[Info-vax] VMS hardware emulators, was: Re: ODS-5 to ODS-2 Data Migration

[Simon Clubley]

On 2018-02-22, Bob Gezelter <gezelter at rlgsc.com> wrote:
>
> Zane,
>
> If you are interested in retiring hardware, and are running Alphas, I would
> recommend looking at the Hobbyist versions of some of the x86 Alpha
> emulations. That would be a less effort path (e.g., basically imaging the
> disks).
>

It might be a good time to review the current situation with the
various free emulators. These are the ones I know about:

VAX
---
SimH: I used this recently to run various VAX/VMS versions from V3.7 to V7.3
and while I don't know if SimH has any known issues with the VAX emulation,
the things I did worked just fine.

Alpha
-----
FreeAXP: I've used this to run V8.4 (and briefly V7.2). Only runs under
Windows and the free version runs in a limited configuration. However,
the free version was sufficient to do my security research.

I have seen the very rare odd boot failures during a reboot but I don't
know if this is the fault of FreeAXP or down to something I was doing.
Other than that very rare glitch, FreeAXP has worked just fine for me.

ES40: I have run VMS under this on Linux briefly a number of years ago,
but it wasn't as robust as I would like and it was very version specific
about whether VMS works. ES40 development is now abandoned.

SimH: The Alpha emulator in SimH is not ready for use. It is little more
than a CPU simulator at the moment and does not emulate any required
devices.

Itanium
-------
Nothing available. The Ski emulator is a CPU simulator, not a full system
emulator.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world