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Copying RL02 pack from PDP-11 to SIMH?

D

DrCharles

Experienced Member
Joined
Sep 2, 2014
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101
Location
West Plains, MO
Can someone please tell me the easiest way to send an RL02 image from my PDP-11/23+ to SIMH?

I used VTserver to create the pack (RT-11SJ, TSX+ 6.50), got it debugged and working on the real hardware, but now I need to copy my disk back over to SIMH so I have an image of the one that works.

I do have a comm line set up in TSX (CL0: ) on the PDP, so could connect that to a serial port on the PC. And 15 other timesharing lines available :D
Can the data be received into a PC .dsk file, or possibly transferred within SIMH directly from the serial port to a simulated device? Is this what Kermit is good for?

Need a little hand-holding here, I've never tried to send data from the hardware back to SIMH.
Thanks for any tips/tricks/instructions. ;)
 
An old, slow (300 MHz) Win XP box is what I have for the PDP-11 front end (when not using the real VT220).

Once I got enough delay set in character and line, it would still bomb out under RT-11SJ even on the short file (KRTHEX.MAC, 4 KB) after a couple of minutes. Error was "?Mon-F-stack overflow 4." So I booted TSX+ and tried it that way - works fine. Go figure... I guess TSX+ has better stack handling or something (the 11/23+ has a full 4 MB RAM). Now trying it on the full program (KRT.HEX, 234 KB).

If that doesn't work, I may give PDP11GUI a shot. Thanks for the tip.
 
Got Kermit-11 installed with surprisingly little trouble... it does work, and is quite useful for transferring small files to/from the PC.
But it is so slooooooooow! (Even allowing for the limitations of a 9600 baud console port).
I uploaded the hard-to-replace TSGEN.MAC to the PC for safekeeping, which is the most important part for the moment.

However, although I could just let it run overnight to transmit the entire *.* contents of the TSX+ pack (7-8 MB), I would end up with a lot of individual files in a Windows directory. and still not have a finished .dsk (image). Could I use PUTR to copy all files in a folder to an RL02 virtual disk with wildcards? If so, that'd be better (but still not a complete, bootable RT11 image)...

If not, time to check out the PDP11GUI you suggested ;) I'm trying to make this process as automated as possible (like vtserver).
 
PDP11GUI is nice as it doesn't depending on a working OS on the other end. It will copy the entire disk as an single image.

If you have a DEQNA or a DELNA card, you can do the transfer of files over FTP. Speed is somewhat dependent on the processor. I have seen ~15Kb/sec on an 11/73 using Alan Baldwin's package http://shop-pdp.net/index.php. An 11/23 will be a little slower.

There are some options in Kermit to speed up just a bit, but you are in the 1-2Kb/sec range for 9600 or 19200 baud.
 
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