This repository is a fork of simh/simh that integrates the following:
- simh: The Computer History Simulation Project
- BlinkenBone: extend the SimH simulator with real or simulated console panels
- PiDP11: recreating the PDP-11/70
Please consult the individual README and LICENSE files in the tree.
The BlinkenBone and PiDP11 sources have been reorganized a little and merged into the simh source tree (including changes to scp.c and the addition of REALCONS). To build with REALCONS support, build simh with USE_REALCONS=1; to build with PIDP11 support (on a Raspberry Pi only), build with USE_PIDP11=1. The BlinkenBone and PiDP11 binaries can be built on Linux by running make.sh in the BlinkenBone subdirectory. Unlike Joerge Hoppe's original distribution, this builds only for the current machine (not cross-compilation).
The PiDP panelserver has been rewritten to use libgpiod (rather than directly manipulating device registers by mmap'ing /dev/mem). This incurs more CPU overhead (because all GPIO actions are done with ioctls). On slower CPUs it may be desirable to use Oscar's panelserver (/opt/pidp11/bin/server11) instead.
The PiDP8 panel server has not been updated, and the PiDP11 panelserver has not (yet) been tested for 64-bit ARM.
This does not replicate Oscar Vermeulen's PiDP11 installation and runtime scripts (see http://pidp.net/pidp11/pidp11.tar.gz), not does it include the PDP-11 disk images. Those should be installed as per Oscar's instructions. Then, to build and install manually on a Raspberry Pi as replacements for the binaries that were installed by Oscar's distribution, change directory to the root of the GIT repository and do the following:
sudo apt-get install apt default-jdk libgpiod-dev libtirpc-dev
USE_PIDP11=1 make pdp11
(cd BlinkenBone; ./make.sh)
cd BIN
cp pdp11 /opt/pidp11/bin/client11
cp pidp1170_blinkenlightd /opt/pidp11/bin/server11
cp scansw /opt/pidp11/binWindows support is very brittle at this time. Nonetheless, if you want to try...
simh itself has good support for building and running on Windows. There is no supported version of Windows on the Raspberry Pi, so the PiDP panel simulators are not applicable. However, with some work it is possible to use simh with the Java panel servers.
Java is "write once, run anywhere", so you can build BlinkenBone/javapanelsim/panelsim_all.jar
on Linux and run it on Windows with an equivalent JDK.
To build it on Windows, install JDK 19 or newer and also install Apache Ant;
then cd to the BlinkenBone directory and run make.bat.
The Visual Studio Projects folder contains a project file to build a PDP11 with REALCONS,
but this has only been used with Visual Studio 2022. It creates the executable BIN/pdp11_realcons.exe
If you need to rebuild it for an older IDE (particularly if you want to build for Windows XP
using Visual Studio 2008), then you will probably also need to rebuild BlinkenBone/3rdparty/oncrpc_win32.
There is no support (at least not yet) for building a REALCONS-enabled PDP11 simulator using mingw64.