Blinkenlight graphical panel compatable with current version of PiDP11?

[Three Jeeps]

Not sure if I want to go down this rabbit hole or not...am considering downloading and trying the Blinkenlight graphical/virtual panel described here:

https://retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone

Anyone know if it plays nice with the current software version of the PiDP front panel and what ever the current version is of simh+blinking LED fixes that have been released lately? 

According to the website, there are  several precompiled ready-to-run distributions with virtual desktop panels - One thing that is not clear- is simh bundled with the virtual desktop client? or does one have to 'fiddle' with trying to make the client talk to a simh 'server'  via the simh API?

Does one need to have the virtual panel 'talk to' an actual blinkinboard?

At this point, I just want to run the virtual panel with blinkin lights as a screen saver...maybe more later...

Thanks

J

[terry-...@glaver.org]

On Monday, July 14, 2025 at 11:18:22 AM UTC-4 jjhu...@gmail.com wrote:

Not sure if I want to go down this rabbit hole or not...am considering downloading and trying the Blinkenlight graphical/virtual panel described here:

https://retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone

Anyone know if it plays nice with the current software version of the PiDP front panel and what ever the current version is of simh+blinking LED fixes that have been released lately? 

The current "official" PiDP-11 distribution with the recent LED fixes +  other fixes and the updated recompile.sh script is believed to have finally fixed the LED problem. We probably won't know for several months or more if it fixes all panel freezes.

I don't know if you can slot in a virtual Blinkenbone panel instead of the PiDP-11 panel - both the Blinkenbone author and Oscar made changes to both the  simulator and the Blinkenbone hardware driver to create the PiDP-11. So I'd go with one of the "canned" distributions below.

According to the website, there are  several precompiled ready-to-run distributions with virtual desktop panels - One thing that is not clear- is simh bundled with the virtual desktop client? or does one have to 'fiddle' with trying to make the client talk to a simh 'server'  via the simh API?

I believe they are complete and ready to run, but haven't checked. 

Does one need to have the virtual panel 'talk to' an actual blinkinboard?

No. You only need the board if you want to animate an actual front panel you have laying around.

At this point, I just want to run the virtual panel with blinkin lights as a screen saver...maybe more later...

I don't know if simh emulates the actual hardware's power fail / restart behavior. A screen saver tends to "go away" when the user presses a key to wake up the system. So it would ideally look like a power failure to the emulator and then a restart once the screen saver was needed again. The saver could also detach from the console and just continue running without the display. I'm not that familiar with Windows screen savers and even less familiar with X11 ones, and have no experience at all with Wayland or MacOS, so if the software doesn't already do that, you'll need expertise from someone to get you pointed in the right direction with a screen saver. As I said, the precompiled Blinkenbone simulator + panel should just work "out of the box" as a desktop app.

[Anton Lavrentiev]

IIRC, it's based on a much older simh version (although 4.0 branch) which was heavily modified (including hacking the console, so even deeper than for PiDP-11). But I have it on my PC and it works (I used pre built binaries, and played with it before I got PiDP-11).

Hope this helps

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "[PiDP-11]" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to pidp-11+u...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/81ad8c1b-ec2c-44bb-a4a3-89edfbb90738n%40googlegroups.com.

[Neal G.]

Same here. That is, I installed the Blinkenbone distribution, and used it to evaluate the PiDP-11 systems, before commiting to build the PiDP-11.

It was not difficult to install or use (on Linux), or to substitute the PiDP-11 systems for those provided by Blinkenbone.

One thing to consider. The graphical front panels are implemented in Java. They can easily be opened/started independently of SimH; but it might be more difficult to use a Java app as a screen saver. It might be easier to capture several minutes of video of the PiDP-11 front panel and display the video as the screen saver.

- Neal G.

[timr...@gmail.com]

I tried this quite some time ago (many years) and it worked fine then.