TYMCOM-X Project Status

• Q: Why did the first attempts fail? A: 14035E.SAV and others expected a KMC11 co-processor and custom microcode for UUILDB and UUIDPb; two op-codes that read and wrote in KMC11 format.
• Q: What was the workaround? A: Redefine IFKMC and IFNKMC and re-assemble from sources.
• Q: What failed then? A: CLOCK1.MAC was corrupted, and jury-rigged to work with an older version.
• Q: Did that work? A: No level 7 interrupts, no incrementing of UPTIME or reading the IRING.
• Q: How was that fixed? A: With help from the simh github team, found a part of ONCE that was using a fullword quantity before its page had been mapped; it set the interval timer to zero, which acted differently on NetBSD than on the others.
• Q: Working now? A: No, the login got immediately zapped. The code to change from super-SHUT to plain SHUT was inside an IFKMC conditional. Fixed.
• Q: What about DZ11 support? A: When DZKON is enabled, login at the console is done by simply hitting RETURN. The DZ11 lines respond to telnet by echoing characters, but no logins.
• Q: Now what? A: Can get logged in, but attempts to .RUN MTA:TITO.SAV are failing. The same tape can be read by TOPS-10 using the COPY command, but not by the RUN command.
• Q: Run TITO from disk? A: Modified ONCDSK to allocate and create empty SYS:TITO00.SAV. Used TOPS10 to put TITO there via FILDDT.
• Q: Did that work? A: No TITO appeared to be hung, but it was looking for position 1 which was not on the TITO tape. Giving it the argument 301-e worked, was able to restore from both savesets in less than one minute each.
• Q: What about BOOTS? A: gfd ks2020 and run ksfefs.sav, but that overwrote the wrong pages.
• Q: Why? A: DSKCHR was returning a pointer to the RIB of FEFILE.SYS instead of length and starting page number.
• Q: Workaround? A: Modify REFSTR to return hard-coded pointer to the FEFILE.SYS data pages.
• Q: Current status? A: Can load TYMCOM-X from disk and login on the console. DSKCLN does not run automatically, otherwise all is well (for logins on the console only). X14 is a two-pack system, X17 is a three-pack system. X95 is a single-pack system for debugging DZ11 logins.

— Joe Smith 2018/04/13 03:59

Both the version for Windows (run via CMD.EXE) and Cygwin (compiled on Windows 7) produce the same results as the Linux and FreeBSD/NetBSD.

Linux% cd; rsync -av pdp10/simh-ks/ tty:pdp10/sim-ks/

Make a compressed tar file of everything in the simh-ks directory. Copy the txz file from Linux to Google Drive.

When creating a tar file, note that “j” (bzip2) produces much better compression than “z” for *.dsk files. (Using capital “J” compresses better, but is not standard on MacOS.)

Linux% tar cvfj /b/share/data/tymcom-x.tbz simh-ks/*

Place in a private directory on Google Drive, right-click to get a URL to share.

To share a working system, enter one of the following commands:

Linux% tar cvfj /b/share/data/3-pack.tbz simh-ks/pdp10* simh-ks/x17* simh-ks/readme.*
Linux% tar cvfj /b/share/data/2-pack.tbz simh-ks/pdp10* simh-ks/x14* simh-ks/readme.*
Linux% tar cvfj /b/share/data/1-pack.tbz simh-ks/pdp10* simh-ks/x95* simh-ks/dz11* simh-ks/newmon.*

Overview page, SIMH Setup page, TYMCOM-X Startup page, TITO on disk page, Status page.