About em400

EM400 is an emulator of Polish MERA-400 minicomputer system (built in late '70 and popular in the '80). Learn more at: http://mera400.pl In its current state, EM400 can run original MERA-400 software.

Emulation features:

• MERA-400 CPU
• MX-16 CPU (original CPU with modifications)
• real CPU speed
• floating point arithmetic
• Elwro memory (32kword modules, magnetic-core)
• character channel (character-oriented I/O interface)
• SP45DE 8" floppy disk drive
• Amepol MEGA memory (64kword modules, DRAM)
• Amepol MULTIX peripherial processor
• Amepol real time clock
• Winchester disk drive
• terminal connection over TCP or serial line

Things that are still waiting for implementation:

• memory channel and MERA 9425 disk drive
• Terminals connected to MULTIX peripherial processor
• 5.25" floppy disk drive

Things that may or may not be implemented:

• Amepol PLIX peripherial processor
• EC 6051 disk drive
• PT-305 tape drive

Requirements

To build and run em400 you'll need:

• cmake
• a build tool (GNU make or ninja)
• bison and flex
• Qt6 (used by qt ui)
• libemdas (deassembler library)
• libemcrk (CROOK memory structures)
• libemawp (floating point arithmetic)

Build instructions

Do the following in the source directory:

mkdir build
cmake -B build
cmake --build build
cmake --install build

Running

EM400 is built with a debugger which currently is its primary user interface.

Usage:

em400 [option] ...

Where options are:

• -h - Display help
• -c config - Config file to use instead of the default one (~/.em400/em400.ini)
• -p program - Load program image into OS memory at address 0
• -l component,component,... - Enable logging for specified components. Prefix a component with '-' to exclude it (e.g. "all,-cpu"). lib is always logged and cannot be excluded. Available components: lib, app, crk5, mem, cpu, op, int, io, mx, cchr, cmem, uzdat, uzfx, meclo, term, 9425, wnch, flop, pnch, pnrd, tape, all.
• -L - Disable logging
• -u ui - User interface to use. Available UIs: qt (default), cmd (minimal, for remote control)
• -O sec:key=value : Override configuration entry "key" in section [sec] with a specific value