AM-100, and was good enough to send me a copy of his wd16 manual. There's Rhett who found me a really clean complete copy of amos. There's Joe, another guy with a running AM-100 who sent me an assembled copy of

cpu diagnostic and worked with me to get it to run without a monitor. And of course there's Alex who has given permission to distribute amos along with the emulator so more people can enjoy it.