New branch: upstream-prep, containing zimh integration and redo of front panel integration.

[William Cattey]

As I dug into the design of a pull request for zimh to accept the Major State (cycle accurate) variant on the cpu, I reviewed what the OpenSIMH folks said about what they'd accept for a pull, that they'd be willing to accept an alternate CPU following the model for the PDP-10 simulator's integration with PIDP10.

A design for zimh turned out to be pretty much the same thing.

Today I sat down with claude.ai and got serious about it.

claude.ai reported that the front panel on the PIDP10 code line did not have lots of conditional code in scp.c, instead it used the public API, sim_vm_read. It proposed a re-factoring of the current implementation that would follow that model, and eliminate a bunch of mods to scp.c.

I have just tested that re-factoring in the upstream-prep branch, and it seems to work just fine.

There is documentation on the approach at:
https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/file?name=doc/upstream-submission-strategy.md&ci=tip

I'd be grateful for some review of this.

-Bill

[Sven M. Hallberg]

William Cattey on Sat, Jul 04 2026:

> Today I sat down with claude.ai and got serious about it.

Not that I expect any particular reaction to it, but I would like to
make public the fact that embracing AI-generated code is actively
driving my motivation to participate in this project toward zero.

Just to make sure it doesn't appear like everybody is on board with it.
You are losing at least one potential contributor.

This is of course influenced by my previous experience here, short as it
was, but that is mostly coincidental.

-p

[William Cattey]

I sent a private reply to Sven which I will share here:

Hello Sven,

I am sorry that you feel that way. I'm sure I won't be able to change your mind about this. I respect your opinion, and appreciate why you feel strongly that open source projects should not encourage utilization of AI, because of the message it sends that it's ok to use tools that may be dangerous to the livelihood of the people who are critical to the forward motion of Open Source projects.

For my part, I am being transparent on my use of AI, so as to try and be respectful and open about it.

Unfortunately, if I had not used claude, the work would never have gotten done.  There was nobody besides me who was making any effort to get Steve Tockey's important updates to the PDP-8 emulation into a state where upstream would accept them, and thereby enable more than niche deployment.

As primary committer on this project, my choice was, "endanger the pool of contributors", or "accept no forward progress on an important project aspect."

I apologize to you for the decision I made, and again, I appreciate and respect where you are coming from.

-Bill