PDP-8/E Simulator

What is new in this release:

Version 2.1 is big maintenance release:

• The PDP-8/E Simulator now is a 64-bit application fully supporting macOS 10.14 "Mojave" Dark Mode and still retaining compatibility to old Macs with Intel or PowerPC CPUs running Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" or newer.
• Many adjustments for 64-bit mode, macOS 10.12 SDK and Xcode 8.2.1; esp. the memory inspector drawer is now a panel (NSDrawer is deprecated and has no black appearance in "Mojave" Dark Mode) and all registers are now text fields (the formerly used NSForm and NSFormCell are deprecated and do not draw the register content reliably with "Mojave").
• App Nap is now disabled when the PDP-8/E runs to avoid massive slowdown when the simulated machine works for a while without user interaction.
• More robust ASR 33 thread synchronisation now avoids sporadic stops of the input when OS/8 BASIC reads source code from taper tape or via Copy & Paste. When pasting multi-line text in the ASR 33, the line feeds are now handled correctly; before, the pasted text was handled as one long line. ASR 33 toolbar removed, the controls are now at the top of the window.
• Position of the progress bar and the file label in the ASR 33 and PC8-E paper tape reader and punch exchanged.
• The RK05 drives now avoid file I/O for unmounted disks; before, the MAINDEC-08-DHRKA-B-PB RK8-E Diskless Control Test was able to cause this in rare cases, resulting in an immediate crash of the simulator. The RK05 drives are now correctly initialized and the devices implemented by plug-ins are correctly reset when no preference file for the simulator exists, i. e. at the very first launch of the app.
• The EAE instructions SHL 37, ASR 37 and LSR 37 now correctly clear AC and MQ when executed on Intel CPUs in 32-bit mode and EAE mode A: these are 32-bit shifts were ignored by Intel CPUs in 32-bit mode (deteced with MAINDEC-8E-D0LB-PB KE8-E EAE Instruction Test Part 1).
• Improved performance of the Memory Content plugin.

What is new in version 2.0.2:

Version 2.0.2 contains some visual adjustments for OS X 10.11 "El Capitan", especially for the memory view and the memory inspector of the CPU window.

What is new in version 2.0.1:

This is the final version 2.0 of PDP-8/E Simulator, a Cocoa based reimplementation of the classic Mac OS and Carbon based version 1.x, retaining the proven PDP-8/E emulation engine.

With version 2.0.1, the ASR 33 Teletype now correctly recognizes the ESC key as ALTMODE. Additionally, three very minor visual glitches were fixed.

Some highlights of the new version compared to the old implementation:

• Photo realistic KC8-EA console (thanks to high quality photos of the front panel from Gerhard Kreuzer (http://www.compuseum.at/)
• ASR-33 Teletype with sound
• Improved real time behaviour of the emulated PDP-8/E and the I/O devices
• Improved and updated GUI, matching the current Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Future-proof code base using modern tools like Objective-C, Cocoa, XML, Xcode, OS X
• Very simple plugin architecture for I/O devices thanks to Cocoa: writing a I/O device for the simulator is as easy as subclassing an Objective-C class
• Running natively on Intel Macs (the old version used Rosetta emulation of PowerPC code): the emulated PDP-8/E now runs at least 100 times faster than a hardware PDP-8/E (on an 2.53 GHz MacBook Pro)
• A set of useful PDP-8 software is included in the download

What is new in version 2.0:

This is the final version 2.0 of PDP-8/E Simulator, a Cocoa based reimplementation of the classic Mac OS and Carbon based version 1.x, retaining the proven PDP-8/E emulation engine.

Some highlights of the new version compared to the old implementation:

• Photo realistic KC8-EA console (thanks to high quality photos of the front panel from Gerhard Kreuzer (http://www.compuseum.at/)
• ASR-33 Teletype with sound
• Improved real time behaviour of the emulated PDP-8/E and the I/O devices
• Improved and updated GUI, matching the current Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Future-proof code base using modern tools like Objective-C, Cocoa, XML, Xcode, OS X
• Very simple plugin architecture for I/O devices thanks to Cocoa: writing a I/O device for the simulator is as easy as subclassing an Objective-C class
• Running natively on Intel Macs (the old version used Rosetta emulation of PowerPC code): the emulated PDP-8/E now runs at least 100 times faster than a hardware PDP-8/E (on an 2.53 GHz MacBook Pro)
• A set of useful PDP-8 software is included in the download