[Simh] An idea for graphics support in SIMH

[Michael Kerpan]

On Wed, Jul 7, 2010 at 1:25 PM, Shoppa, Tim <tshoppa at wmata.com> wrote:
> I suppose some people want to run an archaic windowing system.
>
> I look at this a little differently - I usually want to run an archaic application. And that archaic application usually supports
> Tek 4014 or similar graphics. In fact it usually didn't run under a windowing  or framebuffer system to begin with.

That's fine, but there are still whole bunches of things that don't
support 4014 graphics that would be fun to muck with. The VAX
framebuffer is one example. The built-in vector display system of the
PDP-1 is another. Various graphics cards for systems like the PDP-11
or the S100 bus system are another still. All these things would
benefit from SIMH having a virtual framebuffer that graphical device
emulation code could write to and that could be viewed by an external
client. I'm not saying that good Tektronix emulation won't take care
of a lot of graphics stuff, I'm just saying that a modular system to
allow for guest-specific video hardware to be emulated in a uniform
way would useful.

PS, are there any free terminal emulators with support for
terminal-based graphics? Xterm does a mediocre job with Tek, but other
systems like DEC Regis/Sixel and DG Dasher seem to be completely
unsupported by any free (over even cheap) software in any meaningful
way... Maybe a nice cross-platform retro-oriented terminal emulation
suite would make a nice counterpart to SIMH?