QVSS support was done by Matt Burke (as part of the extra VAX models he 
implemented) and has been in the MicroVAX I and MicroVAX II simulators 
available on github for at least a year.

The video support provided uses the video, keyboard and mouse capabilities 
provided by libSDL.

Since we’ve only got the mono graphics of the QVSS video to worry about now the 
necessary interfaces to provide color capabilities haven’t been fully worked 
out, but should be not too hard to work out when necessary.

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
Behalf Of Hittner, David T (IS)
Sent: Friday, June 27, 2014 8:44 AM
To: Henry Bent
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Simh] EXT : Ultrix 1.0

AFAIK, the Q-Bus QVSS graphic video card(s) have not been simulated in SIMH, 
unless someone has done it recently.
QVSS mono graphics and QDSS color graphics were supported on the MicroVAX 1 
(KA610), MicroVAX 2 (KA630), MicroVAX 3 (KA65x), and VAX 4000 (KA670/690) 
series.
You’d have to map the graphics output to some fairly common graphics renderer 
for portability: X or QT are probably the best bets. X would be more 
universally available.

One of the 1-off simulators posted on the web really did simulate Rainbow or 
Pro350 graphics, but it only worked on windows, and I don’t think it was ever 
back-ported into the SIMH code base. It was based on an older SIMH 2.x release, 
I think.

I took a stab at writing the QDSS simulator using X once, but couldn’t find 
enough documentation to figure out what the QDSS card was doing. There’s a lot 
of weird pixel mapping going on.
I still have real QDSS boards in an  VAX 4000/500 to compare behavior with if 
anyone ever finds enough QDSS documentation for me.

--

Regarding the DEQNA – there were some early DEQNA boards that had less bits 
defined in the registers. It’s possible that Ultrix 1.0 sees the ‘wrong’ 
register state - undefined bits shouldn’t be tested and verified, but in 
practice, most OS’s *assume* that the undefined bits will be in a specific 
state at specific times, and will exit if the undefined bits aren’t in the 
‘correct’ state.

Dave

From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Henry Bent
Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2014 9:09 PM
To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
Subject: EXT :[Simh] Ultrix 1.0

I had success booting the Unix Archive's floppy distribution of Ultrix 1.0 on 
the MicroVAX 1 simulator.  It appears that the distribution there was only 
meant for a dual-RX50 MicroVAX 1 with an RD drive, and will not boot on any 
other machine.  RQ0 needs to be an RD51 or RD52, and RQ1 and RQ2 need to be 
RX50s.  TTI and TTO need to be 7 bit.  To boot the installer, put 
32m-1.0-bin/01 on RQ1 and 32m-1.0-bin/02 on RQ2.  The install goes cleanly, 
albeit with quite a bit of disk swapping - the installation disk set is 13 
floppies.
The QVSS is supported and will display some output on boot.  I haven't yet 
looked into what is needed to use it as the console (if that's possible?).

The kernel seems to support what I assume is the DEQNA - it has references to a 
qe device - but I can't figure out how to get it recognized.  Unfortunately 
there are no kernel config files in the distribution, so I have no idea if the 
stock kernel is expecting the controller at a non-standard address.  Any help 
with this would be greatly appreciated,
-Henry
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