PERQemu v0.2 and a Request for Software

[Josh Dersch]

Just in case anyone's interested, a new and significantly improved
PERQemu v0.2 is available at:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/perq/emulator/v0.2/

I would consider this a fairly usable release (v0.1 was very buggy).
Improvements include:

- A 25% or so speed increase (yay!)
- A more or less complete and accurate Z80 simulation, which makes many,
many more things work correctly.
- Kriz Tablet support - now you can actually USE those graphical
applications!
- RS232 support (yes, now YOU can use a VT100 emulator running inside of
a PERQ emulator to talk to your VAX!)
- (Nearly) complete Floppy and Hard Disk support. Enough works to allow
bringing up a completely fresh installation
of POS on a new hard disk, from floppy.

Next up on the list of things to do: Real RasterOp emulation, followed
by 16K CPU support. Can't wait to run Accent on this thing...

If any of you get a chance to try this out, I'd love to hear some feedback.

If anyone out there has any PERQ1/1A compatible software that hasn't
already been archived on Bitsavers (I know, it's unlikely...), please
drop me a line. Much of the software that's been archived is for the
PERQ2, which is incompatible in tiny (but annoying) ways. In
particular, versions of POS G.x or any release of Accent that can run on
the PERQ1A would be wonderful to have.

(As an aside: Al Kossow - thank you so much for Bitsavers...)

Additionally, if any of you have working PERQ1's and are willing to run
it for a few hours to dump an image of your hard disk, let me know. It
would be nice to have some other "real" hard disk images to work with.

Thanks,
Josh

[Al Kossow]

Josh Dersch wrote:

> (As an aside: Al Kossow - thank you so much for Bitsavers...)
>

You're welcome. And thanks to Chris (skeezics) for the loan of the
floppies to read. Since I don't have a running PERQ, it's good to
know the reads seem to be working.