[Simh] New to the List + Questions

[Christian Gauger-Cosgrove]

Hello everyone! I'm rather new to the mailing list, but I've been
using SIMH for a while now. Mostly because I find the old software and
hardware to be quite interesting. Also, SIMH and the various OS's make
for quite a fun distraction from the drudgery of assignments and lab
reports.


Now on to the questions I had.

The first question I have is related to XVM/RSX and XVM/DOS. Using
DOSSAV, I can never seem to be able to build an 8 platter RF system
disk. Is the reason for this the same as for the "issue" with 8
platter RF disks as mentioned in the DOS-15 software distribution?
(That is, an error in the RF disk handlers.) And would the fix as
outlined in the DOS-15 software distro work on the XVM/DOS and XVM/RSX
software drivers?

My next question is; under SIMH is it possible to build a "cross-disk"
XVM/RSX system (XVM/DOS on the RF, and XVM/RSX on the RP); and as a
corrolary to that, is it possible to build XVM/RSX in a cross-disk
system where all disks are of the same type - that is the XVM/DOS disk
on RP0, while the RSX system disk is on RP1?

Thirdly, and yet another PDP-15 question, will the PDP-15 system ever
have UNICHANNEL added to it? I'd love to try and add it myself, but
suffice it to say my skills at C are roughly as good as my skill
Sanskrit. (Well, actually that is a bit of a hyperbole, as I can do
some coding in C, but nothing that would be competent enough to be
included in SIMH.)

Fourthly, my last question is if any one knows if Mentec still exists,
and whether or not it is still possible to get the newest
distributions of the PDP-11 operating systems (I'd really love to try
RSTS/E 10.1 if the distribution media exists for it, as V9.6 is not
Y2K compliant, and the Y2K bug fix just borks up the dating).

And now, my absolute final question; I'm interested in trying to run
UNIX V7M, but I don't have the distribution tape made (namely, I'd
like to try this one:
http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/pups/PDP-11/Distributions/dec/Jean_Huens_v7m/
), nor do I know how to make a SIMH bootable distribution tape. Any
help to this Windows user would be much appreciated.


Cheers, and sorry for the length.


Christian Gauger-Cosgrove