A type 30 display option

[Ian Schofield]

I would first say that I real enjoyed building this kit although aligning the LEDs and switches was quite a challenge! Given the effort here by Oscar and the team I thought that an optional update to the Type 30 display would be of interest. I have create a Simh based build of the pdp1 which includes a Type 30 display which may be used within the app itself or, more importantly be attached a running PiDP1 instance.

See: Isysxp/PDP1-Dpy-SDL2: A Type 30 display for the PiDP1

This is an SDL2 based display system as used for the PiDP11.

I hope the instructions in the README are clear.

The attached image is generated by a separate Pi 3B on the same network as the PiDP1.

It will run on the same machine as well if you wish. (Pi5 recommended)

The resolution is 1280x1024 which suits the monitor I am using.

The monitor color setting is set to cool which gives an (umm!) quite cool display.

The real difficulty was the short persistence electric blue.

I would like to thank Norbert Landsteiner for his help with the artwork.

I hope you think that this adds something to the PDP1 experience.

BW, Ian.

[Bill E]

That is exceptionally cool! Checked out, built, works as advertised. Big improvement appearance-wise.

One gripe, and it has nothing to do with your work, it's SDL. SDL expects xrandr. I typically work on my dev machine via vnc, and I can't run this or p7sim that way. Grrr.

Bill

PS - now you just need mouse location, er, 'lightpen' support. :) There's actually not much to it, just writing the cursor location back to the pidp normalized to dpy coords. when the mouse button is down.

[Bill E]

If you (or someone) could post a win fully-linked binary, that would be great. I don't have a build env on my win box, the pdp1.exe isn't linked with all the dll's it needs.

Bill

[Ian Schofield]

Hi Bill,

 I was going to do this anyway as Visual Studio is a bit of a heavyweight dependency!

 I have updated the repo here:Isysxp/PDP1-DPY: A Type 30 display for the PiDP1 project

 NB do let me know when you have sorted out the light pen bit and I will include this as well.

 Hope it works...

Regards, Ian.

[Bill E]

Many thanks! Per your private request, here is the lightpen test program. It's not pretty or optimized, but it works.

Of course, it's written using my assembler, am1, and it requires my pidp1 mods. Just an incentive. The mainline pidp1 doesn't do anything at all with the lightpen updates p7sim sends.

If you use am1, you'll quickly find it's so much easier to do things than in macro1, imho.

 

Bill

[Bill E]

Just to show someone is actually using this, here it is running on my win11 box connected to one of my remote pidp1 machines. It's running the classic Type 33 Symbol Generator demo, with an added set of ascii char bitmaps.

This is so convenient. Pretty, too. BTW, the color banding is an artifact of the screen capture.

Bill