[HECnet] Ersatz-11 V7.1

[Jerome H. Fine]

>John Wilson wrote:

V7.1 of Ersatz-11 is done.   New features include:

- DMP11/DMV11 network ports.

- DDCMP over TCP and UDP (as well as serial lines).

- Kermit client for transferring files in and out of the PDP-11 over any
emulated serial line (KERMIT command and KERMIT: pseudo-driver).

- "MOUNT ddcu: BAD: /LIST:badblks.txt ..." adds fake bad blocks (from a
list in a file) to any disk (for testing PDP-11 utilities).

- "MOUNT ddcu: ... {/NOPAD | /PAD:NULL | /PAD:RAM}" selects how to handle
emulating disks with an image file (or physical drive) that's smaller
than the drive being emulated.   (/PAD:RAM is currently an experimental
feature and may have bugs -- it's intended for systems that use the tail
end of the drive as swap space.)

- DPDISK: and DPTAPE: (BOTH UNSUPPORTED) set up dual-ported disks and tapes.
Any disk or tape type can be mounted on one of these pseudo-devices, after
which units 0 and 1 of the pseudo-device represent the two ports which may
in turn each be mounted on different PDP-11 controllers, presumably on
different processors of a multi-processor system.

- "SET TTu: DL11A" (needed by DOS/BATCH for TT0:).

Impressive list of new features!!   As usual, congratulations for a
job well done.

- "SET PCLOG n" enlarges the number of logged PC values that can be shown
with SHOW PCLOG.

This will be the big one for me as I want to be able to check it against
a similar (NEWLY added) feature in SDHX.SYS for RT-11.   Of course,
your PCLOG adds only about 8% to 10% additional time.   In SD:,
my initial benchmark suggests at least a HUNDRED times longer.
In addition, for SDHX.SYS, the current size of the PC Address
circular buffer is only 3000 PC Addresses which, although much
larger than the original 64, can't compete against a VERY large "n".

- New native "SYS" utilities for Linux, OS/2, and Windows, for making disks
(or flash drives) boot the stand-alone version of E11.   The Linux and
Windows versions try to notice if a drive (e.g. USB flash card that came
pre-partitioned) hasn't been made "active" and/or is missing the MBR
bootstrap, and fixes it (may require privs).   If anyone can please tell
me what sys calls in OS/2 will find out which physical drive owns a FAT
volume given the drive letter, I'd appreciate it!

- The stand-alone version's bootstrap supports USB drives (including flash).
Also there's a bootable CD, but since there's currently no ATAPI dev
driver or ISO9660 FS driver, it can't install E11 onto a hard drive, and
it requires a FAT volume to hold .DSK files etc.   So it's more of a proof
of concept than something useful (but it's an easy way to try out the
stand-alone version of E11).

Bug fixes and tweaks as usual (sorry about that .TAP seeking thing in V7.0!).

As usual, the Demo version can be downloaded from:

	http://www.dbit.com/demo.html

Jerome Fine