>> [...] I have a PDP-11 written in C that runs on SunOS and probably
>> would be easy to port to other OSes.  It could be speeded up
>> immensely by compiling the -11 code to native code instead of doing
>> pure interpretation, but of course that would then be sparc-specific
>> instead of the current more or less MI program.

> If one could compile the native -11 code into native code, then maybe
> one could just translate it into C?  Perhaps not very efficient C
> code...  But then one would have a MI idea.

Yessss...but that would mean constantly forking cc and then having to
somehow run-time-load the resulting executable, because I don't know
what portions of the -11's memory are code and which are data.  The
compiling into native code I was talking about above would be done
on-the-fly, at run time, when the -11 attempted to execute
not-yet-compiled code.

> ([...]  Perhaps if you considered having a 'virtual machine' and how
> a few pieces of hardware worked, you could then guess what their
> twiddling was trying to accomplish...)

This is exactly what I want to do; I want to be able to run a native
PDP-11 OS on the simulated machine.  It already handles much of the
necessary stuff and the framework is there to handle a lot more; it
does privileged versus user mode, traps, "hardware", including
interrupts; all that it really needs is for me to write a "hardware"
module for some disk drive, and then I have to get my hands on an OS.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu