IBM PC/IX .. help me get it running

[amouse]

Recently I rescued my original IBM PC/IX 360K 5.25" diskettes from England and my cunning plan is to use them to ressurect PC/IX aka practically IBM's first UNIX port.

Well here in Switzerland I have multiple PC's but only a PC XT 286 with a VGA card (and screen).

At them moment I can't get the Installation disk to load though I can hear the diskette being read sequentially at least ..

IBM PC XT286 .... reads diskette and ends up with flashing underline top left
Microsoft VPC07 ..reads diskette and ends up with flashing underline top left
VMware 6 ......... crashes the virtual machine when trying to read floppy

I think the problem is that PC/IX is trying to interact with a Monochrome Display adapter and a genuine XT, MFM hard disk controller. I have neither.

So the question is, is there a hardware IBM PC XT (not XT 286 or AT) emulation that I can run, and hence load and run PC/IX. Dont forget the emulator needs to emulate the XT diskcontroller and the monochrome display!

[Sharkonwheels]

Have you looked into MESS?
I think you can start at www.mess.org, and work from there for the particular platform you want to run it on.
Last time I looked at it, I saw it had a few different PC/XT/AT emulations in it.

You KNOW you're going to have to image those disks, and upload them somewhere so others can play with it, right? :D


T

[amouse]

Ah, so my preliminary research did uncover a few problems:

a) The XT emulation is CGA not monochrome
b) Where exactly is the documentation for getting a mess emulator running for my XT platform.

I noticed the WIKI link on the official website blank, and so if some helpful soul has a quickstart MESS IBM XT emaultor build guide then of course I will be willing to give it a go?

Marcus

[Mike Chambers]

hmm, interesting. never heard of that before.

have you tried QEMU as a PC emu for this? if the others you tried didnt work this most likely wont either but it's worth a shot.

here's the official site:
http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/

and here's another site where a japanese dude ported it to win32:
http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/

QEMU is not nearly as fast as virtual PC program like the MS one or vmware (unless you install the KQEMU module) but the great part about it being a real emulator instead of virtualization is that you can port it to pretty much any architecture. somebody even figured out a way to run it in DOS on any 386+ with the HX DOS extender...

what does this mean? it means you can emulate an athlon 64 to run windows vista on a 386 and take bets from people on whether or not you will be dead before it gets to the desktop

:D