On 2018-04-09 22:16, Mark Pizzolato wrote:
On Monday, April 9, 2018 at 11:57 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
I think the whole concept of deriving the number of controllers based on units
in simh is wrong.
I think one should configure each controller separately, including being able to
tell what CSR and vector it has, and how many units should be connected one
way or another, and any other relevant information.
Well, that was not how these things were written long ago. What you're
suggesting would require a rather dramatic rewrite of essentially all of the
Unibus and Qbus devices. If you've got the time, please go head. :-)
I know. I still consider it a design flaw. And no, I do not have the
time. :-)
For serial ports, that
obviously means that you might connect one line to a physical line, another to
a telnet listener, and another one not connected to anything at all.
You can actually do that right now. Each line on any multiplexer device can
have a separate TCP listener or be connected to a remote TCP port or to a
local serial port, or be part of the pool of ports which may optionally be
configured to listen for the mux device.
Right. But I cannot skip a few lines. And simh really dislikes me if the
number is not a multiple of 8.
And exactly
how many units/lines the controller have should also be a factor here then.
This also comes back to disks, where I might not want to configure four disks
on one controller, but maybe one controller per disk.
The device simulation for DEC's disk controllers usually default to the
maximum number of disk devices each controller was capable of supporting.
Each of those device units can be disabled so if you want one controller per
disk, you absolutely can.
Up to 4 separate MSCP controllers can be configured today (with up to 16
separate drives). A single RP controller with up to 8 drives is available.
This functionality has solved most user problems without issue. If you've
got a simulation need for more than this, you can extend or rewrite what's
there now. Since configurations that can be simulated today can far exceed
what was ever possible on any real system, it seems like a lot of work to
address the theoretical flexibility you're asking for. :-)
I'd like to have more than 4 disks on one MSCP controller. There is
absolutely no reason for the limit of 4. That's just an implementation
detail on some of the existing MSCP controllers, but there are MSCP
controllers who also take more than 4 disks.
And that exists in real life, and I cannot do that (and a bunch of other
setups) in simh, so I'd say that simh is rather more limited than real
life. :-)
Same story for TMSCP.
Johnny
- Mark
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
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