Category Archives: SIMH

Visual C++ 2005 project & exe’s for SIMH 3.7-3

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I’ve uploaded onto the sourceforge site, my project source & the resulting exe’s…

I need to see which compiler generates the faster exe, and ship with that going forward for the win32 platform. I suspect its VC2005, but the race is going to be between VC2005, gcc/mingw, Watcom 11.

Of course if anyone want’s to suggest another C compiler for win32, I could always try it out, and see how it performs.

Of course today is 9/11… It’s hard to believe that it’s been 6 years. One can only hope the madness will end.

Zork lives on the Altair!

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Ok, I can’t sleep so I thought I’d rummage through the dungeon of Zork…

And what better platform to do so than the Altair?

First get your altairz80.exe, out of simh, or just build it yourself…

Then you’ll need a copy of CP/M! (http://www.schorn.ch/cpm/zip/cpm2.zip)

Finally a copy of Zork (http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/games/zork123_80.zip)

unzip everything into a directory, then run the following

C:\altair>altairz80.exe cpm2

And with any luck you’ll be greeted with the following:

Altair 8800 (Z80) simulator V3.7-1
64K CP/M Version 2.2 (SIMH ALTAIR 8800, BIOS V1.25, 2 HD, 15-Jan-07)
A>

Just like MS-DOS right?. … Not quite. Anyways there is time to tour later, but for now there is dungeons to explore.

The Altair has two floppies (out of eight) and a 8mb hard disk!… So let’s go to the hard disk on I:

I:

changing drives is just like MS-DOS, letter, colon then hit enter. Ok now lets copy in the zork game from the native PC into the emulator. Hat’s off to Peter Schorn for this!

b:read zork1.com
b:read zork1.dat

If all goes well it’ll look like this:

A>I:
I>B:READ ZORK1.COM
READ V-2.21 (03-Dec-06) SIMH Interface V003
Read from “ZORK1.COM” and write to “ZORK1.COM”.
PTR: unit is read only8.5kB written.

I>B:READ ZORK1.DAT
READ V-2.21 (03-Dec-06) SIMH Interface V003
Read from “ZORK1.DAT” and write to “ZORK1.DAT”.
PTR: unit is read only83kB written.

Ok, now with that out of the way, lets enter the Dungeon!

I>zork1
ZORK I: The Great Underground Empire
Copyright (c) 1981, 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc. All rightsreserved.
ZORK is a registered trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Revision 88 / Serial number 840726
West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with
a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

>open mailbox
Opening the small mailbox reveals a leaflet.

>take leaflet
Taken.

>read leaflet

“WELCOME TO ZORK!
ZORK is a game of adventure, danger, and low cunning. In it
you will explore some of the most amazing territory ever seen
by mortals. No computer should be without one!”

>

Ok, now we are playing one of the greatest games ever. Wikipedia has an awesome article on Zork ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zork ) And along with ( http://infocom.elsewhere.org/gallery/zork1/zork1.html ) You can party like its 1982.

SIMH 3.71 released!

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The ammount of systems that this package contains is simply amazing. It could probably take me a few months to properly review the whole thing, but to get started, I’m going to go with building from source code.

As it ships it’s really meant for UNIX type build enviroments with CLI tools. Now if you really want you can build it from the main site using MinGW (http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml).

I’ve built simh using Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express. You can download that here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/default.aspx). You’ll also need to install the Platform and integrate it with VC++. Instructions on how to do that can be found here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/visualc/usingpsdk/ ). If you are on Vista, be sure to install the service packs associated with the Express tools!

With that out of the way, simply download the project file from my site (http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/files/simh%20source%20code/simh%203.7-3/simh-3.73-vc2005.zip/download), unzip it, and open simh-3.71.sln . I’ve included the runtime for WinPCAP, so this *should* build on your computer. Unless you want to really dive into the source, you can build the release target, and then build the entire solution. On my laptop this takes about 3-5 minutes. Remember that if you want to run your 2005 compiled EXE’s on another computer will need to install the associated runtime on that machine first.

You can download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Packagehere:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=200b2fd9-ae1a-4a14-984d-389c36f85647&DisplayLang=en

Once it’s completed, just open the release folder, and you’ll see all the emulated systems.

They are:

altair.exe
altairz80.exe
eclipse.exe
nova.exe
h316.exe
hp2100.exe
i1401.exe
i1620.exe
i7094.exe
ibm1130.exe
interdata16.exe
Interdata32.exe
pdp1.exe
pdp10-network.exe
pdp10.exe
pdp11-network.exe
pdp11.exe
pdp18b.exe
pdp8.exe
vax-network.exe
vax.exe vax780-network.exe
vax780.exe
s3.exe

With the -network part to signify that they are capable of networking. You will need to have WinPCAP 4.0 installed on your computer to take advantage of it, however the host computer is unable to communicate with the emulated computer.

WinPCAP can be downloaded here: (http://www.winpcap.org/install/default.htm)