mirror of
https://github.com/prirun/p50em.git
synced 2026-02-03 06:50:28 +00:00
84 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
# Prime 50-Series Emulator
|
|
|
|
## What Is This?
|
|
|
|
This is a software emulator for a minicomputer architecture sold
|
|
by Prime Computer from the early 70s through about 1993. Prime's
|
|
initial business plan was to make systems compatible with the
|
|
Honeywell x16 family, which had then-recently been discontinued.
|
|
Prime extended the architecture heavily.
|
|
|
|
## Emulator History
|
|
|
|
Beginning in 2005, Jim Wilcoxson developed an emulator for Prime
|
|
Computer's 50-Series architecture. The emulator originally ran on
|
|
the PowerPC architecture. In late 2011, Jim ported it so it would
|
|
run on x86. This entailed solving endianness issues (The 50-Series
|
|
is big-endian), as well as re-optimizing the code for performance
|
|
without the host processor having a large set of general-purpose
|
|
registers.
|
|
|
|
## Emulator Documentation
|
|
|
|
Coming soon, we swear!
|
|
|
|
## Public Systems
|
|
|
|
There are a set of emulators available for public use. These may
|
|
be accessed via `telnet` to the appropriate port on `em.prirun.com`.
|
|
|
|
| PRIMOS Revision | Port |
|
|
|-----------------|------|
|
|
| 18.3.1 | 8007 |
|
|
| 19.2 | 8001 |
|
|
| 20.2.8 | 8002 |
|
|
| 21.0.6 | 8003 |
|
|
| 22.1.4 | 8004 |
|
|
| 23.4.Y2K.R1 | 8005 |
|
|
| 24.0.0.r15 | 8006 |
|
|
|
|
For example, `telnet em.prirun.com 8001`.
|
|
|
|
## Prime History
|
|
|
|
Some information about the Prime company is available in the FAQ
|
|
which was assembled by denizens of the comp.sys.prime usenet group
|
|
and Info-Prime mailing list around the time Prime's 50-Series
|
|
business unit ceased to exist. A reformatted copy is available
|
|
[here](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_faq.html).
|
|
|
|
## Prime Documentation
|
|
|
|
A growing collection of Prime and related documentation is available
|
|
at [sysovl.info](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime.html). A howto
|
|
on installing PRIMOS in the emulator is [here](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_installing_primos.html).
|
|
Discussion of adapting these instructions to 22.1.4 has been occurring on the [cctalk mailing list](http://classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2020-March/052126.html).
|
|
|
|
## Getting PRIMOS
|
|
|
|
Two versions of PRIMOS are available from Bitsavers:
|
|
|
|
* [Rev 22.1.4](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/primos_22.1.4.zip) [has issues]
|
|
* [Rev 22.1.4 repacked](https://yagi.h-net.org/m2214repack.tar.gz) [use this]
|
|
* [Rev 19.?](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/pps/03_log.tape_I=boot_II=iptpal.tap.gz)
|
|
|
|
The Rev. 19 tape is a save from an installed system.
|
|
|
|
## Sample System Images
|
|
|
|
A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can
|
|
be downloaded to get you started. The
|
|
[tarball](https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/emulator/p50em_samplemachines_v4.tar)
|
|
is 143510751 bytes, and its sha256sum is
|
|
f7bf880cb1c7f32903ad85c4f52386cf2179067b8bfcf2c10b51c2e4dcf074dd.
|
|
(gzip compression would only reduce this by ~400 kilobytes.)
|
|
V4 corrects ACL problems in the Rev19 and Rev24 images.
|
|
|
|
V3 removes additional junk, and rebuilds the disk images as 600 MB
|
|
drives, split 30/10 heads filesystem/paging. This tarball preserves
|
|
sparse allocation ("holes"), so that uninitialized space in the disk
|
|
images does not occupy actual space. You may need to tell `tar` to
|
|
preserve this sparse allocation when you extract, e.g. with the `-S`
|
|
option. Also includes enhancements to the wrapper scripts: directory
|
|
independence and the ability to run the `runem` script from a terminal.
|