[Info-vax] Free Alpha emulators running under Linux ?

[Simon Clubley]

On 2022-01-02, John H. Reinhardt <johnhreinhardt at thereinhardts.org> wrote:
> On 1/2/2022 3:09 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> At the moment, I run my home Alpha system on a FreeAXP instance
>> running under Windows.
>> 
>> It would be nice to switch to running an Alpha emulator under Linux
>> while switching to the VSI version of Alpha VMS.
>> 
>> What is the current state of play for free Alpha emulators running
>> under Linux ?
>> 
>> When I last looked at this a number of years ago, the only Linux based
>> emulator I could find at the time was es40 and that wasn't very usable
>> at the time.
>> 
>
> Things haven't improved.  There is the AXPBox (forked from es40) which
> has been discussed here before.  Currently at V1.10 it still isn't as
> stable as the commercial Windows apps.  All the other previously available
> non-commercial non-Windows (and even commercial, I think) Alpha emulators
> have disappeared.
>

Thanks for the links and the summary.

I've gone through the links you and others have provided and see what
you mean.

The licence units issue was a bit of a surprise and something I had not
realised. While I criticise VSI for many things, that is something I
actually do understand from their viewpoint, given the number and types
of comments about bypassing the existing licencing terms.

It does raise one interesting question however: what does the concept
of licencing units even mean when it comes to x86-64 VMS ?

After all, unlike with the DEC hardware, you can't really add meaningful
markers to generic x86-64 hardware to indicate what type of system it is.

Oh well, it looks like it's going to still be FreeAXP on Windows for now... :-)

Thanks,

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.