OpenVMS Emulation

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640kb
Posts: 16
Joined: Thu Mar 28, 2019 11:32 pm

OpenVMS Emulation

Post by 640kb »

I have been running VMS lately, and I have compiled a list of emulators.

VAX:
Simh: works flawlessly, networking works perfect. It is cross-platform.

Alpha:
ES40 (AlphaSim): very slow, VMS crashes when DECnet starts. Other than that, it emulates the whole system including the SRM firmware, where other emulators only provide the "boot" command and a few others. It is cross-platform, but networking works on Linux.
AlphaVM-Free: hard to find today, but works the best. Fastest emulator available for free, and supports the most RAM. There is a Linux version, but I can't find an installer for it.
FreeAXP / vtAlpha: emulates an AlphaServer 400, so older VMS versions can run. Has RAM restrictions, but works well and is up-to-date. Windows only.

There seems to be a new emulator, called DECaxp: https://github.com/JonathanBelanger/DECaxp
It looked promising, but it now looks dead. Has anyone had any experience with Itanium emulation? I saw an emulator called Ski, but it only emulates CPU instructions.

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