Saturday, September 10, 2016

3b1 emulator, MFM hard drive and emulation files, and David Brower...

https://github.com/dad4x/s4-3b1-pc7300

<Cprossu> I've reached out to David Brower, since he made/wrote and used the tools to convert the mfm emulator files back and forth from the freebee emulator form to another
<Cprossu> and I have like zero clue how to use them
<Cprossu> https://github.com/dad4x/s4-3b1-pc7300


From: Cprossu <cprossu@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 6:36 AM
Subject: Floating a trial balloon to see if it lands where it should... (AT&T/Convergent Unix PC/7300/3B1/Safari/ETC)
To: David.Brower@oracle.com

Hello there, I am messing around with a AT&T unix pc emulator and I have a
friend with several functioning ATT unix pc's and other weird stuff. My
goal is to take games from the CTIX miniframe tape and see if they will run
on the 3B1 emulator at least since the two machines should be binary
compatible.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/bits/Convergent/miniframe/BO-11x-4_1err_CTIX_Single-User_3.20.zip
The tape file that contains the said games is "ft"
I am not sure if it's possible to make a tape image and then run it on the
emulator or the real machine, but it would be interesting to find out. The
single tape file is too big to put on a 360k dd 5 1/4" floppy image, but
might fit on a dd 720k  3 1/2" (80 cyl instead of 40?) image. If not we'll
have to untar it not using native software, which would add another
complexity level to it?

I am running this guy's precompiled 3b1 freebee emulator, as when I
attempted compiling the original code under CYGWIN terrible things happened
->
http://virtuallyfun.superglobalmegacorp.com/2014/05/21/philip-pembertons-3b1-emulator-now-boots-att-unix/#comment-158503

I discovered your page -> https://github.com/dad4x/s4-3b1-pc7300
because my friend supplements and backs up his unix pc's utilizing the
Gesswein unix emulator, and found that you were able to take the .emu files
from the emulator and through your programs convert them into an image to
run on the freebee emulator. I have no idea how to install or run these in
a windows environment, so I might have to make a VM to do it all, and even
then I do not understand how to use your tools properly to accomplish what
you did using my friend's real disk images.

Basically I have lots of copies of files I want to transfer and try between
real machines, emulated machines, and other stuff and I don't know how to
proceed.
Hopefully this email forwards to you. Let me know if you get the email, and
if you can help me figure this mess out

I am in #mightyframe on irc.freenode.net if you are into IRC, with my
friend who has the real machines.

-Cprossu
Andrew Lewton