On Wed, 11 Feb 2015, B Degnan wrote:
via trial and error, and a lot of reading. I believe
that loading the
bootstrap manually is a must; one cannot use or create tapes otherwise.
Only if your drum memory loses its contents. I don't know if SIMH has a
concept of non-volatile main storage (drum, core). And for the LGP-30, all
registers are non-volatile, too.
think this SIMH has the bootstrap pre-loaded. I am
unaware of anyone who
is using the SIMH simulator, although I have seen two non-SIMH LGP-30
simulators. One is in German.
That's mine, but there's an English version, too.
In order to enter instructions into memory I first
learned how to translate
code from the various actual papertape sources, for example...
"flexowriter entry"> 6300 P 0000'
becomes
sim> d -a 6300 10000000
Urks, that's sick... but SIMH should offer the possibility to enter the
mnemonics and addresses (or anything else since everything is mapped to
its four bit code) like
sim> d -a 3w00 p0000 (or d -a 6300 p0000
sim> d -a 3w04 i0000 d -a 6301 i0000 ...)
sim> d -a 3w08 c3w14
sim> d -a 3w0j p0000
sim> d -a 3w10 i0000
sim> g 3w00
Anyways, SIMH is not very well suited for machines like an LGP-30 where
the user interaction with typewriter and console buttons for operation is
imperative. The SIMH version does officially work, but it is not really
user friendly in this case.
But the best would be if you use a drum image with 10.4 (the monitor)
already loaded, i.e. save the memory contents to a file and reload it on
the next incarnation of SIMH (there's a "START" drum containing 10.4 in my
simulator package, and an "ACT5" drum with preloaded ACT-V and
subroutines, these may be usable in SIMH, but I don't know).
repertoire. The hardest part is finding ways to enter
Flexowriter key
input via a modern keyboard, using SIMH commands.
By using a simulator that offers the right frontend to the user (i.e. keys
and buttons as required by the machine operations) *g*
Christian