Comments on: Philip Pembertonâ€™s 3B1 emulator now Boots AT&T Unix!

By: Arnold Robbins

Arnold Robbins — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 07:22:19 +0000

In reply to David Brower. Are these utilities available? Being able to mount and put files into the hard disk image from Linux would be a much easier way to move things in and out than by using floppies. Thanks!

By: jesse

jesse — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 18:14:56 +0000

cc is now working! Couldn’t let this little gem not have cc. I played some “tetrix” and conway’s game of life. it’s pretty neat to see bitmapped graphics on this system – when i used a real one back in the early 90s, we were mainly just using it in terminal mode. to get software onto it, i used dosbox to write files onto a 360k msdos floppy. then used the ‘msdos’ program on the 3b1 to access the floppy. you have to change main.c to use 9 sectors/track instead of 10 though to read the dos disks: “wd2797_load(&state.fdc_ctx, state.fdc_disc, 512, 9, 2, writeable);” I was also able to try out the Bellcore MGR window manager which was a trip! it requires user access to VRAM which is now on github (“VIDPAL” mod)

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 11:30:07 +0000

In reply to bifo. looks like the online service i used to generate simple random passwords is offline. So I just changed it to pulling a random word out of the dictionary. Nothing sophisticated, but it just has to rotate to lock robots out. Sigh it's such a giant pain in the butt, however this crappy 'solution' has been working for some time.

By: bifo

bifo — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 02:44:50 +0000

In reply to neozeed.

Thanks for the reply, but I’m still getting the same issue across multiple browsers and multiple OSes. I’ve taken a quick screenshot:
https://i.imgur.com/p1pGd1u.png

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 02:25:25 +0000

In reply to bifo. passwords are being re-generated, so you should be able to find them.

By: bifo

bifo — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 02:00:04 +0000

Download system seems to be malfunctioning, can you put your drive up somewhere else or have a look at the user/password generator?

Anyway it’s a shame that this emulator has been abandoned, the last update on the bitbucket was in 8/14. I doubt that the MMU issues were fixed, has anyone else tried picking up the project? I know the MMU was custom but does it resemble the NeXT MMU at all? Previous made tremendous progress on that front in the meantime.

By: Eugen

Eugen — Tue, 26 Apr 2016 02:19:42 +0000

I was able to format the disk. Then, If I hit reboot, no matter what floppy image I insert, the system goes into diagnostics. So I shut down the emulator, I plugged the no. 2 disk and booted again. It said “Insert disk no. 3 and press any key. No matter If I insert or not the no. 3 disk, If I hit any key the emulator will stop with the messages:

src/memory.c:90:checkMemoryAccess(): Page not mapped in: addr 00080000, page 0080, mapbits 0000
src/memory.c:895:m68k_read_memory_8(): Bus Error while reading, addr 00080000, statcode 1

This happens with both my linux build and your windows build. So, what am I doing wrong?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 05:30:14 +0000

In reply to neozeed.

Maybe I can nibble it down to 85 or 90. It’s been useful for figuring out drive imaging stuff for the MFM emulator.

I’ll try mingw/msys, which I’ve never used before.

thx
-dB

By: neozeed

neozeed — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 05:31:06 +0000

In reply to David Brower.

I compiled it with MinGW+MSYS …. I don’t recall doing anything that difficult to build it.

I think freebee suffers from the 80/20 problem which is that 80% of the emulator is written in 20% of the time. And the last 20% takes the longest, and it works well enough for trivial tasks…

By: David Brower

David Brower — Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:42:38 +0000

Hi, I’m picking this up to progress work on reviving my old 7300 using the Gessewin MFM drive emulator. I’m writing tools to manipulate the emulation files he uses, and disk images, and the linux sysv filesystem driver so it can loop mount those images.

I’ve recently gotten my old hard disk read by the emulator, mounted on linux for modification, dismounted, rebooted on a real machine, and then that image booted into freebee the emulator.

The problem with freebee reading drive images is that it doesn’t understand real drive geometry, which I’ve corrected adding (a) config args to breebee for such things, including the hd.img filename; and (b) having load_hd() see if there’s a valid volume header in the image, and take the geometry from that.

As others seemed to have noticed, if the machine does real work for a while, something bad happens. In my case, running any compilation results in a “kernel panic: pagein” I take this to be the long-running MMU woes, and I may chase a little further.

The other problem is that when I run freebee in a Virtual Box Linux window, the captured mouse response is horrible. This may not be the case on a native windows executable, but I’d need to build it on windows. What are the tools and instructions for doing that?