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72 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
72 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
# Prime 50-Series Emulator
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## What Is This?
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This is a software emulator for a minicomputer architecture sold
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by Prime Computer from the early 70s through about 1993. Prime's
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initial business plan was to make systems compatible with the
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Honeywell x16 family, which had then-recently been discontinued.
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Prime extended the architecture heavily.
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## Emulator History
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Beginning in 2005, Jim Wilcoxson developed an emulator for Prime
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Computer's 50-Series architecture. The emulator originally ran on
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the PowerPC architecture. In late 2011, Jim ported it so it would
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run on x86. This entailed solving endianness issues (The 50-Series
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is big-endian), as well as re-optimizing the code for performance
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without the host processor having a large set of general-purpose
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registers.
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## Emulator Documentation
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Coming soon, we swear!
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## Public Systems
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There are a set of emulators available for public use. These may
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be accessed via `telnet` to the appropriate port on `em.prirun.com`.
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| PRIMOS Revision | Port |
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|-----------------|------|
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| 18.3.1 | 8007 |
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| 19.2 | 8001 |
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| 20.2.8 | 8002 |
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| 21.0.6 | 8003 |
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| 22.1.4 | 8004 |
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| 23.4.Y2K.R1 | 8005 |
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| 24.0.0.r15 | 8006 |
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For example, `telnet em.prirun.com 8001`.
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## Prime History
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Some information about the Prime company is available in the FAQ
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which was assembled by denizens of the comp.sys.prime usenet group
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and Info-Prime mailing list around the time Prime's 50-Series
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business unit ceased to exist. A reformatted copy is available
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[here](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_faq.html).
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## Prime Documentation
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A growing collection of Prime and related documentation is available
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at [sysovl.info](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime.html). A howto
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on installing PRIMOS in the emulator is [here](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_installing_primos.html).
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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).
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## Getting PRIMOS
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Two versions of PRIMOS are available from Bitsavers:
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* [Rev 22.1.4](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/primos_22.1.4.zip) [has issues]
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* [Rev 22.1.4 repacked](https://yagi.h-net.org/m2214repack.tar.gz) [use this]
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* [Rev 19.?](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/pps/03_log.tape_I=boot_II=iptpal.tap.gz)
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The Rev. 19 tape is a save from an installed system.
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## Sample System Images
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A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can be
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downloaded to get you started. The [tarball](https://yagi.h-net.org/p50em_samplemachines_v2.tar.gz)
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is 291913284 bytes, and its sha256sum is 76bfde3560bfdde6f2ea47ed2abd9d4f09de04dc1c805c751bf51510adb5909a. V2 removes an extraneous disk image from the Rev 18 directory. We may rebuild these later and distribute them individually in a more formal fashion.
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