A simulator homage to old-school mini/mainframe systems with real lights and switches
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Here's part of an example video showing PI being calculated to 1000 decimal places, using 2 simulated mag tapes to process an array which is too big for main memory.
More details on the PhiliZound website.
Feel free to join in the discussions on the PlasMa Google group.
CoPEx - Cooperative PlaMa Executive
Part 1 of an experimental executive program
Full walk-through of latest programming route using plasm assembler.
Main memory increased from 2K to 64K words for the PleX ISA. This was part of an upgrade exercise using re-tracked PCBs, and was the final planned hardware change. Future updates will be firmware-only.
Floating point functions added to PleX . This has not been rigorously tested yet, apart from running Lunar Lander :) but any fixes will only require firmware updates.
When your in Germany, you can make your panels at https://kunststoffplattenonline.de/, i have ordered my panels today, they ship whithin 3 Workdays. The Company accepts DXF Files, but you must "repair" the Files in a suitable Programm to get all Holes in the panels.
I importet the Front and Backpanel in the "Frontplattendesigner" from Schäffler ( https://www.schaeffer-ag.de/frontplatten-designer/ ) an exported them again, so i was able to get the correct panels to order.
nice but .... pdp11 is nice
or making normal cluster beowolf with 30 motherboards
Agreed it would have been nice to emulate a real machine (the PleX ISA does use some ideas from the PDP series, such as the indirect, post-increment and pre-decrement addressing modes), but they would need a lot more work & research to emulate accurately... and real machines evolved over their lifetime so which variant would you emulate?
I'm more interested in the hands-on experience and initial low-level software development such as bootstraps, executives, job schedulers etc. so didn't want to get bogged down making an accurate simulator of an existing machine, and then just running existing software packages. I think if you want to go this way, there are already many better simulators around.
Thanks for stopping by.
If you are interested in modern versions of low-level computer components. I suggest you design a 10-12 bit computer from scratch. 8 bits is not much.
Run some standard os on it : fuzix, linux, minix, Serenity, dos, hurd etc.
We need new computers. But let them be energy efficient, or faster, or scalable like Parrallel's Epiphany.
Phil Tipping
Mark Jelic
davidadkins1
Alexios C
Kn/vD
Feel free to join the discussions on the PlasMa Google group
https://groups.google.com/g/plasmacomputer