[ES40-announcements] ES40 version 0.12: another small step

[Camiel V. <iam...@gm...>]

Dear all,

I just released version 0.12 of the ES40 emulator on the SourceForge
download page (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=187340).
Please check it out!

With the previous version 0.11, I kept looking at "%SWAPPER-I-SYSDISK,
checking status of system disk" for the longest time while booting OpenVMS
7.3-1. I found out that there were quite a few bugs to be fixed before the
emulator got past this message. Some of these bugs, in order of appearance:

1. Queued forks were never processed, because software interrupts were not
fully implemented yet (small oversight, big consequences!)
2. The emulated IDE controller did not provide interrupts
3. Interrupt vectors were not correctly read from the cascaded interrupt
controller
4. The DQ-driver did not like the cylinder-head-sector translation layout
the IDE emulator provided (even though all drive access is done with LBA
access)
5. The emulated IDE-controller did not recognize some commands
6. Ending an interrupt on the cascaded interrupt controller did not end them
on the primary controller.

And a few smaller ones to add... These are all fixed now. When booting
OpenVMS 7.3-1, I now get to "%SWAPPER-I-MAINLOOP, entering SWAPPER main
loop". Maybe further, but I didn't have the patience to wait for it before
sending you all this e-mail.

Thanks for the support, and enjoy!

Camiel.

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/es40