Hi Sampsa,
I made some corrections and I think it is ready, unless you have
further suggestions for improvement. You can edit it as you like
and add further screenshots (I don't think I have dtterm). Perhaps
this depends on Mark Wickens' contribution. Is it something to put
in http://retrotron.sampsa.com/magazine/ ? Or I can have a link to
this material on my own web server?
Files are attached.
Erik
On Sat, Nov 02, 2013 at 07:21:55PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Cool, that's like 2-3 pages of material.
I could throw in a screenshot of DTTERM as well, and say this is how it looks on a real DEC VMS box..:)
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 2 Nov 2013, at 18:51, Erik Olofsen <e.olofsen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
Hi Sampsa,
This is a first draft, where I have a reference to Mark's contribution.
http://rullf2.xs4all.nl/sg/doc.html
Mark: would you perhaps like to be co-author?
Erik
On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 04:41:34PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Yeah go for it. The more the better.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 1 Nov 2013, at 13:44, Erik Olofsen <e.olofsen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
Hi Sampsa,
In case you think it is interesting, I can write something about my
Sixel image viewer.
See also below for something that may be fun for the Retrotron.
(The implementation and the game rules are at alpha stage.)
Erik
---
It is hard to imagine, but perhaps even Captain Kirk sometimes played
a Sudoku before boldly going where no man has gone before:
http://rullf2.xs4all.nl/sst/sudoku.html
There are nine entities in the Sudoku chart, but a Starfleet ship
may be a Galileo, Faerie Queene, or an Enterprise; a Klingon may
be an ordinary one, a Commmander or a Super Commander. (This depends
on a Greek-Latin square).
The Sudoku is played backwards, because the Federation is under attack.
Entities are removed at random if they take up a unique position.
In a fight, the strength matters, but if you take up a unique position,
you are trapped and may be destroyed.
It was good that Kirk practiced in a game first, because in the first
battle he lets the Galileo fight with a Klingon Super Commander.
Next there are some easy battles; in the one but last battle, a
Romulan ship disappeared from Quadrant 1 - 2, Sector 3 - 1.
Captain Kirk did not notice this in the next battle at Quadrant 1 - 2.
The Enterprise has nowhere to go, but the Commander can move to Sector
3 - 1, and Kirk loses another ship...
He then decides he might be better at real missions :)
---
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:39:56PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Mark,
Sorry, no DECwrite, I won't even deal with docx :)
ASCII txt and RTF with basic formatting only, and if you want pictures / diagrams, mark the spot where you'd like it wrt to the text with [* ... *], for example:
--- SNIP ---
This is my newest MLP, Candlestick, still in it's box: [** candle.jpg **] I prefer to keep my MLPs boxed since I don't feel I am ready for the type of relationship touching would entail.
--- SNIP ---
(No offence to bronies out there intended, just had to make something up the spot.)
Then just send me a ZIP of text and all the images.
If you have an editor that can create RTFD, you can dispense with the [* ... *] notation as the doc will have the pics in the right place (remember that RTFDs are bundles and need to be zipped).
The magazine is laid out in columns like a "proper" magazine (easier to read) but it's hard to promise EXACTLY where a picture will go in your submission. We'll run the submission by you before going live of course, and correct it as much as possible
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 22:28, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
On 30/10/2013 20:26, Sampsa Laine wrote:
This version specifically, at the start of the DEChead/HECnet etc section of the magazine:
http://www.sampsa.com/DECMonkey.jpg
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 22:12, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
This is going in the exit retrotron magazine.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 17:53, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
https://db.tt/G5b8sbRX
Sent from Samsung Mobile
Cool. I may get round to writing you something at some point.
Do you accept DECwrite files? ;)
Mark.
--
http://www.wickensonline.co.ukhttp://hecnet.euhttp://declegacy.org.ukhttp://retrochallenge.nethttps://twitter.com/#!/%40urbancamo
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
Remember, the OSX stuff, darwin, etc - really was before Jobs.
Or between Jobs ... ironically while Jobs himself was between jobs.
(I'm sure this has been covered.)
Let me talk to the compiler guys next time I'm in my NH office [I usually
work from home].
Thanks!!
I fear its something like a
special tree walker that generates macho files from the internal form.
... which is what try to I'd write myself if I understood WLINK's internal
form. But the code's barely commented and I'm too dumb to trace it out.
But they may have some tools. You never know - you're not the first guy
that has had to deal with this.
My suspicion is that every guy who's *successfully* dealt with this kind of
thing is in such a foul mood by the time it's working that they aren't really
up for paving the way for the next person to smack into it.
Paul might have some suggestions.
[I also know he loathes the Microsoft format].
He sounds smart! :-) There are few truly beautiful formats, although
the VMS .OBJ format was way above average from what I remember reading --
the linker was an RPN calculator and could do anything, so they didn't fall
into the usual trap of special-casing the 17 situations the then-in-vogue
compiler wanted and figuring that's good enough, until someone needs an
18th case and now what?
The
GNU guys were actually no very helpful here. They defined their own crap
and the confer everything to that.
That baffles me. I haven't checked in ages but every time I do, binutils
is all things to all people *except* there's no support for OMF-386 or
any of the .EXE formats. I'm not surprised that that crowd is a little
snippy about MICROS~1 but it still seems like it's better for the tool to
do what needs doing even if it's a bit distasteful.
As I argue at Intel, when you build a tool for a specific environment, you
need to be "socially compliant" with the target. That means you need to
deal with native formats, native installers, etc.
That's a really good way of putting it. I use tons of GNU stuff on Linux
but not on DOS (seems to crash a lot) and it's uncomfortable on Windows
because the pieces so often don't fit together. I mean a lot of it won't
even write normal text files with CRLFs! Sure people feel really strongly
about stupid stuff like that but ... when in Rome ...
Well if you have linux already - *BSD should be easy.
Almost. Here's where my assembly language extremism gets me -- instead
of having wrapper routines named read or fork or kill, my code is all full
of places that load up the registers and do INT 80h, which would instead
have to ... what is it? Push a bunch of junk on the stack, load EAX, and
INT 40h? And is stack cleanup my problem? It's mechanically but annoyingly
different, is my point. But yes the actual calls should be 99% the same
(probably even a lot of the syscall #s), except maybe some funny business
like sigaltstack or modify_ldt or clone or who knows what that might have
local differences.
Where they differ is in UI
and specifically GUI.
Well then, good news! I haven't been doing a GUI on Linux, again due to
linker issues (no problem on Win32 or OS/2 since WLINK does support imports
there). I looked into writing an X client entirely from scratch and ...
nah, I think waiting around for someone smarter than me to fix WLINK might
be a lot faster.
That said, since you said the DOS version is the native version, I fear it
might be huge surgery to get there and not worth the effort.
Not worth the ... huh? I did a port to OS/2 for chrissake. *Recently!*
Pointless effort is its own reward.
Speaking of which, I hate to say it (I've had my heart broken SO many
times) but I'm actually excited about the Intel Galileo board. They're
positioning it against the Arduino because they've lost their !@*&^% minds,
but apparently it's a semi normal (screen shots show it booting to grub,
with enough mismapped characters to imply that it's a whole imaginary
VGA with a serial console on top of it???) 400 MHz Intel PC, for $69.
I might be all wrong about its vanilla-ness (what little documentation
there is seems to be trying to downplay the idea that it's anything more
than a ridiculously overpowered Arduino knockoff), and if UEFI means UEFI
*only* and it can't boot legacy stuff all (and there may be all kinds of
rules above that about what's missing or non-standard) then it'd be a ton
of work figuring out how to run stand-alone on UEFI (they've got Linux in
there but as always I think that misses the point of embedded systems,
and it's absolute lunacy if all they want to do is emulate an Arduino).
But E11 on a 400 MHz x86 should handily beat a real PDP-11/70. (I've
still got a grudge with the RPi people so I'd love to see this.)
It used to be $65 with delivery two weeks from now, now it's $69 at the end
of the month, and those both may be just the beginning ... but still, cute!
John Wilson
D Bit
Even if I weren't afraid of Apple because of their "app store" monopolistic
grabbiness (they used to be so nice in the old days),
Yup - any developers just ignore them and don't both with their stilly app store. Many I know flip off Apple on that. Jobs was always bad about that actually, he had to leave and come back for the gates to open. Remember, the OSX stuff, darwin, etc - really was before Jobs.
Used to Jailbreak my phones back in the day but nowadays there is nothing that I can't get on the App Store for free or a few bucks. So whoever this many developers are, I really don't care about their work :)
As for Jobs, uhh, OS X is an extension of OpenStep which Apple they got the rights to when they acquired Next and they brought Jobs in. What are you talking about?
OS X isn't a closed environment (I seriously don't feel any more restricted on my OS X host OS than any Linux VM) it just isn't open source. I get access to both OooShiny(tm) Cocoa apps that install by dragging into a folder, and either packages via apt or BSD ports.
Somebody tell me how I'm being oppressed again?
I LOATHED Apple pre-OS X, had to learn C in Uni on that piece of shit OS which would crash the whole OS on a pointer error and then take 20 mins to boot in a networked environment
But Nextstep, Openstep and now OS X are simply my favourite desktop environments. Oh and it's Unix underneath. And the hardware is a tad expensiveish and I'm worried about the future of the 17" MBP line (I don't want a retina display, I can't see that well anyway, I want a big physical damn thing :)
If OS X didn't exist, I'd probably be running a laptop with a hacked-up version of OpenStep 4+ or even GNUStep.
sampsa
Yuk. I would think that a OS interface library might help here. Linux, Mac OS and *BSD are all pretty much the same for the basic I/O and all three support most of the basic low level OS stuff from open/close/read/write to mmap/semphores etc.. Where they differ is in UI and specifically GUI. I wonder if you considered something like QT for everything but DOS, I would like the amount of OS specific code you had to deal with I would hope would drop substantially.
QT would look like ass, frankly, esp on OS X.
I'd go for SDL and just make the UI a framebuffer thats a DOS screen with the same inputs as the DOS version. No need to write any manuals either :)
Or SDL and a Star Trek interface or whatever, but all the cross-platform GUI stuff looks TERRIBLE on OS X.
Sampsa
below
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 2:10 PM, John Wilson <wilson at dbit.com> wrote:
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
>Much as as I like *BSD, I'd rather see OSx ;-)
Even if I weren't afraid of Apple because of their "app store" monopolistic
grabbiness (they used to be so nice in the old days),
Yup - any developers just ignore them and don't both with their stilly app store. Many I know flip off Apple on that. Jobs was always bad about that actually, he had to leave and come back for the gates to open. Remember, the OSX stuff, darwin, etc - really was before Jobs.
I wasn't able to find a reasonable way to get Mach-O executables from OMF-386 .OBJ files.
Let me talk to the compiler guys next time I'm in my NH office [I usually work from home]. The guy that was the brains behind the VMS linker is a very good friend of mine. [Paul Winalski] He had to deal with Microsoft OMF crap when the DEC GEM compilers started to generate Winders code. Since the Intel compilers are all native on the OSX, have to do something for the Mac, I just don't know what it is. I fear its something like a special tree walker that generates macho files from the internal form. But they may have some tools. You never know - you're not the first guy that has had to deal with this. Paul might have some suggestions.
[I also know he loathes the Microsoft format].
Writing a new linker seems like a great way not to have fun!
Right - again you would like there would be a reason way to do this. The GNU guys were actually no very helpful here. They defined their own crap and the confer everything to that.
As I argue at Intel, when you build a tool for a specific environment, you need to be "socially compliant" with the target. That means you need to deal with native formats, native installers, etc. It's ok to use an interface library, but if you don't make it socially compatible, you are dead.
>On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
>
>> Then how about NetBSD on x86???
I really would like to attack the *BSDs ...
Well if you have linux already - *BSD should be easy. Again maybe I can help you here. *BSD is really my native tongue, I use Mac OS because its is really BSD under the covers.
I investigate periodically but I just can't decide which I'd regret more: conditionalizing the
hell out of 11K lines of Linux-specific support code, or editing a copy
into ~11K lines of BSD-specific code that's easy reading but needs to
be maintained in parallel. Um, or I could do both? Nah. It would be fun to get working though.
Yuk. I would think that a OS interface library might help here. Linux, Mac OS and *BSD are all pretty much the same for the basic I/O and all three support most of the basic low level OS stuff from open/close/read/write to mmap/semphores etc.. Where they differ is in UI and specifically GUI. I wonder if you considered something like QT for everything but DOS, I would like the amount of OS specific code you had to deal with I would hope would drop substantially.
That said, since you said the DOS version is the native version, I fear it might be huge surgery to get there and not worth the effort.
But I agree, would be fun to have.
Let me know if I can help you. No sure I can, but you never know.
Clem
On Sat, 2 Nov 2013, John Wilson wrote:
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
Much as as I like *BSD, I'd rather see OSx ;-)
Even if I weren't afraid of Apple because of their "app store" monopolistic
grabbiness (they used to be so nice in the old days), I wasn't able to
find a reasonable way to get Mach-O executables from OMF-386 .OBJ files.
Writing a new linker seems like a great way not to have fun!
Yup. It's not a way to have fun. ;)
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
Then how about NetBSD on x86???
I really would like to attack the *BSDs ... I investigate periodically
but I just can't decide which I'd regret more: conditionalizing the
hell out of 11K lines of Linux-specific support code, or editing a copy
into ~11K lines of BSD-specific code that's easy reading but needs to
be maintained in parallel. Um, or I could do both? Nah. It would be
fun to get working though.
How linux-specific? The linuxulator compat layer emulates some syscalls...except not raw libpcap...I've not quite managed to figure that out. I was trying klh10 though.
John Wilson
D Bit
--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net Personal stuff
http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>
Much as as I like *BSD, I'd rather see OSx ;-)
Even if I weren't afraid of Apple because of their "app store" monopolistic
grabbiness (they used to be so nice in the old days), I wasn't able to
find a reasonable way to get Mach-O executables from OMF-386 .OBJ files.
Writing a new linker seems like a great way not to have fun!
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
Then how about NetBSD on x86???
I really would like to attack the *BSDs ... I investigate periodically
but I just can't decide which I'd regret more: conditionalizing the
hell out of 11K lines of Linux-specific support code, or editing a copy
into ~11K lines of BSD-specific code that's easy reading but needs to
be maintained in parallel. Um, or I could do both? Nah. It would be
fun to get working though.
John Wilson
D Bit
Hi Sampsa,
This is a first draft, where I have a reference to Mark's contribution.
http://rullf2.xs4all.nl/sg/doc.html
Mark: would you perhaps like to be co-author?
Erik
On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 04:41:34PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Yeah go for it. The more the better.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 1 Nov 2013, at 13:44, Erik Olofsen <e.olofsen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
Hi Sampsa,
In case you think it is interesting, I can write something about my
Sixel image viewer.
See also below for something that may be fun for the Retrotron.
(The implementation and the game rules are at alpha stage.)
Erik
---
It is hard to imagine, but perhaps even Captain Kirk sometimes played
a Sudoku before boldly going where no man has gone before:
http://rullf2.xs4all.nl/sst/sudoku.html
There are nine entities in the Sudoku chart, but a Starfleet ship
may be a Galileo, Faerie Queene, or an Enterprise; a Klingon may
be an ordinary one, a Commmander or a Super Commander. (This depends
on a Greek-Latin square).
The Sudoku is played backwards, because the Federation is under attack.
Entities are removed at random if they take up a unique position.
In a fight, the strength matters, but if you take up a unique position,
you are trapped and may be destroyed.
It was good that Kirk practiced in a game first, because in the first
battle he lets the Galileo fight with a Klingon Super Commander.
Next there are some easy battles; in the one but last battle, a
Romulan ship disappeared from Quadrant 1 - 2, Sector 3 - 1.
Captain Kirk did not notice this in the next battle at Quadrant 1 - 2.
The Enterprise has nowhere to go, but the Commander can move to Sector
3 - 1, and Kirk loses another ship...
He then decides he might be better at real missions :)
---
On Wed, Oct 30, 2013 at 10:39:56PM +0200, Sampsa Laine wrote:
Mark,
Sorry, no DECwrite, I won't even deal with docx :)
ASCII txt and RTF with basic formatting only, and if you want pictures / diagrams, mark the spot where you'd like it wrt to the text with [* ... *], for example:
--- SNIP ---
This is my newest MLP, Candlestick, still in it's box: [** candle.jpg **] I prefer to keep my MLPs boxed since I don't feel I am ready for the type of relationship touching would entail.
--- SNIP ---
(No offence to bronies out there intended, just had to make something up the spot.)
Then just send me a ZIP of text and all the images.
If you have an editor that can create RTFD, you can dispense with the [* ... *] notation as the doc will have the pics in the right place (remember that RTFDs are bundles and need to be zipped).
The magazine is laid out in columns like a "proper" magazine (easier to read) but it's hard to promise EXACTLY where a picture will go in your submission. We'll run the submission by you before going live of course, and correct it as much as possible
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 22:28, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
On 30/10/2013 20:26, Sampsa Laine wrote:
This version specifically, at the start of the DEChead/HECnet etc section of the magazine:
http://www.sampsa.com/DECMonkey.jpg
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 22:12, Sampsa Laine <sampsa at mac.com> wrote:
This is going in the exit retrotron magazine.
sampsa <sampsa at mac.com>
mobile +358 40 7208932
On 30 Oct 2013, at 17:53, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
https://db.tt/G5b8sbRX
Sent from Samsung Mobile
Cool. I may get round to writing you something at some point.
Do you accept DECwrite files? ;)
Mark.
--
http://www.wickensonline.co.ukhttp://hecnet.euhttp://declegacy.org.ukhttp://retrochallenge.nethttps://twitter.com/#!/%40urbancamo
Much as as I like *BSD, I'd rather see OSx ;-)
Clem
On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 7:49 AM, Steve Davidson <jeep at scshome.net> wrote:
Then how about NetBSD on x86???
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of John Wilson
Sent: Fri 11/1/2013 12:07
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Ersatz-11 PDP-11 emulator V7.0
From: Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net>
>Next you just need to support non-x86 architectures. ;)
I'm not sure "need" is the word for that! :-)
(358,000 lines of assembly code...)
John Wilson
D Bit
Then how about NetBSD on x86???
-Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE on behalf of John Wilson
Sent: Fri 11/1/2013 12:07
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Ersatz-11 PDP-11 emulator V7.0
From: Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net>
Next you just need to support non-x86 architectures. ;)
I'm not sure "need" is the word for that! :-)
(358,000 lines of assembly code...)
John Wilson
D Bit
