PDP-8 Simulator (a.k.a. "The Virtual Machine" a.k.a. "Ma Kate")
This software is supplied 'as is' and is not warranted as fit for anthing very much. You use it at your own risk, etc.
Having said that, I THINK I can say that it's stable, and works on all known Macs. Known to me that is- though I have access to a pretty wide variety, including Quadra's and Pluses.
Anyway, Here are a few disclaimers, etc- I hope people won't be too disappointed or critical of the software- It was put together in a week for a first-year undergrad micro course, and as such it's pretty feeble. Plenty of scope for expansion for those who are of a masochistic bent. It was written by two of us, and we have quite widely differing programming styles, so the source code is frustratingly difficult to understand. Also, because of the speed with which we hacked it together, it's probably mind-numbingly inefficient.
The Documentation comes in three flavours- ClarisWorks for the main report, MacWrite II for the assembler documentation, and MacDraw for the diagrams. I expect this will be inconvenient, so please accept my apologies in advance. However, most of the docs were written to please the staff who marked the piece, and aren't terribly informative as a user manual. In fact, that's the biggest problem, as the assembler is a bit non-standard.
The assembler accepts PDP-8 mnemonics, and pseudo-ops like ORG, EQU, etc. IOP is parsed OK, but will perform no operation in the simulator. (I think- it's a long time ago...) The source code window allows code to be opened and displayed on the screen, and will provide a hilite of the offending line if it can't be assembled, but you cant edit text in this window- use any text editor. This was a 'TO DO' which has never been done. Please don't scream at the editor source code- it's extremely poor I know. (Mainly because it holds the text as a VAST linked-list of lines- stoopid!)
Feedback (CONSTRUCTIVE ONLY PLEASE) to U9119523@sys.uea.ac.uk
