[Simh] Emulated Graphics card?

[Holger Veit]

Am 13.05.2011 15:48, schrieb Michael Kerpan:
> SDL would be OK legally, but a local-only graphics system wouldn't
> really fit with the way that SIMH has developed thus far. Also, it
> might affect some of the cross-platform portability as I'm pretty sure
> that SIMH runs on some platforms that don't have SDL. Still, some sort
> of system to allow for the systems that had graphics to have them in
> SIMH might be a big enough improvement to make it worthwhile if
> somebody wanted to tackle it.

This brings up the question: what platforms is simh currently still in 
active use for?

Windows, Unix/Linux/BSD, MacOSX are obvious. eons ago, I made it work 
with OS/2 (which was
similar to the Windows-cygwin/mingw port); I was under the impression it 
ran on
VMS as well; and some derived ports were for iPhone and Android (but no 
longer the
original code).

The hardware of these ports has enough horse power to run an emulation
at least at the original speed of the emulated system - at least for some
incarnations - I doubt an 11/780 is fast enough to emulate itself at 
sufficient speed.

What port am I missing? Just curious. The point with emulation is of 
course to get at least
the impression the system behaves almost like the original - emulating a 
VAX on a
PDP-1 (provided there were a port of simh) is IMHO ridiculous - just the 
hack to manage
it do do something at all (can be personally satisfying, though). 
Likewise an AltairZ80
on an 8080 CP/M system.

When we are talking about SDL or any other library, we should be aware 
that we
necessarily sacrifice cross portability to suspected hacks of a 
PDP-1-port or alike.
This is because emulation of graphics will require even more horse power 
of the
hosting system. But then, cross portability has been already, degraded 
as not all systems
have TCP/IP networking, and certain emulations even need very special 
support by
the WinPcap library - doubt this exists for many other platforms beyond 
the initial prominent
triple.

To summarize: isn't already "platforms that don't have SDL" a strawman's 
argument?

The SDL website mentions:
"SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, 
FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code 
contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, 
SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported. "

which IMHO is quite a large base, already (OpenVMS is supported through 
X11, I've been told).

-- 
Holger