[Simh] More VAX Simulators

[Zane Healy]

> On Apr 20, 2019, at 12:56 AM, Matt Burke <matt at 9track.net> wrote:
> 
> On 20/04/2019 01:13, Zane Healy wrote:
>> Very exciting!  Especially the InfoServer support, and potentially very timely for what I am planning to do this weekend.  Does the InfoServer simulation support backing up a system disk on a VAX or Alpha to InfoServer tape?  Actually does it even support tape?
>> https://www.itec.suny.edu/scsys/vms/ovmsdoc073/v73/6017/6017pro_051.html#info_ex
>> 
>> Also, I assume I need to use the images found here?
>> ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/openvms/freeware/infoserver/freeware_readme.txt
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Zane
>> 
> 
> There is some preliminary support for SCSI tape but only basic reading
> commands have been implemented so far. You could backup to an InfoServer
> disk though. One other thing to take note of is that I've found the
> LANCE Ethernet to be a bit slow compared to real hardware. This might be
> because the operating system does not notify the controller when there
> are new packets to be transmitted. Instead the controller has to check
> for new packets on each poll interval. This can result in a delay up to
> 20mS between packets whereas on real hardware it's more like 2mS.
> 
> Yes, the images from the freeware are the ones you need. It's been a
> while since I last did the installation but I seem to remember something
> about devices having to be at specific SCSI IDs. I'll have to experiment.
> 
> Matt

So far I’ve been trying ‘vax412’ with the various images at DKA0 and DKA100 (the two drives listed when you do a “SHOW BOOT” from the ROM prompt.  At this point I fear a sample .ini file may help. :-)

Looking at the strings at the beginning of each disk, I’m starting to wonder if any are actually bootable.  I see that a couple say "is not a system disk”, and the rest say “IS_KEY_DISK”, so I’m wondering if any are bootable, even though it seems like I should be using InfoServer/VMS V3.5 (ag-r7lfa-bs.img), which says, "IS_V35          is not a system disk”.

Zane