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Install RT11 on a real Pro/380. How?

C

czunit

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Aug 7, 2015
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So in my not-so-endless amount of time here I've been fiddling with running RT11 on my Pro/380. Nice system, I currently run a very large 3.2 OS on it with a real RD53 with all the bells and whistles including Decnet for the Ethernet card, a 512mb enhanced daughtercard on the CPU board, and at least 2 256k cards, a TMS, and of course the 128k of extra memory on the DECNA. I can either use the RX50's or hook up a pair of Gotek floppy emulators and load software 2023 style.

Solid box, I also have a small pile of working RD51's, 50's and 52's. I also have a Gesswin MFM reader/emulator thingie.

At first I found a nice RD51 image for XHomer, but that doesn't seem to work with either mfm_write or mfm_emu as it's a .rd file format and not .dsk. Is there a way to convert between them somehow so I can either run that image off the Gesswin emulator or blow it out to an RD51?

Or is there a better method that would get me 5.7 and some fun games?

Thanks!
Chris
 
At least on PRO/350 the first block of the disk is not used - the driver shifts everything by one block. That is, block 0 of the driver is block 1 on the disk. Perhaps if you remove the first block from the .rd image, it will work.
 
czunit said:
So in my not-so-endless amount of time here I've been fiddling with running RT11 on my Pro/380. Nice system, I currently run a very large 3.2 OS on it with a real RD53 with all the bells and whistles including Decnet for the Ethernet card, a 512mb enhanced daughtercard on the CPU board, and at least 2 256k cards, a TMS, and of course the 128k of extra memory on the DECNA. I can either use the RX50's or hook up a pair of Gotek floppy emulators and load software 2023 style.

Solid box, I also have a small pile of working RD51's, 50's and 52's. I also have a Gesswin MFM reader/emulator thingie.

At first I found a nice RD51 image for XHomer, but that doesn't seem to work with either mfm_write or mfm_emu as it's a .rd file format and not .dsk. Is there a way to convert between them somehow so I can either run that image off the Gesswin emulator or blow it out to an RD51?

Or is there a better method that would get me 5.7 and some fun games?

Thanks!
Chris
Click to expand...
See ext2emu command assuming .rd file is raw sector image of disk including the first block that Hunta says isn't used.
http://www.pdp8online.com/mfm/code/mfm/ext2emu_doc.html

If your version is older than 2.54 you should upgrade before using mfm_write.
 
Also I'm not sure what interleave the pro used. If you read an existing disk you can determine that so you can use the proper interleave. Should work without specifying but may be slow.

In this example (not from a pro) you would specify --interleave 7. 1 is the default.
Interleave (not checked): 0 7 14 4 11 1 8 15 5 12 2 9 16 6 13 3 10
 
The interleave according to the tech manual is 5. "The disk drives used on the Professional 350 and 380 computer systems are formatted with a five to one interleave. The order of the sectors is 0, 13, 10,7,4, 1, 14, 11, 8, 5, 2, 15, 12, 9, 6, 3. I've used 5 successfully on a 380. I was recently successful in taking an xhomer RT-11 .rd image, changing the extension to .dsk and boot it with my DREM. I scanned the binary and it looked similar to a .DSK.
 
Hm. Putting interleave in requires sectors, which is not supported by emu.
root@beaglebone:~/mfm# ./ext2emu -c 306 -h 4 -i 5 -f Elektronika_85
Number of sectors must be set before interleave is specified

root@beaglebone:~/mfm# ./ext2emu -c 306 -h 4 -s 15 -i 5 -format Elektronika_85
Option 's' sectors not valid for this program

Never mind, I need to put the interleave as 5,1 and not just 5. Oops works now.

Will try it tomorrow on the system. Amazing program!
 
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I have never used ext2emu (and would like to learn more), but judging from the command line arguments, it looks like you are specifying the disk geometry and it is not corrrect for the xhomer RT-11 image. The xhomer RT-11 image is a 33 MB disk. The geometry I used is 512 cylinders, 8 heads, 16 sectors.
 
Sort of. This is the 5.7 version on a 10mb drive. That pretty much maps it to either an RL02 (reeeeally doubtful) or an RD51.

We'll see if it works. Hope so.
 
czunit said:
Never mind, I need to put the interleave as 5,1
Click to expand...
If you were trying to specify no track to track interleave the last parameter should be 0. Haven't found too many systems that do track to track interleave.

I've cleaned up the handling of interleave option and put better explanation in the ext2emu doc. Will be in the next release.
 
Ok, got it to boot with mfm_emu. Interesting note, you need to use the -d 1 option on the beaglebone line and set the drive ID jumper on the board to 1 in order for it to work.

Boots up, that's nice, the device PI.SYS burns up a lot of memory (7k words). Wonder what it even is.
Well, DW: is the hard disk controller, DZ: is the floppy drives, so I guess PI: is a massive console driver or something. Odd, I don't see a PI.MAC and its CSR and Vector are both 0

So what is land.sav? Tried running it (people say it blows up on xhomer) and it spits out:
W TAKIH USLOQWIQH RABOTATX NE MOGU

Also note, with 1.536mb of memory booting the 380 takes awhile as it has to do a full memory test. Might remove a few boards here :)
Odd. More in a bit.

C
 
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LAND is a Soviet game similar to Lode Runner and would likely need a considerable rewrite to work with the Pro 380's graphics system instead of the DVK's.
 
krebizfan said:
LAND is a Soviet game similar to Lode Runner and would likely need a considerable rewrite to work with the Pro 380's graphics system instead of the DVK's.
Click to expand...
Ah that would explain it. Oh well, it's only an exe and data file, I think there's another thread discussing graphics modes. Still, wondering what PI.SYS is.... Guessing it's not compatible with 350 graphics either.

C
 
The RT-11 installation guide 5.6 has PI.SYS as "processor interface system support handler for unmapped monitors" if I got the snippet right. One of the manuals had a note about not doing a SAVE with PI.SYS which I don't quite understand.
 
krebizfan said:
The RT-11 installation guide 5.6 has PI.SYS as "processor interface system support handler for unmapped monitors" if I got the snippet right. One of the manuals had a note about not doing a SAVE with PI.SYS which I don't quite understand.
Click to expand...
IIRC the Pro380 could be used as a console processor interface for some larger VAX systems. It had a special parallel interface card as well as several high speed serial ports that were used for this function. Maybe that driver handled that interface?

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX_8000#VAX_Console
 
Not sure, but the driver is loaded. I might just try deleting the .sys file and rebooting to see if anything happens.
 
One of the features of the PRO series is the use of a graphics subsystem. One of the functions of the PI driver is the output of text information when the program accesses the OS functionality for outputting information to a standard console terminal. If you remove the PI driver, the system will not boot.
 
AK6DN said:
the Pro380 could be used as a console processor interface for some larger VAX systems.
Click to expand...
And in this case, a special version of RT is generated - if you look at the sources, you can see conditional translation blocks for this. By the way, there are also sources for the PI driver.
 
krebizfan said:
LAND is a Soviet game similar to Lode Runner and would likely need a considerable rewrite to work with the Pro 380's graphics system instead of the DVK's.
Click to expand...
No, this file on the RT-11 v5.07 image is a special version for the Electronika-85, the Soviet clone of the Pro-350.
 
Someone pointed out on another thread that pi.sys is the driver for the video console, it can probably be loaded in high memory but most of my RT11 experience is with V3C and not with mapped systems so I'll have to find a tutorial on how to load stuff high and all that.
 
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