David's Blog
I have been busy trying to get the Ersatz-11 emulator to run on DR-DOS, which seems to work OK (more about that another time). Then I decided to try getting the whole thing to boot from CD. This would give me a PDP-11 Live CD. Anyway, whilst having a rummage round in my pile of old junk hardware I found a motherboard given to me by my friend James. It has 32Mb RAM on board and a 200MHz AMD K6 processor. I don't have any IDE hard disks, but I do have an old CD drive. So I started wondering if I could turn this lot into a PDP-11. This is the machine on the bench:So the next thing to do was to see if it boots, so I tried a linux CD I had lying around:...which works a charm. So the next thing was to try my PDP-11 live CD. Guess what? It only works:This is sooo cool. You can see I'm running my ASCII mandelbrot program in celebration. In fact, this is so cool that I've gone and bought a brand new Intel D410PT motherboard and I intend to rig it to run as a PDP-11. I expect that will fly. I will use a solid state disk and have old software running on new hardware. In the meantime this AMD K6 based prototype easily outperforms my real PDP-11/53.
Tags: AMD, K6, PDP-11, motherboard, live cd
DEC PDP
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I'm a C# developer having worked with .Net since it was in beta. Before that I mainly worked in C and C++. I have been developing commercial software for more than 20 years. I also mess around with microprocesors, but that's just for fun. I live near Cambridge, England and at the moment I'm contracted to one of the departments at Cambridge University.