Further PERQ Emulator progress (and a download!)

Josh Dersch derschjo at msu.edu
Wed Jul 2 23:30:22 CDT 2008


Thought some of you PERQ fanatics out there might be interested in an 
update... I've had some time to work on projects the past few days and 
so I picked up my poor, neglected PERQ emulator and brushed it off.

And this is the result:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/perq/emulator/perq-5th.png
http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/perq/emulator/perq-chess.png

As you can see the emulator is now capable of booting POS from an image 
of my real PERQ's hard drive!  I had to hack in a few things I'm not 
proud of -- most notably, a simulation of the RASTEROP QCode instruction 
since emulating the real thing has proven to be a nightmare -- but I 
plan on doing a proper emulation of the stuff I've hacked around as I 
work out more of the hardware details...

If you want to try it out and see the glory of POS (and who doesn't, 
really?) you can download version 0.1 at:

http://yahozna.dyndns.org/computers/perq/emulator/perqemu0.1.zip

Includes all you need to get going.  You'll need a Windows machine with 
.NET Framework 2.0.  (Yes, I hear the jeering from the peanut gallery.  
Sorry I didn't write this for your OS.  If you want to help with a Mono 
port when I get this thing more finished, let me know :)).

Be sure to read the readme.txt file as it covers some work-arounds for 
some annoying emulation issues.

Well, back to the grindstone.  Need to implement GPIB tablet, disk 
writes, hardware cursors, serial, ethernet, video timing, real RasterOp 
emulation, 16K CPU support... and whatever else I've forgotten...

- Josh




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