Building the Emulator

SIMH is an open source project that emulates many different computers. I have cloned the main SIMH repository in order to be able to work on the MU5 emulator. The repository is hosted on GitHub, and I have created a branch called MU5, which is where I do all the work. I try to keep the master branch closely synchronised with the original SIMH repository so that perhaps one day the MU5 emulation can be folded into it.

If you don’t understand SIMH or Git very well, the simplest thing to do is to download the sources directly from this link, extract the files and run “make mu5” from the directory containing the makefile. This will put a file called mu5.exe in the BIN directory.

If you are using Visual Studio, there is a solution file in the Visual Studio Projects directory and you can build the MU5 project from Visual Studio instead.

If you are a little more advanced it would be better to install Git, clone the repository, checkout the MU5 branch and build. You can then update to the latest code using a “git pull” command.

Running The Emulator

You need to run the emulator in the same directory as the mu5.ini file. The simplest thing is to move the executable from the BIN directory to the MU5 directory, as the ini file is there along with a few pre-built binaries.

The ini file contains multiple commented sections that each contain a set of commands designed to run a pre-built binary. The “reset -t” command will reset the emulator and run a battery of unit tests that confirm whether the emulator is working or not.

I will provide more details about how to build your own programs later, but suffice to say you need the XPL compiler mentioned on the main MU5 page.