Gavin,
I certainly enjoy playing with it and do appreciate your efforts.
I realize how many memory cells I have lost. I can barely remember some of the commands.
I love the speed and the ability to have multiple virtual ATP sessions with Reflection.
Very nice, thank you.
The games do bring back memories.
-Craig
On Friday, August 28, 2020, 06:39:09 PM PDT, Gavin Scott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
External Email
Hi all,
Since Roy "announced" my little hobby project here (thank you Roy) I guess I can post a link here as well for people who want to play with it, with the caveat that there is no official license of any sort that I know of covering this 40-year-old HP software that has been floating around, so keep that in mind.
For the last month or so I have been constructing a fully-appointed virtual Series III computer, using David Bryan's amazing Classic 1970s HP-3000 simulator/emulator along with the existing MPE V/R software that has been floating around with it, and the old CSL tapes collected by Kevin Miller and others. Most of this was available, but there was "some assembly required" to put it together into something usable. My goal was to produce a TurnKey version with exactly what you need that runs right out of the box.
Along the way, I ended up hacking the simulator to make a Series III that supported 4x as much memory as any real one ever did, and reverse-engineered the APL microcode functionality in order to add emulation of those instructions to MPE so that APL\3000 could run again for the first time in 35 years or so.
So, here is a (probably temporary so get it while you can) link to the new 1.4 version of "My Series III" for all your retro-MPE needs.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gfUpk3R4OcuqReWXbKXnFwtJ62JDX16y
All the instructions you need are in the associated README.txt file, and it takes only a minute or so to be up and running with MPE. You can optionally use Reflection (if you have it) or QCTerm (links to the free archived version and instructions in the README) to get full terminal functionality and run up to 15 user sessions via telnet to the virtual ATC ports on the Series III.
This version includes fully working APL\3000 and my associated APL CPU Instruction Set emulation, as well as being a new model of HP-3000, which one might call a Series III+ (or even a Series IV) which has its memory "hardware" support increased to 8MB (4096K words) which is the same maximum amount of memory that MPE IV supported on the Series 64 in those days.
One extra file is included with this version which is a PDF of the 1976 APL\3000 Reference Manual since that has been so hard to find.
One tip for playing with APL: Turn your CAPS LOCK on first.
It also contains several metric crap-tons of old freeware including a complete GAMES account with all of the historically relevant software like Advent, Mansion, Dungeon, Warp, Trek73, DROID, and even the DRAGONS game written by a college kid who then used it to get a job at TSR where he contributed to the writing in many of their D&D products and later went on to be the lead designer for a little game called Skyrim.
This is a five-disc system (you can add up to three more if you need more space, though there's about a million free sectors right now) with the directory expanded to 6,000 sectors and various system tables expanded so you should not encounter any issues with it. It has been perfectly stable, staying up for weeks and pretty much never crashing or having any issue whatsoever.
Hopefully one or two of you will have some fun with it.
Feedback is appreciated.
Gavin
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