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RX02 for QUniBone is ready ... now media questions

Joerg Hoppe

Experienced Member
Joined
Nov 10, 2014
Messages
111
Location
Goettingen, Germany
Hi all,

after RX01 now also the RX02 drive is emulated in UniBone + QBone.

The RX211+RX02 combo passes the ZRXF and ZRXD diags, and boots RT11.5.4

This is exciting, as now all the floppy-based software can be used.
For example, use QUniBone to emulate just the RX floppy system in a PDP-11,
then install software from RX image files onto the real machine.

Run ./update-code.sh and ./update-files.sh, as documented earlier.

The usual links to general documentation:
http://retrocmp.com/projects/unibone
http://retrocmp.com/projects/qbone
https://groups.google.com/g/unibone


Now I need help with some existing RX01/02 images on the web.

* While searching bitsavers and others I found RX02 images,
which seem not readable in my drive. Luckily, they fail also in SimH.
One reason is: the RX01/02 floppies have 77 tracks, but track 0 is not used by DEC.
So some images contain only tracks 1..76 and are not SimH compatible.
Usable "77 track" images have a size of 256.256 resp 512.512 bytes.

* However even with a track 0 correction I can not boot the stuff from
http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/floppyimages/dydp/
http://www.bitsavers.org/bits/DEC/pdp11/floppyimages/rx02/

Anybody got those running?

* Also I played with UCSD Pascal on an Apple II recently. Cool stuff!
I learned LSI11 was the devleopment machine for it.
Any pointers to disk images ?

thanks and kind regards,
Joerg
 
If you can emulate RX02 that would be great.
Some efforts are made to read REAL RX02 floppy's, but as those are a mix of FM and MFM, that a normal PC floppy diver card
can not handle.
There for, to my knowledge there is no possibility to read real 8" RX02 floppy through a real 8"drive attached to a normal PC.
So an image of a real FM MFM RX02 is not to be found yet.

http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/DEC_RX02
 
There for, to my knowledge there is no possibility to read real 8" RX02 floppy through a real 8"drive attached to a normal PC.
So an image of a real FM MFM RX02 is not to be found yet.

As of this week, there is now another set of DY images in bits/DEC/mixed_media/rx02
 
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>>> Also I played with UCSD Pascal on an Apple II recently. Cool stuff!
>>> I learned LSI11 was the devleopment machine for it.
>>> Any pointers to disk images ?

I am trying to find the same. The disks I have located only contain the incomplete source code for the LSI-11 interpreter.

If you look at the bottom of page http://pascal.hansotten.com/ucsd-p-system/ucsd-compiler-and-p-system/ you will see a link to "I.5 sources in text format". This link contains the text files for "mainop" and "procop" and various device bootstraps - but there are a few files missing I think. I have been slowly trying to piece the missing macros back together.

However, I have 'fallen over' a problem with the macro cross assembler. It seems to complain about something. It may be the text file formatting (I am using OS/X instead of DOS). Basically, the assembler complains when it tries to assemble a label! It is fine with my other source files though...

Dave
 
I have a number of PDP-8 and PDP-11 RX01 and RX02 images in my tree for my RX02_EMULATOR project.

Look here: https://github.com/AK6DN/rx02_emulator under disk_images

These images are 256,256 bytes for RX01 and 512,512 bytes for RX02. Full physical drive disk images, all tracks, all sectors.

They work under SIMH as well as on my emulator (of course).

Don
 
Note the images I posted a link to in the prior post are all taken as physical track:0-76/sector:1-26/byte:0-255 (for RX02) images.
So they are exactly 77*26*256=512,512 bytes total length.

Some other images may be posted in LOGICAL 512B block order as an image of the device,
or may be physical images that have skipped over track 0 which is 26*256 bytes in length.
These are NOT directly usable by SIMH for RX01/2 media.
494K images are 76*26*256=505,856=494*1024 total length.

Don
 
Hi Don,
I have a number of PDP-8 and PDP-11 RX01 and RX02 images in my tree for my RX02_EMULATOR project.

Look here: https://github.com/AK6DN/rx02_emulator under disk_images

These images are 256,256 bytes for RX01 and 512,512 bytes for RX02. Full physical drive disk images, all tracks, all sectors.

They work under SIMH as well as on my emulator (of course).

Don
I saw your repository earlier and used RT11.RX as my test RT11 boot indeed, thank you!

However I was neither able to boot XXDP.RX2, nor could I "DIR DY1:" to NEW_GAMES.RX2 or ADVENT_MUSC.RX2 under RT11 or
What do I miss?

kind regards,
Joerg

PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta REALCONS build Mar 18 2018 git commit id: $Format:
sim> do -v boot.ini
boot.ini-1> set cpu 11/23, 256K
boot.ini-3> set rx disable
boot.ini-4> set ry enabled
boot.ini-6> attach ry0 RT11.RX2
RY: buffering file in memory
boot.ini-6> ; attach ry0 XXDP.RX2
boot.ini-8> attach ry1 NEW_GAMES.RX2
RY: buffering file in memory
boot.ini-8> ; attach ry1 ADCENT_MUSIC.RX2
boot.ini-11> reset all
boot.ini-13> boot ry0

RT-11SB V05.07

.R MSCPCK

.dir dy1:

?DIR-F-Invalid directory

.


.
 
I am not sure those disk images have the source code to the PDP P-code emulator though (although I haven't looked yet - so I may be speaking prematurely)...

I have, however, managed to get the source code I have been trying to resurrect to 'almost' assemble.

The MACRO-11 cross assembler I am using appears to have a few bugs - resulting in it 'hanging' whilst trying to assemble, or just generating a load of error messages when it shouldn't be.

I am a few definitions and macros missing, the start-up code and the trap handler code.

Happy to share if this would be of use to anyone...

I am trying to build a system for a KXT11-CA using the second serial port as a virtual TU58 device. Why not?!

Dave
 
Hi Don,

I saw your repository earlier and used RT11.RX as my test RT11 boot indeed, thank you!

However I was neither able to boot XXDP.RX2, nor could I "DIR DY1:" to NEW_GAMES.RX2 or ADVENT_MUSC.RX2 under RT11 or
What do I miss?

kind regards,
Joerg

PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta REALCONS build Mar 18 2018 git commit id: $Format:
sim> do -v boot.ini
boot.ini-1> set cpu 11/23, 256K
boot.ini-3> set rx disable
boot.ini-4> set ry enabled
boot.ini-6> attach ry0 RT11.RX2
RY: buffering file in memory
boot.ini-6> ; attach ry0 XXDP.RX2
boot.ini-8> attach ry1 NEW_GAMES.RX2
RY: buffering file in memory
boot.ini-8> ; attach ry1 ADCENT_MUSIC.RX2
boot.ini-11> reset all
boot.ini-13> boot ry0

RT-11SB V05.07

.R MSCPCK

.dir dy1:

?DIR-F-Invalid directory

.


.

The games disks I believe are OS8, not RT11 format.

The XXDP.RX2 disk is a PDP-11 bootable XXDP diagnostics disk, it is not RT11 format.
 
I am not sure those disk images have the source code to the PDP P-code emulator though (although I haven't looked yet - so I may be speaking prematurely)...

I have, however, managed to get the source code I have been trying to resurrect to 'almost' assemble.

The MACRO-11 cross assembler I am using appears to have a few bugs - resulting in it 'hanging' whilst trying to assemble, or just generating a load of error messages when it shouldn't be.

I am a few definitions and macros missing, the start-up code and the trap handler code.

Happy to share if this would be of use to anyone...

I am trying to build a system for a KXT11-CA using the second serial port as a virtual TU58 device. Why not?!

Dave

Why don't you try compiling natively instead of using some cross assembler?
 
I am not sure those disk images have the source code to the PDP P-code emulator though (although I haven't looked yet - so I may be speaking prematurely)...

I have, however, managed to get the source code I have been trying to resurrect to 'almost' assemble.

The MACRO-11 cross assembler I am using appears to have a few bugs - resulting in it 'hanging' whilst trying to assemble, or just generating a load of error messages when it shouldn't be.

I am a few definitions and macros missing, the start-up code and the trap handler code.

Happy to share if this would be of use to anyone...

I am trying to build a system for a KXT11-CA using the second serial port as a virtual TU58 device. Why not?!

Dave

I have used this PDP-11 cross-assembler for ages: https://github.com/Rhialto/macro11 and have had no problems even with very complex macros and source files.

All my home grown diagnostics here: https://www.ak6dn.com/PDP-11/DIAGNOSTICS/ are built using it.
 
Thanks Don.

I was using an old version of this (pre Rhialto modifications).

However, the TRAP instruction appears to generate an error. There is a line missing from source file "assemble.c".

in the 'CASE OC_MARK:', just after the statement "value = parse_expr(cp,0);", there should be a statement "cp = value->cp;" otherwise the source line character pointer does not get moved on properly to satisfy the EOL check.

However, this didn't 'fix' my original problem. When invoking .FLT2 from with an a .MACRO, the assembler hangs. I will have another look at this later on tonight.

I also had a problem with .RADIX 2 (but this was in the previous - older - macro11 assembler source). I modified the original code for the UCSD p-code interpreter to use an OCTAL constant rather than a BINARY constant.

EDIT1: The .RADIX 2 problem appears to be fixed with the later release.

EDIT2: The bit of code that causes the macro11 assembler to loop appears to be:

Code:
 ;. BUILD A POWER OF TEN TABLE
 EXPON = 0
 .MACRO  PWR10   EXP
         ;DERBODGE .FLT2   1.0E'EXP
 .ENDM

 TENTBL: .REPT   38.
         PWR10   EXPON
         EXPON = EXPON+1
         .ENDR

Obviously, without the ";DERBODGE" present!

Using the construct:

Code:
.FLT2 1.0E0
.FLT2 1.0E1

Appears to work OK, so I suspect it has something to do with the concatenation within the macro.

Interestingly, putting some debug code into assembler.c within the while loop of "case P_FLT2:" resulted in the debug code not executing for some reason. Almost as though the assembler went into a loop before getting there...

Dave
 
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I'll have to check these out on the current versions of the code I am using to see if I can replicate. If I can, probably will submit bug reports to github to get it fixed.
 
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