[Simh] SIMH/Vax woes

[Brian Meadows]

On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 06:56:52 +1000, pgaray at bigfoot.com wrote:

>
>I think the 0.9.1 version at http://www.tcpdump.org/ would be
>ok. But if you have the ram you want to emulate + 128M to run
>the emulator on xp and happy with the security there - you
>can. I think your linux knowledge is quite ok. I myself was
>not impressed that simh went to use a pcap that is not
>released on any platform - but it would be in any pre-compiled
>simh.
>

Well, I'm making some progress, but now I've come up against a
problem that I really don't know how to sort. 

I've got both the Linux version and the Win2K version to the same
point - namely that the VAX console boots and goes through the
normal system tests with no visible problems. A 'show devices'
shows all the expected devices. Trying to boot from the CD image
then goes through the last couple of system tests, but then bombs
with an error 

%BOOT-F-unknown processo
HALT instruction, PC:00004EC7  BLBS 4F49 4EC6

(that's not a typo, the 'r' is missing from 'processor'). 

I've dug through the system manager manual, and not too
surprisingly, the 'explanation' is that the processor isn't
recognised, and the 'advice' is to call Compaq. :-((

I get the same error message and error codes with both the
Ethernet and non-Ethernet versions of SIMH/VAX on both Windows
2000 and Linux. 

I tried the procedure to patch the boot ROM to a uVAX 3900 per
the SIMH FAQ, just to see whether that would get me anywhere, but
nothing doing - that just gives me 'unknown device' errors when I
enter the commands. 

Anyone have any suggestions? 


Thanks

Brian.