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PersonalAlpha |
gesteele
Member
Posts: 1
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Joined: 29.03.09 |
| Posted on February 17 2010 14:53 |
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PersonalAlpha is great and working well, but on 128mb of memory? Even for a hobbyist this is VERY inconvenient. I admit that CHARON-AXP NCE would give me an ES40, but then I would need to buy a quad-processor system with 2 ethernets and 8gb of memory, plus install some kind of Linux on it.
Anybody have a suggestion for a solution somewhere between these extremes? |
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RE: PersonalAlpha |
astrodanco
Member
Posts: 36
Joined: 04.03.10 |
| Posted on March 04 2010 15:44 |
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Hey, count yourself lucky. I've been running OpenVMS 8.3 in the ES40 Alpha emulator under Fedora Core 12 (Linux) for a day now and I've already fixed six trivial bugs in the code just today. It looks like this thing could easily become production quality if more people who are capable of fixing bugs would run with it and run into them. And it didn't take much know how to fix those bugs either. Alas, I haven't put my fixes into the SourceForge CVS respository because what's in CVS doesn't appear to be in a consistent buildable state or at least not snapshotted, hence I can't integration test anything I might put in there. It appears someone started something in there and didn't finish (some nine or more months ago now). |
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RE: PersonalAlpha |
robl
Member
Posts: 6
Joined: 06.03.09 |
| Posted on March 05 2010 04:40 |
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The ES40 emulator had a lot of promise, but looks to be an orphaned project. There hasn't been any new releases or code commits in quite some time. Even the mailing lists and forums have been dormant.
I believe the original developer of the code joined up with "Migration Specialties" to develop a commercial Alpha emulator called "Avanti" and its free little brother "FreeAXP".
FreeAXP looks to have less restrictions than PersonalAlpha, but still has a 128MB RAM limit. There should be a beta release of FreeAXP soon.
I've not seen any details on Avanti as far as release dates, features, or pricing. But it would appear they intend for it to compete with the Charon series of commercial Alpha emulators.
Another solution may be to pick up a cheap / used Alpha. I recently had a DS10 given to me and only had to cover shipping costs. You can easily find some AlphaServers that outperform PersonalAlpha for sale for under $350 USD.
I would like to see the ES40 opensource emulator development continued. |
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RE: PersonalAlpha |
iamcamiel
Member
Posts: 25
Location: Wageningen, The Netherlands
Joined: 06.04.08 |
| Posted on March 10 2010 23:26 |
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Hello robl,
The original developer of es40 would be me. You're correct that I joined MigrationSpecialties. This allows me to spend a lot of time doing what I like to do, which is coding.
I'm currently unable to spend time on new es40 development, because my priority is to get FreeAXP and Avanti up and running.
What I can do, is apply bugfixes to the repository. Astrodanco, can you tell me where the build on Linux breaks, and let me know what changes you had to make?
Cheers,
Camiel Vanderhoeven |
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RE: PersonalAlpha |
matt002
Member
Posts: 12
Joined: 31.03.10 |
| Posted on April 01 2010 12:30 |
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I would be very interested in these fixes too. I have never been able to get ES40 to boot fully. I seem to be able to get to different points in the boot process depending on the version of OpenVMS used and they it usually bugchecks. Which version of OpenVMS would you recommend? I have tried 7.3-2, 8.2 and 8.3 so far.
Matt |
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RE: Stromasys released new NCE versions |
VolkerHalle
Member
Posts: 104
Location: Germany
Joined: 02.04.10 |
| Posted on April 26 2010 20:57 |
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Hi,
this weekend, Stromasys has released new NCE (Non-Commercial and Educational) versions of various of their emulators:
- PDP11 (Linux & VMware client versions),
- VAX (Linux, VMware client, Windows 32 & 64),
- Personal Alpha (Windows 32 & 64), Runs both VMS and TRU64
- AlphaStation 400 (Linux 64, VMware client, Windows 64)
- Alpha ES40 server (Linux 64, VMware client, Windows 64)
The link is: http://www.stromasys.ch/downloads/
Registration required.
See the announcement in comp.os.vms:
http://groups.google.de/group/comp.os.vms/browse_frm/thread/82f4feffc16481c0?hl=de#
Volker. |
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