PiDP-8/I Software

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Getting Started with the PiDP-8/I Software

Prerequisites

Getting the Software onto Your Pi

If you're reading this file within an unpacked distribution of the PiDP-8/I software, you should skip this section, because you have already achieved its aim.

If you are reading this online and have not yet downloaded and unpacked the software source code onto your Pi, this section will get you going.

Transferring the File to the Pi

The first step is to get the tarball (*.tar.gz file) or Zip file onto the Pi. There are many options:

  1. Copy the file to the SD card you're using to boot the Pi. When inserted into a Mac or Windows PC, typically only the /boot partition mounts as a drive your OS can see. (There's a much larger partition on the SD card, but most PCs cannot see it.) There should be enough free space left in this small partition to copy the file over. When you boot the Pi up with that SD card, you will find the tarball or Zip file in /boot.

  2. Pull the file down to the Pi over the web, directly to the Pi:

    $ wget -O pidp8i.tar.gz https://goo.gl/JowPoC

    That will get you a file called pidp8i.tar.gz in the current working directory containing the latest release version. (Use the "bleeding edge" links on the home page if you want the tip of trunk instead!)

  3. SCP the file over to a running Pi from another machine. If your Pi has OpenSSH installed and running, you can use WinSCP, Cyberduck, FileZilla or another SCP or SFTP-compatible file transfer program to copy the file to the Pi over the network.

  4. Clone the Fossil repository using the instructions in the HACKERS.md file. (Best for experts or those who wish to become experts.)

  5. Switch to the binary OS installation images available from the top-level project page. These are default installations of Raspbian Lite with the PiDP-8/I software already downloaded, built, and installed. These images were produced in part using option #4 above, so you can use Fossil to update your software to the current version at any time, as long as the Pi is connected to the Internet.

Unpacking the Software on Your Pi

Having transferred the distribution file onto your Pi, you can unpack it with one of the two following commands.

If you grabbed the tarball:

$ tar xvf /path/to/pidp8i-VERSION.tar.gz

If you grabbed the Zip file instead:

$ unzip /path/to/pidp8i-VERSION.zip

The file name will vary somewhat, depending on when and how you transferred the file. After unpacking it, you will have a new directory beginning with pidp8i. cd into that directory, then proceed with the configuration steps below.

If You Need More Help

If the above material is not sufficient to get you started, you might want to look at the documentation provided by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. In particular, we recommend their Linux and Raspbian guides. The book "Make: Linux for Makers" by Aaron Newcomb is also supposed to be good.

Configuring, Building and Installing

This software distribution builds and installs in the same way as most other Linux/Unix software these days. The short-and-sweet is:

$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

The configure step is generally needed only the first time you build the software in a new directory. You may want to add options after it, as described below.

After that initial configuration, the software normally auto-reconfigures itself on updates using the same options you gave before, but occasionally we make some change that prevents this from happening. If you get a build error after updating to a new version of the software, try saying:

$ make reconfig

...and then continuing with the make && sudo make install steps before reporting a build error.

If make reconfig also fails, you can try running the configure script again manually.

Running the Software

For the most part, this is covered in the documentation linked from the Learning More section of the project home page.

The only tricky bit is that if this is the first time you have configured, built and installed the software as above on a given system, you will have to log out and back in before commands like pidp8i will be in your user's PATH.

Configure Script Options

You can change many things about the way the software is built and installed by giving options to the configure script:

--prefix

Perhaps the most widely useful configure script option is --prefix, which lets you override the default installation directory, /opt/pidp8i. There are many good reasons to change where the software gets installed, but the default is also a good one, so unless you know for a fact that you want to change this default, leave it alone.

For example, you might prefer that the installer put the built software under your home directory. This will do that:

$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/pidp8i && sudo make install

You might think that installing to a directory your user has complete control over would remove the need for installing via sudo, but that is not the case, since the installation script needs root privileges to mark a few of the executables as having permission to run at high priority levels, which improves the quality of the display, particularly with the incandescent lamp simulator feature enabled.

--lowercase

The American Standards Association (predecessor to ANSI) delivered the second major version of the ASCII character encoding standard the same year the first PDP-8 came out, 1965. The big new addition? Lowercase.

That bit of history means that when the PDP-8 was new, lowercase was a fancy new feature in the computing industry. That, plus the memory savings you get from storing stripped ASCII as two 6-bit characters per 12-bit PDP-8 word means that most PDP-8 software did not expect to receive lowercase ASCII text, particularly the older software.

The PDP-8 lived long enough to see lowercase ASCII input become common in the computing industry.

As a result, PDP-8 software reacts in many strange and wonderful ways when you give it lowercase input. Some software copes nicely, other software crashes, and some software just sits there dumbly waiting for you to type something!

This configuration option lets you control how you want your simulated PDP-8/I to react to lowercase input:

--no-lamp-simulator

If you build the software on a multi-core host, the PDP-8/I simulator is normally built with the incandescent lamp simulator feature, which drives the LEDs in a way that mimics the incandescent lamps used in the original PDP-8/I. (We call this the ILS for short.) This feature currently takes too much CPU power to run on anything but a multi-core Raspberry Pi, currently limited to the Pi 2 and Pi 3 series.

If you configure the software on a single-core Pi — models A+, B+, and Zero — the simulator uses the original low-CPU-usage LED driving method instead. (a.k.a. NLS for short, named after this configuration option.)

Those on a multi-core host who want this low-CPU-usage LED driving method can give the --no-lamp-simulator option to configure. This method not only uses less CPU, which may be helpful if you're trying to run a lot of background tasks on your Pi 2 or Pi 3, it can also be helpful when the CPU is heavily throttled.

--serial-mod

If you have done Oscar's serial mod to your PiDP-8/I PCB and the Raspberry Pi you have connected to it, add --serial-mod to the configure command above.

If you do not give this flag at configure time with these hardware modifications in place, the front panel will not work correctly, and trying to run the software may even crash the Pi.

If you give this flag and your PCBs are not modified, most of the hardware will work correctly, but several lights and switches will not work correctly.

--alt-serial-mod

This flag is for an alternative serial mod by James L-W. It doesn't require mods to the Pi, and the mods to the PiDP-8/I board are different from Oscar's. This flag changes the GPIO code to work with these modifications to the PiDP-8/I circuit design.

See the linked mailing list thread for details.

As with --serial-mod, you should only enable this flag if you have actually done the mods as specified by James L-W.

This option is a pure alternative to --serial-mod: you can leave both off, but you cannot pass both.

--throttle

See README-throttle.md for the values this option takes. If you don't give this option, the simulator runs as fast as possible, more or less.

--disable-usb-automount

When you install the software on a systemd-based Linux system, we normally configure the OS to automatically mount USB drives when they are initially plugged in, which allows the SING_STEP + DF media image auto-attach feature to work smoothly. That is, if you plug in a USB memory stick holding a *.pt file containing a paper tape image, you want the simulator to be able to find it if you have the DF switches set to 1, telling the PiDP-8/I front panel code to look for something to attach to the simulator's paper tape reader.

This feature may interfere with other uses of USB, such as when booting your Pi from an external USB hard disk drive. Give this option to disable the feature.

(Alternately, you could modify our etc/udev.rules and/or bin/usb-mount scripts so that they work cooperatively with your local USB setup rather than conflicting with it.)

--disable-cc8-cross

Give this option if you do not want to build Ian Schofield's cc8 C cross-compiler on the host.

Because the cross-compiler is needed to build the CC8 native OS/8 compiler, disabling the cross-compiler also causes the native compiler to be left off the bootable OS/8 RK05 disk image, as if you’d passed the --disable-os8-cc8 configuration option.

--disable-os8-*

Several default components of the OS/8 RK05 disk image used by boot options IF=0 and IF=7 can be left out to save space and build time:

--enable-os8-*

There are a few file sets not normally installed to the OS/8 RK05 disk image used by boot options IF=0 and IF=7. You can install them with the following options:

--os8-minimal

If you set this flag, it sets all --enable-os8-* flags to false and all --disable-os8-* flags to true. If you give this along with any --enable-os8-* option, minimal mode overrides it. Alas, the only way to get "minimal plus one or two features" is to explicitly disable all of the optional OS/8 features you don't want.

This flag's name is aspirational, rather than accurate: our current "minimal" installation could still be stripped down some more. We expect to add more --disable-os8-* flags later to reduce the delta between the ideal "minimal OS/8" and our current offering. These options would then be included in --os8-minimal. An example of this is OS/8's BASIC interpreter, which currently cannot be left out.

This option does not control some things you might think it should:

  1. This option does not affect the --lowercase option because that affects only OS/8's command interpreter and OS/8's BASIC implementation, so we deem it to be orthogonal to the purpose of the --os8-minimal flag, which only affects the optional post-BUILD features. If you want a truly pristime OS/8 disk, you should therefore also give --lowercase=none.

  2. This option does not affect --disable-os8-src, because it only suppresses optional features in the "bin" media. If you want a minimal OS/8 bin disk and no src disk, give that option as well.

  3. Although it disables display of the INIT.TX file on boot, the file is still generated in case you later want to enable it, since the file acts as build documentation as well as a "welcome" message.

--help

Run ./configure --help for more information on your options here.

The OS/8 RK05 Disk Image

For the first several years of the PiDP-8/I project, the OS/8 RK05 disk image included with the PiDP-8/I software (called os8.rk05) was based on an image of a real RK05 disk pack that someone allegedly found in a salvaged PDP-8 system. Parts of the image were corrupt, and not all of the pieces of software on the disk worked properly with the other parts. It was also a reflection of the time it was created and used out in the world, which was not always what we would wish to use today.

In late 2017 several of us created the mkos8 tool, which was replaced during 2018 by Bill Cattey with the os8-run interpreter and its stock scripts. The --*-os8-* options documented above get passed into os8-run during the PiDP-8/I software build process, which controls how it generates the v3d*.rk05 RK05 disk image files.

This set of disk images entirely replaces the old os8.rk05 disk image, in that all features of the old disk image are still available, though not necessarily in the default configuration. In some cases, features pesent on the old os8.rk05 disk are now left out or disabled by default, and in other cases we have changed the behavior of features from the way they used to be on the old disk. Mostly, though, the new disk images are simply more functional than the old ones.

If you wish to know the full details of how these disk images are created, see the documentation for os8-run and that for class simh.

The remainder of this section describes some aspects of these disk images which are not clear from the descriptions of the --*-os8-* configuration options above.

Baseline

The baseline for the bootable OS/8 disk images comes from a set of DECtapes distributed by Digital Equipment Corporation which are now included with the PiDP-8/I software; see the media/os8/*.tu56 files. From these files and your configuration options, the os8-run script creates the baseline v3d-dist.rk05 disk image.

The default build creates a complete OS/8 V3D system including BUILD support, FORTRAN IV, MACREL v2, and more.

Subtractions

It turns out that it's pretty easy to run out of directory space on an OS/8 RK05 disk due to a limitation in the number of files on an OS/8 filesystem. For this reason, the archive of device drivers and TD8E system are left off the system packs. They can be found in OS/8 Binary Distribution DECtape #2.

If you do fancy work with BUILD, you may need to attach that DECtape image and copy files in from it.

Default Additions

The OS/8 RK05 disk image build process normally installs many software and data file sets to the disk image. See the option descriptions above: the "disable" option set effectively lists those packages that are installed by default, and the following set of "enable" option set lists those left out by default.

Console Enhancements

The default build enhances the console in a few ways:

  1. The SIMH PDP-8 simulator and a few select parts of OS/8 are adjusted to cope with lowercase input to varying degrees.

  2. Rubout/backspace handling is set to assume a video terminal rather than a teletype by default.

You can read more about this in the wiki.

Patches

The v3d-dist.rk05 disk image referenced above is considered a read-only master. A copy is made called v3d.rk05. This is the default OS/8 rk05 image assigned to the IF=0 and IF=7 boot options.

In keeping with the standards of good systm management this image incorporates all mandatory patches, as well as optional patches appropriate to proper operation of the system. For details on the available patches, the selection criteria, and information about other optional patches see the OS/8 system patches document.

The OS/8 TU56 Tape Image

As with the OS/8 disk image, this distribution’s build system can create custom TU56 tape images from pristine source media. This replaces the old os8.tu56 binary image previously distributed with this software.

The build system actually creates four such tape images according to a 2×2 matrix of choices:

Overwriting the Local Simulator Setup

When you run sudo make install step on a system that already has an existing installation, it purposely does not overwrite two classes of files:

  1. The binary PDP-8 media files, such as the RK05 disk image that holds the OS/8 image the simulator boots from by default. These media image files are considered "precious" because you may have modified the OS configuration or saved personal files to the disk the OS boots from, which in turn modifies this media image file out in the host operating environment.

  2. The PDP-8 simulator configuration files, installed as $prefix/share/boot/*.script, which may similarly have local changes, and thus be precious to you.

Sometimes this "protect the precious" behavior isn't what you want. (Gollum!) One common reason this may be the case is that you've damaged your local configuration and want to start over. Another common case is that the newer software you're installing contains changes that you want to reflect into your local configuration.

You have several options here:

  1. If you just want to reflect the prior PDP-8 simulator configuration file changes into your local versions, you can hand-edit the installed simulator configuration scripts to match the changes in the newly-generated boot/*.script files under the build directory.

  2. If the change is to the binary PDP-8 media image files — including the generated OS/8 disk images — and you're unwilling to overwrite your existing ones wholesale, you'll have to mount both versions of the media image files under the PDP-8 simulator and copy the changes over by hand.

  3. If your previously installed binary OS media images — e.g. the OS/8 RK05 disk image that the simulator boots from by default — are precious but the simulator configuration scripts aren't precious, you can just copy the generated boot/*.script files from the build directory into the installation directory, $prefix/share/boot. (See the --prefix option above for the meaning of $prefix.)

  4. If neither your previously installed simulator configuration files nor the binary media images are precious, you can force the installation script to overwrite them both with a sudo make mediainstall command after sudo make install.

    Beware that this is potentially destructive! If you've made changes to your PDP-8 operating systems or have saved files to your OS system disks, this option will overwrite those changes!

Testing Your PiDP-8/I Hardware

You can test your PiDP-8/I LED and switch functions with these commands:

$ pidp8i stop
$ pidp8i-test

You may have to log out and back in before the second command will work, since the installation script modifies your normal user's PATH the first time you install onto a given system.

It is important to stop the PiDP-8/I simulator before running the test program, since both programs need exclusive access to the LEDs and switches on the front panel. After you are done testing, you can start the PiDP-8/I simulator back up with:

$ pidp8i start

See its documentation for more details.

Using the Software

For the most part, this software distribution works like the old stable 2015.12.15 distribution. Its documentation therefore describes this software too, for the most part.

The largest user-visible difference between the two software distributions is that many of the shell commands are different:

  1. To start the simulator running in the background:

    $ pidp8i start

    This will happen automatically on reboot unless you disable the service, such as in order to run one of the various forks of Deeper Thought.

  2. To attach the terminal you're working on to the simulator:

    $ pidp8i

    (Yes, it's the same base command as above. The pidp8i script uses its first argument to determine what you want it to do. Without arguments, this is what it does.)

  3. To detach from the simulator's terminal interface while leaving the PiDP-8/I simulator running, type Ctrl-A d. You can re-attach to it later with a pidp8i command.

  4. To shut the simulator down while attached to its terminal interface, type Ctrl-E to pause the simulator, then at the simh> prompt type quit. Type help at that prompt to get some idea of what else you can do with the simulator command language, or read the SIMH Users' Guide.

  5. To shut the simulator down from the Raspbian command line:

    $ pidp8i stop

There are other major differences between the old stable distribution and this one. See that linked wiki article for details.

Enabling the SSH Server on the Binary OS Images

The OpenSSH server is enabled and running by default on the PiDP-8/I binary OS images, but for security reasons, the build process we use to create these OS images wipes out the SSH host keys generated here on our build system, else everyone's PiDP-8/I would have the same host keys, which would be a massive security hole. Unfortunately, the Raspbian sshd service is not smart enough to regenerate these keys if they are missing on boot, so you need to do this once by hand:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server

You should be able to log in via SSH immediately after that command completes.

We used to do this automatically in releases v2017.12.22 and before, but that was when we started the pidp8i service as root, which we no longer do. Consequently, the pidp8i service no longer has permission to generate your OS's SSH keys, so you must do it interactively with sudo permissions.

The systemd Unit File

The PiDP-8/I software version 2017.12.22 used an old-style System V init script to start the PiDP-8/I service, as did all prior releases, including Oscar Vermeulen's final stable release.

As of 2018.02.22, we have now switched to a systemd unit file, since we normally install on Raspbian, which has been systemd-based for years. We've wanted to do this for some time, but some changes in the way systemd handles SysV init script compatibility in Raspbian Stretch forced the issue.

One of the features systemd gives us is the ability to set the unit to run as user-level service rather than as a system-wide service, which means you no longer need the sudo prefix on commands to start, stop, restart, and query the service. The only time you now need root privileges is when installing the software. After that, the software runs under your normal user account, as do all of the commands you use to manipulate the background simulator service.

As a result of these changes, none of these commands work any longer:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/pidp8i start
$ sudo service pidp8i stop
$ sudo systemctl restart pidp8i

The correct forms, respectively, are:

$ systemctl --user start pidp8i
$ systemctl --user stop pidp8i
$ systemctl --user restart pidp8i

These commands are long, so we have extended the pidp8i command to build and run systemctl commands for you when you pass it arguments:

$ pidp8i start
$ pidp8i stop
$ pidp8i restart
$ pidp8i status -l

If you run it without arguments, it attaches to the GNU screen(1) session, just as before.

The last command above shows that all arguments are passed to systemctl, not just the first, so you can pass flags and such.

The service is still set to start at boot, just as before.

To disable the service so you can run something else against the PiDP-8/I front panel hardware instead, such as Deeper Thought 2:

$ pidp8i stop
$ pidp8i disable

If you install this release on a system that has the old SysV init script on it, that service will be disabled and removed before we install and enable the replacement systemd user service.

License

Copyright © 2016-2018 by Warren Young. This document is licensed under the terms of the SIMH license.