[Simh] VAX 8600: Can't boot Quasijarus (tape or disk)

[Cory Smelosky]

Loading the binaries directly in to sing as extracted from tape has worked for me on the 8600 sim.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Sep 22, 2017, at 16:35, Mark Pizzolato <Mark at infocomm.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Friday, September 22, 2017 at 3:55 PM, Bob Eager wrote:
>> Oh, hang on. 'boot tq0' is surely not correct. You do 'boot cpu' and then
>> specify the boot device in a console command.
> 
> Actually, neither "boot cpu" , nor "boot tq0" are meaningful commands 
> with the VAX8600 simulator.  There were no "naturally" or "DEC supported"
> bootable tape devices on the original VAX 8600 system and therefore there
> is no simulation of things which never worked.  In theory, someone could 
> write a tape boot program and it could be loaded into the CPU memory and 
> started execution, but I don’t know of any such program.  
> 
> If you followed instructions regarding how Quasijarus was originally installed 
> on a VAX 8600, then it should work the same as it did on the original hardware.
> I suspect that by the time Quasijarus was put together, the MicroVAX systems
> were prime targets for system installs, and no or very little effort was put into
> getting this stuff to work on the older VAX systems.
> 
> Good luck.
> 
> - Mark
> 
>> On Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:10:12 +0200
>> Dario Niedermann <dario at darioniedermann.it> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello! I'm running "VAX 8600 simulator V4.0-0 Beta" (git commit id:
>>> c8a420ad) on a Linux/x86_64 host. I've installed 4.3BSD Quasijarus on
>>> an empty RA90-sized disk image, following the instructions at:
>>> 
>>>    <http://www.tavi.co.uk/unixhistory/quasijarus.html>
>>> 
>>> But I could never get the VAX 8600 emulator to boot...
>>> 
>>> From TQ0, attached to the .tap file provided at the site, emulator
>>> says "Command not allowed" when I give 'boot tq0'. 'sho tq all'
>>> returns "Controller is not initialized", while 'sho tq' outputs:
>>> 
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> TQ      TU81 (180MB), address=2013F940-2013F943, no vector, BR5, 4
>>> units
>>>  TQ0   attached to /home/ndr/lib/emu/quastape.tap, read only,
>>> write locked, SIMH format
>>>        capacity=188MB
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> 
>>> Is this due to the .tap file being (probably) made with the MicroVAX
>>> 3900 emulator?
>>> 
>>> Issuing 'boot rq0', the emulator's output is:
>>> 
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> Loading boot code from internal vmb.exe loading boot
>>> ra(0,0,0,34): bad adaptor number
>>> boot failed
>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> 
>>> Is it because I used the MicroVAX 3900 emulator to install BSD on the
>>> virtual ra0?
>>> 
>>> TIA for any help...
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Simh mailing list
> Simh at trailing-edge.com
> http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/mailman/listinfo/simh