A few problems, all better now

[Rick Adams]

It took forever to be approved for this group, which I needed because I had a few problems with the kit.  But I figured out all my problems in the interim.

The kit went together easily enough.  My soldering skills are adequate but not stellar.  I had to find two bad solder joints before the kit worked correctly.  The troubleshooting steps in the docs were quite helpful.

Then I had a problem with TSS/8 not booting.  Updating the version of SIMH fixed that.  All better now!

One of the first things I did with my actual PDP8/I back in the day was to patch the OS to blink a different light pattern for the idle job instead of counting up in binary.  That impressed the hell out of my boss.

Maybe I will figure out how to do that again someday.  Alas, I lost my hardcopy listing of the TSS/8 source over the years.  It was for an earlier version of TSS/8 anyway, before the disk quotas were added.

Anyway, I am thrilled to have my PDP8/I off running TSS/8 in the corner of my den!  Nostalgia heaven; thanks so much for this!

[timr...@gmail.com]

There are several copies of the TSS/8 source available here:  https://github.com/lisper/cpus-pdp8.  The one at TSS8.2 is 8.24 and was the

latest I could make fully work.  The UWM version is 8.25 and boots after some kludging as it's booting code has been heavily modified.  I could not

make the system utilities work from other versions of TSS/8 as there must have been changes needed and the source for those do not seem to 

exist.  I was a systems operator for the TSS/8 setup at my local community college back in the early 70s and that's what I learned on for programming.

[Randy James]

New to the group - but was a TSS/8 pro in college; also worked for DEC.

I have a PiDP-11/70 with RSTS, and also just loaded a prebuilt 8.24 image on a Windows platform.   

I'd really like to find an TSS/8 image that is "maxed out" - any and all available devices and quantities supported (RF, RK, DT, etc.) and max memory etc. to run under SIMH.     I have looked at the source in Github and I see where the parameters are that include the drivers and config them, but I don't know enough to build one from scratch...

Any pointers or assistance is appreciated!

[William Cattey]

Although I don't know anything about building or running TSS/8, I did create some helpful scripting stuff that runs under SIMH (the same emulator that implements your PiDP-11/70, but with the PDP-8 instruction set and devices instead.)

I'll keep watching this thread for when someone chimes in with info on how to build TSS/8 from source, and then I volunteer to help craft the relevant scripts to automate it under SIMH.

See also: 

class SIMH documentation: https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/file?name=doc/class-simh.md&ci=tip

class os8script documentation: https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/file?name=doc/class-os8script.md&ci=tip

-Bill

[timr...@gmail.com]

I did that to TSS/8 to make it count backwards.  Got bored seeing it count up.

On Thursday, December 29, 2022 at 6:39:23 AM UTC-6 rick.a...@gmail.com wrote:

[timr...@gmail.com]

I don't know of any image already "maxed out" as you say.  There are parameters to specify what to include and what not to include.  You can't have RF type disks and DF type disks at the same time.  They use many of the same IOTs.  And you have to be careful as TSS/8 in its basic form pretty much fills up the two fields it resides in plus the 3rd that gets swapped (SI and FIP).  There are Makefiles included with the above mentioned TSS/8 images.  I just compile them on Linux with no issues.  Why do you wish a maxed out TSS/8?  I find the standard image works quite well.

[timr...@gmail.com]

The makefiles to build all of TSS/8 uses Macro8x to compile the source.  It's just as easy to build them on the same system you run Simh on I find.