[HECnet] Ersatz-11 V7.1

[Brian Hechinger]

That is one hell of a list of features. Especially for a point release!

I'll never forget you (John) telling me about E11 in your kitchen all those years ago. You continually impress me with this thing. :)

-brian

On Jun 2, 2014, at 19:19, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:


SuhWEET!!

On 06/02/2014 07:16 PM, 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:).

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

- 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

John Wilson
D Bit


-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA