Possible to run PiDP-11 on WSL or an Ubuntu VM?

[Tyler Whitney]

Hello,

I'm new to the PiDP-11 and experienced it running on a friend's raspberry PI, which I must return. I'd like to run it on my Windows machine, via either WSL1 or 2, or my Ubuntu VM.  Is that possible?

I did some experimenting and installed PiDP-11 on both. It falls down when I run pdp.sh

I ran the pidp11 install on both, and it looks like the pidpd11 installer creates a script that runs when the PI starts up that sets up stuff for the console, and then runs pdp.sh. When I try to mimic those commands by hand, and then run sudo screen -ls pidp11, I get No Sockets found in /run/screen/S-root

Has anyone gotten this to work on either WSL or Ubuntu? I'm not even sure that even if I got past that problem that the binaries I installed from PiDP-11 will even run on WSL or the x86 Ubuntu VM.

-Tyler

[Johnny Billquist]

Uh? Sounds like you want to run just plain simple simh, and not the PiDP-11 which is simh plus the front panel plus adaptions for that.

Johnny

Tyler Whitney <TylerW...@Outlook.com> skrev: (4 januari 2022 08:20:08 CET)

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[Clem Cole]

I fear you have skipped a few steps in your enthusiasm to try to get a simulated system running at home.  The PiDP-11 is a piece of hardware [PiDP-11 Kit] that adds a physical front panel to Supnik's simh simulator as PDP-11 [The Computer History Simulation Project: simh] which traditionally runs on a RPi, although FPGA implementation work also.   The SW simulator runs independent of Oscar's wonder hack and precedes it by many years.  In fact, Oscar's work was based on the software frontend, called Blinkenbone Simulated Front Panels which is almost as cool as Oscar's HW emulation [and Blinkenbone as a PDP-10 front panel, but just the PDP-8 and PDP-11].

So, the place to start is with simh, which will build and run directly on Windows (although I see no reason why it would not run on WSL also, but there is no need). BTW: Will Senn just published a very complete set of instructions on how to get UNIX V7 running from  scratch using simh, but the other OS's that Oscar includes will work fine also, as will other SW and HW systems such as Tenex for PDP-10, Vax/VMS, HP 3000/MPE, etc.  If you search for his blog you can find it and download them; although there are a number of similar instructions you can find in the wild, none as complete as Will's however.

Good luck and have fun.

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[Tyler Whitney]

Thank you for the replies. 

Aware of the PiDP-11 kit. My friend has the physical kit (which looks spectacular) but the experience he loaned me was just a raspberry pi with the simh, etc. installed (instructions) On that I was able to run lunar lander, for example, in a graphics window. This is what I'm trying to get to work on Windows but there seems to be some stuff configured as part of the PiDP-11 software install that makes this possible that I haven't been able to replicate yet on either WSL or an Ubuntu VM.

I have simH installed on Windows and that works. The main thing I'd like to get working is the graphics terminal experience shown above that I have on the pi. Since the pi pdp-11 software install seems to have everything needed to do that, I was trying to replicate the experience on Windows. I will look for Will's blog to see if it helps with this. Is [this] the post you are referring to?

[Clem Cole]

I realized that could be parsed in a confusing manner -- Oscar's front panel used an RPi or an FPGA - simh needs a system - which can be Linux, MacOS, Windows and probably a few others.  Check the docs for what is current supported as the host. In simh's case this an ls from the bin directory after a fulle build:

% ls BIN
3b2               i1401             id32              microvax3900      pdp8              vax
altair            i1620             infoserver100     nova              pdp9              vax730
altairz80         i650              infoserver1000    pdp1              rtvax1000         vax750
b5500             i701              infoserver150vxt  pdp10             s3                vax780
besm6             i7010             intel-mds         pdp10-ka          scelbi            vax8200
buildtools        i704              lgp               pdp10-ki          sds               vax8600
cdc1700           i7070             microvax1         pdp10-kl          sigma             vaxstation3100m30
eclipse           i7080             microvax2         pdp11             ssem              vaxstation3100m38
gri               i7090             microvax2000      pdp15             swtp6800mp-a      vaxstation3100m76
h316              i7094             microvax3100      pdp4              swtp6800mp-a2     vaxstation4000m60
hp2100            ibm1130           microvax3100e     pdp6              tx-0              vaxstation4000vlc
hp3000            id16              microvax3100m80   pdp7              uc15

[Johnny Billquist]

The problem is that the PiDP-11 kit and software setup expects there to
be a front panel, and a server handling it, and so on. All which you do
not have, and which is what is causing you problems most likely.

Since you don't have that, don't try and work with PiDP-11. What you are
wanting is just simh. The "problem" is that you need to figure out how
to get simh configured for your desires, which seems to include graphics.
So you need to either find someone who have prepared a simh setup
matching your desires, or work out how to actually configure simh.
The actual disk images with OSes and so on, you can take from Oscar's
PiDP-11 work, and they will work just fine.
It's just the simh side you need to sort out.

Afraid I don't know anything about simh and graphics, so I can't help
beyond that.

Johnny

On 2022-01-04 16:35, Tyler Whitney wrote:
> Thank you for the replies.
> Aware of the PiDP-11 kit. My friend has the physical kit (which looks
> spectacular) but the experience he loaned me was just a raspberry pi
> with the simh, etc. installed (instructions

> <https://www.instructables.com/PiDP-11-Replica-of-the-1970s-PDP-1170/>)

> On that I was able to run lunar lander, for example, in a graphics
> window. This is what I'm trying to get to work on Windows but there
> seems to be some stuff configured as part of the PiDP-11 software
> install that makes this possible that I haven't been able to replicate
> yet on either WSL or an Ubuntu VM.

> lunarLander.png
> I have simH installed on Windows and that works. The main thing I'd like
> to get working is the graphics terminal experience shown above that I
> have on the pi. Since the pi pdp-11 software install seems to have
> everything needed to do that, I was trying to replicate the experience
> on Windows. I will look for Will's blog to see if it helps with this. Is
> [this]

> <https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2018/01/10/life-in-unix-v7-an-attempt-at-a-simple-task/>the

> post you are referring to?
> On Tuesday, January 4, 2022 at 5:54:00 AM UTC-8 cl...@ccc.com wrote:
>
>
> I fear you have skipped a few steps in your enthusiasm to try to get
> a simulated system running at home.  The PiDP-11 is a piece of
> hardware [PiDP-11 Kit

> <https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11>] that adds a

> physical front panel to Supnik's simh simulator as PDP-11 [The
> Computer History Simulation Project: simh

> <https://github.com/simh/simh>] which traditionally runs on a RPi,

> although FPGA implementation work also.   The SW simulator runs
> independent of Oscar's wonder hack and precedes it by many years.
> In fact, Oscar's work was based on the software frontend, called
> Blinkenbone Simulated Front Panels

> <http://retrocmp.com/projects/blinkenbone/blinkenbone-software/176-blinkenbone-download-and-run-simulated-panels-for-free> which

> is almost as cool as Oscar's HW emulation [and Blinkenbone as a
> PDP-10 front panel, but just the PDP-8 and PDP-11].
>
> So, the place to start is with simh, which will build and run
> directly on Windows (although I see no reason why it would not run
> on WSL also, but there is no need). BTW: Will Senn just published a
> very complete set of instructions on how to get UNIX V7 running from
>  scratch using simh, but the other OS's that Oscar includes will
> work fine also, as will other SW and HW systems such as Tenex for

> PDP-10, Vax/VMS, HP 3000/MPE, /etc/.  If you search for his blog you

> can find it and download them; although there are a number of
> similar instructions you can find in the wild, none as complete as
> Will's however.
>
> Good luck and have fun.
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 2:20 AM Tyler Whitney <TylerW...@outlook.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I'm new to the PiDP-11 and experienced it running on a friend's
> raspberry PI, which I must return. I'd like to run it on my
> Windows machine, via either WSL1 or 2, or my Ubuntu VM.  Is that
> possible?
>
> I did some experimenting and installed PiDP-11 on both. It falls
> down when I run pdp.sh
>
> I ran the pidp11 install on both, and it looks like the pidpd11
> installer creates a script that runs when the PI starts up that
> sets up stuff for the console, and then runs pdp.sh. When I try

> to mimic those commands by hand, and then run /sudo screen -ls
> pidp11/, I get /No Sockets found in /run/screen/S-root/

>
> Has anyone gotten this to work on either WSL or Ubuntu? I'm not
> even sure that even if I got past that problem that the binaries
> I installed from PiDP-11 will even run on WSL or the x86 Ubuntu VM.
>
> -Tyler
>
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--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: b...@softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol

[Clem Cole]

It's his work so I'll let Will send it himself -- but if you TUHS mailing list you'll find it.

If you want to learn how to set up simh to use the PDP-11 GT-40 graphics, you need to search  the simh mailing list - it been well discussed and in fact, I believe Oscar is just using the learning from the simh list -- and yes, Jack's old moonlander will run on it.

BTW:  this cut/pasted from an old message from its author that he sent a number of us a few years back.  I do have it on my iPad and indeed it does play very much like Jack's origin code.  As an interesting tidbit, if you look at Jack's original sources (which are available if you do a web search), you will find a PDP-11 transcendental library using only integers (cordic math) - because the GT40 lacks FP hardware, so moonlander is all 16-bit integer math.  I had written something similar originally in Pascal for my old Petal program, which Jack used as a graphics test on the Masscomp machine [after I converted it to C].   But Jack's is in PDP-11 assembler -- so I asked him once about it.  He told me that spent a Saturday at the MIT library reading up on cordic, then wrote it the next day.

For those that remember Moonlander, the “final” version was created 40 years ago on February 25, 1973. But thanks to Rick Naro you can play it right now. On your iPad (sorry, it doesn’t work on an iPhone).

 

It is amazingly like the original.

 

Just download the app Moonlander Classic by Paradigm Systems from the appstore. It’s free.

 

And amidst the credits and faqs there are interesting tidbits of information, including the original source code……

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/2c606e76-03ba-4140-8b60-8d1fbd8e796en%40googlegroups.com.

[pbi...@gmail.com]

No.  Here: https://decuser.blogspot.com/

 

And here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gDBxULlpLwezH-1RO_3ou_W7trElgSgT/view

 

From: pid...@googlegroups.com <pid...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Tyler Whitney
Sent: Tuesday, January 4, 2022 10:36 AM
To: [PiDP-11] <pid...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [PiDP-11] Possible to run PiDP-11 on WSL or an Ubuntu VM?

 

Thank you for the replies. 

… Is [this] the post you are referring to?

 

[Michael Graffam]

Since you have simH installed, and have the PDP-11 images working, all you really need is a proper terminal emulator. I'd look around for a VT11 vector graphics emulator for Windows. 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/pidp-11/2c606e76-03ba-4140-8b60-8d1fbd8e796en%40googlegroups.com.

[Clem Cole]

I did a quick look in old email - I believe what you want is:  https://github.com/Isysxp/GT40

[Tyler Whitney]

I really appreciate everyone taking the time to respond. I will look into the resources you have provided. When I get this sorted out, I'll report back here on the solution.

[Neal G.]

It will be interesting to hear your experience using WSL2.

I frequently use SimH in a Linux VM (Linux Mint) hosted by VirtualBox on Windows.

It works well for running the PiDP-11 systems and others.

You will find that VT11 and lunar lander are integrated into pdp11 builds of SimH when the SDL development libraries are present.

So to run lunar landerer, none of the PiDP-11 systems are needed, just do this

- start SimH (pdp11)

- type, set vt enable

- type, boot vt

It is however, useful to run the PiDP-11, RT11, system as it includes other games and VT11 demo programs. You can also easily write your own with GTBASIC.

- Neal G.

On Wednesday, January 5, 2022 at 10:20:32 AM UTC-6 Tyler Whitney wrote:

... When I get this sorted out, I'll report back here on the solution.

[Tyler Whitney]

Here's where the adventure is at now:

- I created a raspberry pi hyper-v vm. It's running Version 10 (buster) of the Raspberry PI desktop OS. That part seems to work fine.

- I installed the PiDP11 software on it via the instructions in the PiDP-11 user manual. Note, these instructions explicitly say that you can run this without the actual PDP-11 kit hardware. See the section Using the PiDP-11 software without the PiDP-11 hardware

- I run "sudo /etc/init.d/pidp11 start" which seems to work

- Then I do "cd /opt/pidp11/bin" followed by "./pidp11.sh 0003" which results in "Ignoring SR switches, argument provided to script: 0003, booting rt11, start client/server".  But then I get "/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3: No such file or directory."

- I tried rebuilding per this post but that didn't fix it.

I've looked high and low for how to install ld-linux-armhf.so.3, and don't see how to do that.

I'm borrowing a raspberry pi that has all this working. It's running the same version of the OS that I am. It's not connected to a PDP-11 kit at all and runs just fine. I'm running Lunar Lander on it. Somehow it has this ld-linux-armhf.so.3 file.  Any idea how to get it? 

- I then tried Neal's suggestion because I'd love to cut out the Raspberry PI middleman. I have SimH on my Windows machine (v3.9). Here's what I tried there:

- pdp11 - this launches the pdp11 simulator V3.9-0

- I typed "set vt enable" -> resulted in non-existent device

At this point I'm ready to start totally over. I don't care which platform, though I think I'm done trying to get this to run on a Raspberry Pi. I have a real Raspberry Pi that had network troubles, thus the VM. I thought the Raspberry Pi PDP11 install instructions were bringing in a bunch of goodness that would work together to give me the lunar lander experience, but not so much given my experience above.

I'm happy to try this on Windows. I have a SimH install there (got it from SourceForge here) but it doesn't seem to have all the pieces (thus the set vt enable erroring out with 'non-existent device'). The code from SourceForge is old so maybe I need a better place to get a reasonably current version of SimH from. 

Do you get yours from here and build it yourself?

I get responses that "well, you really need the actual PDP-11 kit hardware to make this work", but you don't. I know you don't because I'm running it on a raspberry pi right now that's simply hooked up to a HDMI display and a keyboard. No PDP11 kit in sight. It works fine. My friend who set it up tells me he just followed the instructions that I referenced above. But it's not working out for me. The instructions say you can do this and run things like adventure and lunar lander just on the PI (which I'm doing), but either I'm missing a step or two somewhere or it no longer works on the Buster release of the raspberry Pi OS.

[Adam Thornton]

....well, my first question is, is the Pi hyper-vm actually running ARM-architecture code?  I would expect that your Windows host is amd64.

/lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3 is the ARM architecture loader.  You will have a loader on any working Linux system, so I suspect the problem is that you are trying to use precompiled ARM binaries on an amd64 host.

I think you will have better luck building simh under WSL with whatever-the-graphics-stuff-needs which is probably SDL2.  All the PiDP-11 stuff buys you is the front panel lights and switches.  The graphical terminal emulation is in simh itself, but you need to turn on some compilation options.  The README.md suggests that on Linux (and thus presumably WSL) you would want libsdl2-dev and libsdl2_ttf-dev for the graphics and graphical fonts, and libpcap-dev, libpcre3-dev, and vde2 for TCP/IP networking in the guests (which you can live without, in general, but it's fun to play with sometimes).

I'm getting simh from GitHub: https://github.com/simh/simh  It's updated frequently (its releases aren't, but the master branch is).

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[Clem Cole]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 2:04 AM Tyler Whitney <TylerW...@outlook.com> wrote:

I'm happy to try this on Windows. I have a SimH install there 

Wrong URL:  The Computer History Simulation Project

Mark even includes pre-built winders binaries: Simh Development Binaries for W32

[Tyler Whitney]

Adam Thornton got most directly to the heart of the matter. I'm running Hyper-V on an x64 host. The Raspberry Pi PDP-11binaries are ARM. (I checked them with readelf -h). I didn't know enough about the Linux world to make sense of the loader error I was seeing, so thank you for pointing me in the right direction.

This means trying to get the Raspberry Pi stuff to run on WSL or Ubuntu is not a worthwhile, either, since I have an x86 machine. Per Adam's (and other's) comments, I'll just go the pure simH route on Windows. Or get an M1 Mac. I wonder what my wife would think about that... Hmmnn.

This whole thing is interesting in retrospect as I consider how I got myself boxed into thinking about this problem. Because the Raspberry Pi solution was my introduction to all this cool PDP11 stuff, I thought of the PiDP11 software install as the 'the way' to duplicate the experience on my own machine. I took another wrong turn when I took that assumption and combined it with the instructions that said you didn't need the physical PDP-11 kit to run it. Since I was happily running the Raspberry Pi OS on my VM, I didn't even think about ARM vs x86. Because the OS was running, I assumed the binary compatibility with the VM was fine, which shut down exploring what I was trying to run in that environment. It doesn't help that I typically never have to think about x86 vs. ARM binaries. And then I swirled around the drain trying to make something work that isn't going to. The more it didn't work, the more I couldn't leave it alone :-) 

Anyway, I'm letting go of using the PiDP11 install, whether installing it on a Raspberry Pi VM, on WSL, on an Ubuntu VM, or here or there, not in a house, not with a mouse, not in a box, nor with a fox, a tree, a goat or boat... 

I'll try recreating the experience on Windows via SimH.

Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate the responsiveness of this group.

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

Just to close the loop on the WSL subject….

 

Simh simulators can be built and run just fine on Linux and thus they also can be built and run just fine on WSL.  In fact, on Windows 11, wsl2 has support for native Linux graphics and thus the graphical behaviors of the simh simulators also work fine there.

 

• Mark

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