[Simh] PDP11 on Simh for public access

[Bryan Davies]

Thank you Paul.

I now have V4 of Simh and V10.1 of RSTS so at least I'm up to date!

The date/time registers worked.   Unfortunately, the start process is still
getting stuck; now at the 'Start timesharing? <Yes>' prompt.   My system
doesn't have the 10 second timeout you describe here, although it DOES have
one on the later 'Proceed with system startup" prompt.

I have a vague memory (it's been 30 years!) of an auto restart flag in the
switch register & I'm wondering if you know about this.   Or maybe the
problem is elsewhere.

I'd be grateful for any more ideas you have on the subject.

Bryan

On 18 January 2018 at 16:05, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

>
>
> > On Jan 18, 2018, at 10:40 AM, Bryan Davies <bryan.e.davies at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Many thanks to all for the advice.   Unfortunately I'm still not quite
> there.
>
> There is an easy solution if you have a recent RSTS.
>
> The OS keeps date and time in location 1000-1004.  That is preserved
> across boot, and if on entry to INIT those locations contain what seems
> like a valid date, that's used as the system date/time.  This is why the
> more recent versions of RSTS don't prompt for date/time if you do a restart
> (SHUTUP with restart) or use the BOOT command in INIT.
>
> Second, if you're running V10.1, the "Start timesharing" prompt has a 10
> second timeout, and will default to "yes" (i.e., start RSTS) at that point.
>
> So if you start SIMH with a startup script that deposits the date in 1000,
> and time in 1002, then issues the SIMH boot command, RSTS INIT will pick up
> that date/time and after 10 seconds will go on to start the OS.
>
> RSTS date format: (year-1970)*1000 + day_in_year
> RSTS time format: 1440 - (minutes_since_midnight)
> RSTS seconds: 60 - (seconds_since_minute)
>
> For example:
>
> $ pdp11 pdp11-42.ini
>
> PDP-11 simulator V4.0-0 Beta        git commit id: d3b6018d
> sim> d -d 1000 32004
> sim> d -d 1002 720
> sim> d -d 1004 30
> sim> bo rq
> ?
> Thu Jan 18 11:02:00 2018
>
> RSTS P10.1-L V101XM (DU0) INIT V10.1-0L
>
> 04-Jan-02 12:00 PM
>
>
> Start timesharing? <Yes> NO
>
> I entered the values in decimal (with -d) for convenience.  You can see
> the correct date and time are picked up by INIT.  Seconds are not displayed
> here but they are saved, so you can set them if you want to be that precise.
>
>         paul
>
>
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