z-machine on pdp8 (or paging Woodelf)

[David Griffith]

On Wed, 4 Apr 2007, David Betz wrote:

> Well, there's always virtual memory. Back when I was in college we
> had a PDP-12 and I *really* wanted an 11 to play with (things haven't
> changed much!). So, I wrote a PDP-11 simulator that ran on the 8. It
> used disk space on an RK01 hard drive for virtual memory and could
> simulate a PDP-11 with up to 32k of memory on a PDP-8 with only 8k.
> Of course, it wasn't very fast but it did run ODT-11 (sort of). I
> still have a listing of it. Some day I'll try typing it in to see if
> it will work on the SBC6120 system that I'm building.

This sounds like it could be adapted for my purposes.  Some things I'd
want to address:

1)  Can you specify which pages to swap?  For the Z-machine, one would
want to swap the game data first, then the interpreter (if at all).

2)  Perhaps this emulator could be stripped down to to run one particular
program: Frotz compiled for pdp11.

3)  Can the emulator be wrapped up with the only binary it will run?  The
idea is to have a single Frotz binary for pdp8 to simplify distribution.

-- 
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu

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