# DEC ES40 Simulator es40 is free software. Please see the file COPYING for details. For documentation, please see the files in the doc subdirectory. For building and installation instructions please see below. Windows 11 with VS2026 and X64 builds only is the main development environment. Requires npcap for networking. Use "NN" builds if you do not need networking. Latest VC redist may be required to run binaries, available here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/windows/latest-supported-vc-redist Latest 2017-2026 x64 redistributable is recommended. At minimum the version matching your build toolchain is needed. # Please use es40-cfg to generate a config the first time you use it to ensure you do not omit any required devices from the chipset. # Live shot of X11 running on emulated S3 via SDL display! ![Screenshot](https://github.com/gdwnldsKSC/es40/blob/main/screenshots/OpenVMS.png?raw=true) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Status ## 6/13/26 - JIT support is here! Working for Windows 2210, OpenVMS, and Tru64. No other OSes tested. Non-windows JIT support is experimental but should be fine. OpenVMS is reading approximately 80 VUPS on my machine compared to interp 30 VUPS. So in that benchmark, about 2.5x improvement. ## 5/8/26 - TOY clock issue - SOUND SUPPORT! ES1370 Audio device! For VMS it was not a one time boot prompt, I was wrong about how VMS handles the time offsets. It sets the clock WITHOUT ARC's 1980 assumption. So, we now make it a configurable flag. The ES1370 audio device outputs via the SDL layer. You can use guest OS volume controls or OS mixer level controls instead. DECterm in OpenVMS causing machine check failures is FIXED! This was the result of numerous CPU accuracy fixes. If you build from source now, also, you can disable the custom emulator PALcode implementations for OpenVMS as well, and run with purely native PALcode instead of the accelerated implementations for debugging purposes and experimentation. Interestingly enough, only OpenVMS PALcode was visibly hurt by the flaws that fixed it, OSF and NT PALcode weren't visibly affected (No OS flaws seen), but VMS had ACCVIO 0in SECURESHRP on boot when using native PALcode, essentially breaking OpenVMS entirely. Networking in Tru64 appears to work, at least winth manual configuration! ## 5/7/26 - This one deserves its own notice. TOY clock handling change. ARC base is 1980. This would make year byte 26 in TOY byte 9 2006 instead of 2026. But for everyone with installed VMS disk images out there, your saved clock data in VMS will see a jump from 26 to 46 (which makes ARC correct). This, of course, means in 2079 we will have to binary patch ARC to move the base to allow for dates beyond 2079 to be displayed. Unkown how this would affect Windows NT variants. ## 5/7/26 - Tru64 support. Red Hat 7.2 works. Timers fixed. Thanks to a surprising AXPbox we have finalized the remaining SCSI flaws that were blocking Tru64, and as well implemented some user-friendly features. Red Hat 7.2's X11 doesn't play nicely yet though.... OS Support list looks like this now: Windows NT4 with graphics Windows 2K RCs and AXP64 2210 with some effort with graphics OpenVMS 8.4-2L1 and 2L2 with graphics Tru64 5.1B with graphics SOME Linux - Red Hat Enigma / 7.2 tested X11 flawed, needs to be fixed NetBSD 6 through 10.1 at minimum OpenBSD 4.8, 7.7, and 7.8 Networking is only confirmed working on OpenVMS, however it may work on Tru64. For windows hosts, we now have an emulated MPU-401 MIDI output device. Not full sound, but MIDI players can send out music from the emulator now. ## 4/30/26 - Windows NT support That was a wild ride. ## 4/24/26 - ARC works! Lingering screen corruption issue - memtest failure at 0x80000 Flash system from v73.iso with all options - exit the first stage updater and say yes to manual update, update all flash options - RMC will fail this is expected. ARC will now load/run from flash. Screen blanking before memtest failure and screen corruption expected ARC large sweep clobbers several areas of memory. HW correctness fix to follow shortly to correct this. ## 4/11/26 - BEHAVIOR CHANGE IN SERIAL PORT OPERATION ### I removed LF stripping and modified telnet negotiation. It now negotiates telnet binary mode for telnet clients For non-telnet clients no negotiation happens, so any socket connection to the serial port remains without telnet connection just passes raw data. This is a big change in how the serial port operates. It now only drips in data as fast as the OS can read it, avoiding overloading/crashes/overflows, etc. I was getting TPU crashes before when pasting large amounts of data, among other issues. Those are all now resolved. ## 3/1/26 - NetBSD fixes, SCSI fixes, etc Note: For BSDs, you need to 'set boot_osflags a' in SRM for them to be able to boot successfully. ## 2/28/26 - S3 text rendering resolved. Keyboard input buffer resolved. Tru64 OpenVMS X11 display is almost flawless! Mouse support has been added and works great! Tru64 X11 now displays from the install CD of 5.1B, however install sill fails on SCSI disk. To be resolved. Keyboard issues have been resolved, no more buffer full while using VGA console. ## 2/20/26 - S3 Update, Cirrus exlcuded. SDL3 conversion X11 has basic display support under OpenVMS now, some text corruption issues exist that are being worked on. Mouse input support is currently non-present. Boot to login and CDE desktop works. Cirrus is being excluded from builds now, as it is just a generic VGA card implementation and after render path reworks will need some tending to for conversion. Upgraded to SDL3. Brings lots of new goodies. Gets rid of archaic SDL1.2. Incrimented version to 0.5 due to major changes across the board such as above. ## 2/14/26 - S3 Graphics port from MAME, work towards ARC support Working through the S3 implementation, a more feature-complete and functional implementation is found in MAME, though we already implemented some functions that MAME does not yet. So we've refactored a lot of the code which, while not yet complete, has already brought along some interesting improvements, such as better text-mode graphics and somewhat more concise code. Contribution back to MAME upstream for this code will be forthcoming for the items we implemented prior that MAME does not have. Large comments and functions that documented VGA behavior and standards information have been moved to 'old_vga_docs.txt' to clean up so that our code more closely tracks MAME's S3 implementation to better enable simple diff'ing and code sharing as progress is made. Some basic work has been done in general as well in the direction of getting ARC firmware working. ## 12/24/25 - Build housekeeping All configurations now build cleanly. Default location for include and lib files is now c:\dev\SDL3\ and c:\dev\npcap-sdk\ - you can change this by doing a simple find/replace in the .vcxproj files if you want to use different paths. Simple POKEQ/POKEL support added to IDB as well. NN = No Network NS = No Screen (VGA Console) LSM/LSS = Lockstep Master/Slave builds. IDB = Integrated Debugger build. ## 12/19/25 - Somewhat working full FLASH ROM support. After doing the initial bootstrap with cl67srmrom.exe, you can now use the HP firmware update CD to flash the ES40 firmware, including ARC/Abios, which doesn't work yet, but you can as of this point at least downgrade via the HP firmware update CD to SRM V7.2-1, which does work, and then boot off of the flash rom directly on that version. ## 8/27/25 Actual S3 VBIOS WORKS! S3 Incomplete, but it boots and executes SRM! Use S3Trio64 bios 86c764x1.bin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ # Building Instructions We'll need both npcap and SDL-3.4 for full featured es40 builds. If you build only NS target configurations, then you do not need SDL. If you build only NN target configurations, then you do not need npcap. If you build NS NN target configurations, then you do not need either. ## SDL: Retrieve SDL from https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL For simplicity, I had extracted and configured include and link directories for all es40 targets/configurations to look for SDL under C:\dev\SDL\ - a simple find and replace in the .vcxproj files can change this if you want - eg find "C:\dev\SDL\" and replace with your desired SDL location. Extract the root of the repository to C:\dev\SDL\ Under C:\dev\SDL3\VisualC\ there is a SDL.sln file - open this in VS2022/26. Accept the 'trust and continue' dialog if it is displayed If prompted to retarget the solution, select the desired Windows SDK and toolchain version Build the solution for x64 Debug and Release configurations. ## npcap: If you wish to build only NN target configurations, you can skip this step. If you wish to build all configurations, but not run, you only need to extract the npcap SDK to C:\dev\npcap-sdk\ To run network enabled binaries, you will need to install npcap itself. The installer and SDK for npcap can be found here: https://npcap.com/#download ## es40: After your pathing is fixed in the vcxproj files or you used the default c:\dev\ locations and structure, you should be able to open the es40.sln file Run Build solution for individual configurations, or batch build to build all configurations. SDL3.dll will be required to be placed with the compiled es40 application, for debug x64 build it would be placed in this location: src\VS2022\x64\Debug or wherever you copy es40.exe to. SDL3.dll will be found in C:\dev\SDL3\VisualC\x64\Debug for example if you built x64 debug release configuration. Make sure to set the debug working directory in project settings as `$(OutDir)` for this configuration, the command being `$(TargetPath)` as is set by default is fine, however. Resulting binaries will be in x64\Debug, x64\Release, x64\Release IDB, etc, with the binary names being similar to es40 Release NS NN.exe. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ## Old notes, to be reviewed. Direct SDK can be found here: (This may not be needed, attempt SDL build without first) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=6812