User talk:TArntsen

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--Mike 09:11, 2 August 2009 (UTC)

Emulators

Hi, Any chance that you will share your ND-100 and ND-500(0) emulators? Perhaps it is open source? Such a thing would be cool to have. Torfinn 12:45, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

I will probably release them as GPL at one point. I haven't tried to share the development with anyone because the development itself was as much a point as the end result - I wanted to have a personal project to work on, as I don't get enough "proper" programming projects back at work anymore. So I've been spending many nice deep-flow hours with a laptop in coffee shops during (in particular) vacations (and some weekends).

The ND-100 emulator is in reasonably good shape, there's only one bug I'm aware of and it affects almost nothing. There are parts missing, it cannot handle applications using segments (those would have to be read from e.g. SEGFIL0:DATA from a real Sintran filesystem), so no Notis-WP. There are also many missing monitor calls, e.g. mon xmsg (which I will probably implement first, when I get to the next vacation). Working applications are Fortran-100, ftn, PED, brf-linker, nrl, assembler-500, vtm-assemble, mac, and some more. Plus some of my own old applications. And I can write new Fortran programs, link them, and they run. Oh, and this is user-level only, as mentioned elsewehere this emulator isn't like the ND100_emulator_project with its goal of running Sintran.

The ND-500 emulator isn't really there yet. The ND-500 instruction set is huge, and there are some subtle bugs that I haven't resolved yet (for this one I really suffer from not having access to a real ND-500(0) to check some stuff out. The docu isn't entirely complete.). Unlike the ND-100 emulator I'm not bootstrapped to the point where I can compile and link new applications. The Fortran-500 compiler runs, but there are parsing errors when compiling legitimate programs, for example. The linker also has some problems. Some of my own old applications work though, including a ported Pascal-to-C translator by Samuel H. Smith, and, most importantly, my old 'unzip' program which I wrote back in 1990/1991 - it's a zip/unzip package which could handle ND domain files and :prog files with holes. With that tool I could extract some of my old stuff, like the Fortran compiler and the linker (I have lots of backup tapes but I don't get access to them - lost my 9-track CCT drive. But some stuff is in .zip files). But in any case the ND-500 emulator wouldn't be very useful for anyone else yet.

I also have some tools, debuggers and disassemblers for both architectures. I was actually planning to release the ND-100 disassembler a while ago, but then I got ambitious and wanted to add support for all the privileged instructions (so it could be used to directly disassemble the Sintran part of e.g. Gandalf's Sintran backup image), but the privileged instructions are a mess and the disassembler turned into a mess to at that point. So I stalled it.