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117 lines
4.4 KiB
Markdown
117 lines
4.4 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 by
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Prime Computer from the early 70s through about 1993. Prime's initial
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business plan was to make systems compatible with the Honeywell x16
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family, which had then-recently been discontinued. Prime extended
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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 is
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big-endian), as well as re-optimizing the code for performance without
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the host processor having a large set of general-purpose registers.
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## Emulator Documentation
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Coming soon, we swear! There is a unix man page included in this
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repository.
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Github discussions are now enabled for this repository, and can be
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used to ask for help.
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## Public Systems
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There are a set of emulators available for public use. These may be
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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).
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A howto on installing PRIMOS in the emulator is
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[here](https://sysovl.info/reference_prime_drb_installing_primos.html).
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Discussion of adapting these instructions to
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22.1.4 has been occurring on the [cctalk mailing
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list](http://classiccmp.org/pipermail/cctalk/2020-March/052126.html).
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## Getting PRIMOS
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Distribution tape sets for four versions of PRIMOS,
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with small sets of layered products, are available from
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[sysovl.info](https://sysovl.info/downloads_prime_primedist.html):
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* Rev 21.0.6, including BASIC, FTN, BRMS, INFORMATION
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* Rev 23.2.0, including BASIC, FTN, MIDASPLUS, DRB, DTB, FS_RECOVER, PL1_LIBRARY
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* Rev 23.4.Y2K,R1, including BASIC, FTN, MIDASPLUS, DRB, DTB, FS_RECOVER, PL1_LIBRARY
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* Rev 24.0.0.r15, including BASIC, FTN, MIDASPLUS, DRB, DTB, FS_RECOVER, PL1_LIBRARY
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Tapes for two versions of PRIMOS (these are not clean distribution sets)
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are available from Bitsavers:
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* [Rev 22.1.4](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/primos_22.1.4.zip) [has issues, written with newer magsav, can't restore itself]
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* [Rev 22.1.4 repacked](https://yagi.h-net.org/m2214repack.tar.gz) [use this instead, resaved with Rev. 22 magsav]
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* [Rev 19.?](http://bitsavers.org/bits/Prime/pps/03_log.tape_I=boot_II=iptpal.tap.gz) [a backup from an installed system]
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## Pre-compiled binaries
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We'd prefer that you build your own from the source tree, but if that's
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not possible, a set of pre-compiled binaries is available. Included are:
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* Linux i386
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* Linux amd64
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* Linux armhf (RasPi / BeagleBone)
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* FreeBSD amd64
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* Solaris amd64
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[download](https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/emulator/embinaries.20200504.tar.gz)
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## Sample System Images
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A set of sample system images derived from the public emulators can
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be downloaded to get you started. These tarballs preserve sparse
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allocation ("holes"), so that uninitialized space in the disk images
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does not occupy actual space. You may need to tell `tar` to preserve
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this sparse allocation when you extract, e.g. with the `-S` option.
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The current
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[tarball](https://sysovl.info/pages/blobs/emulator/p50em_samplemachines_v5.tar)
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is 150,029,183 bytes, and its sha256sum is
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f5b8008d7c53171f50ad95dd5cc537ba48ca419049518f8ea28deee009c6541a.
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(gzip compression would only reduce this by ~400 kilobytes.)
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V5 adds the source code for PRIMOS 19.2, and the diagnostics programs,
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to that image.
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V4 corrected ACL problems in the Rev19 and Rev24 images.
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V3 removed additional junk, and rebuilt the disk images as 600
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MB drives, split 30/10 heads filesystem/paging. It also included
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enhancements to the wrapper scripts: directory independence and the
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ability to run the `runem` script from a terminal.
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