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The Computer History Simulation Project

Posted by michael on from the remembering-the-bad-old-days dept.

ChunKing writes "The Computer History Simulation Project is a loose Internet-based collective of people interested in restoring historically significant computer hardware and software systems by simulation. The goal of the project is to create highly portable system simulators and to publish them as freeware on the Internet, with freely available copies of significant or representative software. I can't wait 'til someone fixes me an OS/390 emulator to remind me of the days when I used to be an Ops Analyst for a major bank..."

8 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. At least for game-emus by Troed · · Score: 4, Informative
    ... NGEmu is the best place to visit. I do play PSX and N64 games on my old old PII450 with acceptable speed ..


    And yes, my Atari ST nostalgia was revised by one of the truly great emulators around then, PacifiST. Nowadays the best emu would be Steem - try it! Little Green Desktop has applications to use ..

    --
    it's in my head
  2. S390 by stu_coates · · Score: 5, Informative

    There already is a S/390 emulator... now all you need is the OS... or you could be daring and try Linux on it.

    1. Re:S390 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It's too good. It exposes a bug in the Suse 2.4
      kernel which means disk writes are flakey. You need to patch the emulator, (which slows it way down), then spend a few days building a new kernel, then rebooting with the unpatched emulator.

      Tedious, but well worth the effort.

      (Yeah, it does work, and it's just fast enough to be useful).

  3. Not an OS/390 emulator by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hercules is an S/370 etc. emulator, it does not emulate OS itself. It's complicate to run recent OS versions on Hercules for legal reasons, the operating system is usually licensed to particular machines.

  4. Virtutech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Virtutech's simulator Simic was used by e.g. Suse for porting Linux to AMD's upcoming x86-64 (Hammer project). You can read more in a twelve page article available at Simic's homepage. http://www.simics.net/simics/simics-computer-febru ary-2002-w-cover.pdf

    Apparently it simulates a great number of hardware as seen from the benchmarks given in the article:

    Table 1. Simics performance of target systems for a variety of operatingsystem boot workloads.
    Target Boot workload Instructions Time (sec) MIPS
    Alpha-ev5 Tru64 2,112,119,247 354 5.9
    Alpha-ev5 Linux 1,201,600,120 164 7.3
    Sparc-u2 Solaris 81 1,597,537,438 284 5.6
    Sparc-u3 Solaris 81 6,155,835,717 987 6.2
    x86-p2 Linux2 1,299,639,608 227 5.7
    x86-p2 Windows XP 3,129,351,000 1,518 2.1
    x86-64 Linux2 1,299,639,608 285 4.5
    Itanium Linux 4,644,372,142 1,470 3.2
    PPC-750 VxWorks 1,179,516,468 136 8.7
    PPC-750 Linux3 498,836,969 53 9.3

  5. SIMH review on NewsForge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    This review was over on NewsForge just last month:

    http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/03/01/17362 43

  6. Re:TRS-80 by AgTiger · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes, yes you will! :-)

    This is where I found an emulator that works very well: TRS-80 Emulator Web Site

  7. The Scoop on Hercules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    1) Hercules emulates both S/370 and S/390 hardware.

    2) As far as I know, the only modern operating system you are legally allowed to use on the S/390 version is Linux except potentially as part of your disaster recovery plans.

    3) But VM/370, MVS 3.2, etc. are in the public domain. So you can run them using Hercules as a S/370.

    4) MVS begat MVS/ESA begat OS/390 begat z/OS. From a user perspective, not all that much has changed! You still get the same cushy layer of JCL in the old versions of MVS. Fans of VM get to use the same virtual punch card reader in VM/370 as z/VM.