How to install ! DOS-15 on SIMH?

We can run ! DOS-15 on the SIMH PDP-15 emulator. First, we need to download the ! DOS-15 kit.

Downloads

You can download the kit needed to run ! DOS-15 on the SIMH PDP-15 emulator from the "SIMH Legacy" website:

• ! DOS-15 kit

Using ! DOS-15

tip

If you have not already installed SIMH PDP-15 emulator, see the VirtualHub Setup tutorial on how to do so on Linux and Windows.

Extract the kit you downloaded. Inside you will find several files. Create a folder somewhere to store the files for this VM and move those two files named dosv2a_4p.rf and rfsboot.rim into it.

Now we will create a config file for our VM. Create a text file called pdp15.ini with the following content in the VM folder:

at -e rf dosv2a_4p.rf
load rfsboot.rim 77637
run

Now open a terminal and move to the VM folder. Run the following command to start the emulator:

pdp15

When asked for a date, enter it in MM/DD/YY format. You cannot use backspace to erase characters, even if it looks like you can. Try entering a date before the year 2000, to avoid problems related to Y2K.

Now that DOS-15 is ready, let's run some commands on it. Type D and press enter to see the system's date:

You can run I to see a list of commands you can run:

That's it! We used ! DOS-15. We can create a shell script to make it easy to launch the VM.

Linux

Create a file called dos-15.sh with the following content:

#!/bin/bash
pdp15

Now make the file executable:

chmod +x dos-15.sh

Now you can start the VM using the shell script. For example, on KDE you can right-click the file and choose Run in Konsole or on GNOME, where you can right-click the file and choose Run as executable. The VM will start.

See the manuals section on the main ! DOS-15 page to learn how to use it.

Windows

Create a file called dos-15.bat with the following content:

pdp15

Now you can start the VM by double-clicking the shell script. See the manuals section on the main ! DOS-15 page to learn how to use it.

Credits

• The disk image and other files used above are from a kit available on SimH “Classic” website.

Video tutorial

Do you want to follow the tutorial by watching a video? We will post a video on our YouTube channel soon.

Archives of this tutorial are available on Wayback Machine.