Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements
Hi! One solution to consider, besides a bunch of small CPU's of personal choice each having USB-interface and N signals I/O (thus requiring some USB-hub's), or alternatively using the same way of thinking, but a CAN-bus starting with a RS-232 to CAN converter from the PC would be: Use the PC parallel port (bidirectional). For output, have a decoding circuit (in plain logic or in an embedded CPU of favourite...) and the required number of 8-bit latches. Use a RESET control signal to reset the counter, thereafter sending out 8-bit words on D0-D7, having the strobe select the proper latch to take next strobe to store the data. This will not look like a shift-register, but more like a parallel printer... 64 bit to write out would require 8 writes. One could also imagine a general card with LPT-in and LPT-out that after reset swallows the first 4 characters to come (and make 32 bits available for outputs) and sends the rest of a stream down the line. Next card in line would take the first 4 characters that arrive into it ... The cards would be identical to each other to design! For input, a similar method might be usable, but here, I'm not sure which signal to use for strobing next register. This should all be quire reasonable to implement though! In the good old days. Texas instruments made the 9995 CPU, which I think had some kind of serial 1-bit I/O-interface bus, and they sold quite some different I/O-chips to attach. I never really learnt how this was designed and set-up, but friends of mine who played with these things were impressed (by then). I don't know how much of this that is still available to the open market of electonics... If anyone else in the list can give a 30 s class, I'd really appreceate it! All my best, Göran On 2010-12-07 16:05, Pontus Pihlgren wrote: On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 09:21:43AM -0500, Ken Cornetet wrote: Keep in mind that the printer port on regular old PCs can be used for a few lines of general input and output. I used to do this on a regular basis back in the DOS days. Looks easy under linux too: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/IO-Port-Programming.html It's a solution I'm considering, but I have a concern. Besides the PDP-15 panel I also have a PDP-12 panel. The PDP-12 panel has arround 120 lights. So while I think it will be possible to control them by cascading shift registers, I'm worried it will be to slow. Having more I/O pins and narrower shift registers would speed things up. I would love to be proven wrong here, in which case I can dig out a Pentium III with parallel port and start experimenting. - Pontus. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements
On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 09:21:43AM -0500, Ken Cornetet wrote: Keep in mind that the printer port on regular old PCs can be used for a few lines of general input and output. I used to do this on a regular basis back in the DOS days. Looks easy under linux too: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/IO-Port-Programming.html It's a solution I'm considering, but I have a concern. Besides the PDP-15 panel I also have a PDP-12 panel. The PDP-12 panel has arround 120 lights. So while I think it will be possible to control them by cascading shift registers, I'm worried it will be to slow. Having more I/O pins and narrower shift registers would speed things up. I would love to be proven wrong here, in which case I can dig out a Pentium III with parallel port and start experimenting. - Pontus. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements
From: Pontus Pihlgren pon...@update.uu.se Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2010 4:05 PM To: Ken Cornetet ken.corne...@kimball.com Cc: simh@trailing-edge.com Subject: Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements On Tue, Dec 07, 2010 at 09:21:43AM -0500, Ken Cornetet wrote: Keep in mind that the printer port on regular old PCs can be used for a few lines of general input and output. I used to do this on a regular basis back in the DOS days. Looks easy under linux too: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/IO-Port-Programming.html It's a solution I'm considering, but I have a concern. Besides the PDP-15 panel I also have a PDP-12 panel. The PDP-12 panel has arround 120 lights. So while I think it will be possible to control them by cascading shift registers, I'm worried it will be to slow. Having more I/O pins and narrower shift registers would speed things up. I would love to be proven wrong here, in which case I can dig out a Pentium III with parallel port and start experimenting. - Pontus. Hi Pontus, Vince and I developed the Blinkenlight boards some years ago. It uses a Core board with 6809 CPU and an I/O Board that has 64 digital outputs (8 LS374 latches) and 64 digital inputs (8 LS373). It is capable of cascading up to 6 I/O Boards to one Core Board. But the design is from 2004 or so ... have a look at this: http://www.j-hoppe.de/PDP-11/PDP-11_70_console_panel/11_70_panel_-_Physical/11_70_panel_-_physical.html - Henk. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements
Has anyone have any experience of running on an ARM cpu? I'm asking since I'll need some I/O pins to connect with the real console I have and there are some nice ARM based development boards out there with lots of I/O. I've built the pdp11 emulator for my android phone (ARM). Ran fine, though I didn't make any performance measurements. - Pontus For a small OS, TinyCore Linux makes a nice distribution for throwing together a small image for a dedicated purpose. Tim Newsham | www.thenewsh.com/~newsham | thenewsh.blogspot.com ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
Re: [Simh] Hardware Requirements
2010-12-07 00:34, Jason Stevens skrev: Just about any 32bit machine will do, heck SIMH even builds on MS-DOS! Sounds promising. speed is always relative... I first started with the pdp-11 running unix v7 on a Pentium 60... Like everything else, faster is always better, and you may as well download it and try it. Will do! You can find exe's and various OS's here: http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/ What were you looking to run on the PDP-15? I'm sure others can give specifics? Not sure :) I'm reading up on the PDP-15 right now. There seems to be a few options. XVM/RSX sound appealing, since I already have some RSX knowledge. Regards, Pontus. ___ Simh mailing list Simh@trailing-edge.com http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh
