[Info-vax] SimH with framebuffer and hobbyist kit?

[Bob Koehler]

In article <slrn3vfsklkdre.pc1.vrtsds at sdf.lonestar.org>, Vertis Sidus <vrtsds at sdf.org> writes:
> I'd like to use DECwindows in an emulated framebuffer, but the only option I
> can find for that is the VAXstation 2000 emulator at
> 
>   http://www.9track.net/simh/vax410
> 
> This is a rather limited system! From what I've read, it really wants VMS
> 4.x or so, but unfortunately all I have is the current 7.3 hobbyist kit. Is
> it at all possible for VMS 7.3, with DECwindows, to run in this emulator? Or,
> is there another framebuffer emulator option that I don't know about?

   I would not be in the least bit surprized if 7.3 ran on a VAXStation
   2000 emulator.  I would try it.

   Unsupporting older hardware was generally done because VMS required
   more disk space than any of the disks DEC sold for that model, or
   there just wasn't enough customer demand to keep testing VMS updates
   against it.  VMS Engineering had better things to do than spend time
   ripping out old hardware support.  Emulators often get equiped with
   much larger disk simulations, RAM, ..., than the real hardware did.
   And often things would run on real hardware with third party disks,
   ...

   The only exception I know of was the 11/782.  They had to rip out
   support for asymetric multiprocessing to get support for symetric
   multiprocessing done in a reasonable manner.