[Simh] simh lightweight OS (was RE: Hardware Requirements)

[Jason Stevens]

SIMH has worked on MS-DOS for a long while now... Just think of it as
'OS/2' ... :)

a 'direct' link to download it is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/files/simh%20binaries/3-8.1/simh-3.8-1_MS-DOSi386-exe.zip/download

The only 'catch' of course is that anyone hoping for massive files or
networking is currently out of luck....  I started looking at
interfacing with packet drivers, but seeing that they run in real
mode, and all the context switching involved just seemed silly...

Unlike the other binary versions though, I put in as many os's as I
could figure out how to run in a small state so that I could not only
test the emulators but seeing how everything out there has some
facility to run MS-DOS applications, it could be a 'lowest common
denominator'...  Although running emulators in emulators really kills
performance, but in this day & age with 3+GHZ cpu's.... is it that
bad?

I built them with Watcom C++ 11, I'm sure I could have used something
like Visual C++ 2.0 and bound them with HX DOS (
http://www.japheth.de/HX.html it's like Pharlap TNT, but free!), but I
didn't see any easy facility for calling DPMI/MS-DOS interrupts so I
just didn't bother..........

I would suppose you could take any BSD/Linux and make it boot into
single user mode, with /bin/sh /bin/ls a populated /dev tree, and go
from there to see about running SIMH, I've been playing with 386 BSD
lately and it sure could run from a single diskette back then...

I know the super cut down can be done...... but they always feel so
limited... :)

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Bob Armstrong <bob at jfcl.com> wrote:
>>Zane Healy (healyzh at aracnet.com) wrote:
>>
>>I used to have a dedicated box for PDP-10 emulation, it was built
>>using a Celeron 500Mhz CPU.
>
>  In a slightly different but related question - assuming you want to set up
> a PC just for the purpose of running simh, what's the lightest weight
> operating system that you can run on the host?  Did I hear somebody say that
> simh runs on DOS?  FreeDOS too?  That's pretty light weight.  Or do you use
> a stripped down Linux distro instead?  DSL?
>
>  I'm thinking of a PC that, when you turn it on, runs simh and boots
> directly into the guest OS with as little fuss and muss as possible.
> There'd never really be any need to access the host OS once the system was
> set up.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
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