68K Cromix-Plus emulator

[damian]

I have put together a 68K emulator that can run "68010 XPU 162 Cromix-Plus".  It includes emulation of the 64FDC and STDC cards.  I created this as a tool to assist with my reverse-engineering cromix.sys and Cromix-Plus driver porting efforts not with the intention of releasing it for general use.  I have only implemented sufficient functionality to provide a running Cromix-Plus system that is able to compile a driver library.

I did not write the core 68K CPU emulator, it was written by Tony Headford:
https://github.com/tonyheadford/m68k

The emulator requires a Java 8 runtime, I use "Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_74-b02)" but it should execute on any Java 8 or later runtime.  You can check your java version by executing:

java -version

Download cromix-emu.zip from here: https://github.com/dwildie/cromix-emu/releases/tag/1.0.  Unzip the archive, cd to the cromix-emu directory and execute:

java -jar s100-68k-emu-1.0.jar -configfile ./Cromix-cromemco.yaml -g

A "Cromemco 64FDC Console" window should open and cromix should start booting.  Use 6 & 0 for the root device's major & minor numbers.

Note, this emulation has limitations, some of which are:  

• The emulated disk drives are memory based and do not automatically persist to the host's disk.  The STDC HDD image will be written to disk during the execution of the shutdown command.
• The clock interrupts are generated based on host CPU cycles not wall clock time.  Therefore, the systems clock will not match real time.  This was intentional to make cromix debugging easier.
• There is no Z80 support.

The 64FDC emulation allows IMD floppy images to be mounted.  Have a look at the contents of Cromix-cromemco.yaml, specifying different floppy images is fairly straightforward.  If you are unfamiliar with yaml syntax try: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/yaml/yaml_basics.htm

To terminate the emulator either close the "Cromemco 64FDC Console" window or Ctrl-C the java command.

I have used this on both Linux and Windows 10.  

This software is provided without any warranty or guarantees of any kind.

Damian

[damian]

If people think this could be useful, I will clean up the source code and release it and, when time permits, make it more user friendly.  

Let me know.

Damian

[cro memcos]

Damian,

I enthusiastically tested your emulator and it worked.

The only issue I had (er due to not reading your instructions) was that I first installed a Headless version of Java , so that did not work.

Then I went back to a regular java and the console window popped up,  and remarkably to me,  Cromix 162 sprang into life.

I think this is of immense value to the majority of people who have no access or prospect to have a physical system.  Or as I believe you intended,  for testing and development purposes.

Just my thoughts.

m