scripting on 80386

[Paul Edwards]

The Hercules emulator has the ability to log
all the console output to a file.

In addition, it has an "automated operator"
facility which allows you to see if certain
strings appear on the console, and if so,
it issues a command. One of the commands
you can issue is "quit".

So what this means is that at the Windows
prompt I can type:

runmvs input.jcl output.txt in.zip out.zip

and have MVS/380 started, run the JCL, which
reads the input file, produces the output
file, and when it's all finished, I can
use micro-emacs to look at the output file.

I love this setup. It is the way I wish to
work.

Do any of the 80386 emulators do this?

Thanks. Paul.

[e***@fastmail.fm]

Post by Paul Edwards
So what this means is that at the Windows
runmvs input.jcl output.txt in.zip out.zip
and have MVS/380 started, run the JCL, which
reads the input file, produces the output
file, and when it's all finished, I can
use micro-emacs to look at the output file.

I'm sure all of them allow the guest OS to shut the machine down by APM and/or ACPI. Qemu's -nographic option sends console output to its standard output where you can redirect it to a file. On a 386, the console output will be cluttered with bios and bootloader messages, so you may wish to see if the serial port can be configured to write to stdout or a file.

[Paul Edwards]

Post by e***@fastmail.fm
I'm sure all of them allow the guest OS
to shut the machine down by APM and/or ACPI.

Thanks for the tip.

I discovered that PDOS/386 already had
a poweroff command, but it says it failed
on both bochs and qemu.

Post by e***@fastmail.fm
Qemu's -nographic option sends console output
to its standard output where you can redirect
it to a file. On a 386, the console output
will be cluttered with bios and bootloader
messages, so you may wish to see if the serial
port can be configured to write to stdout or a file.

I don't mind the BIOS/bootloader
messages, but -nographic took me into
a monitor, which seems to be driving
an ANSI terminal:

QEMU 3.0.0 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) qququiquit

BFN. Paul.

[e***@fastmail.fm]

Post by Paul Edwards

Post by e***@fastmail.fm
I'm sure all of them allow the guest OS
to shut the machine down by APM and/or ACPI.

Thanks for the tip.
I discovered that PDOS/386 already had
a poweroff command, but it says it failed
on both bochs and qemu.

If it was PDOS/8086, I'd suggest porting the FDAPM package from FreeDOS which can halt Qemu. It's GPL, though. It supports ACPI if APM isn't found, so I guess poweroff might need ACPI support to work. Or maybe try qemu -no-acpi . There is some mention of both APM and ACPI in the Qemu manual linked at the end.

Anyway, it seems to be possible to feed "quit" to the monitor once it's disentangled from other IO. See below.

Post by Paul Edwards

Post by e***@fastmail.fm
Qemu's -nographic option sends console output
to its standard output where you can redirect
it to a file. On a 386, the console output
will be cluttered with bios and bootloader
messages, so you may wish to see if the serial
port can be configured to write to stdout or a file.

I don't mind the BIOS/bootloader
messages, but -nographic took me into
a monitor, which seems to be driving
QEMU 3.0.0 monitor - type 'help' for more information
(qemu) qququiquit

Everything seems to be Ansified these days. Also, the monitor may be multiplexed with the display, but it doesn't matter. There's a -chardev option which seems to allow connecting the monitor, serial port, & others to any sort of i/o including stdio or sockets, multiplexed or not. Search for it here:
https://qemu.weilnetz.de/doc/qemu-doc.html

[[e-mail]]

Post by Paul Edwards
I discovered that PDOS/386 already had
a poweroff command, but it says it failed
on both bochs and qemu.

I researched this further and found that there
was a bug in the poweroff implementation
and now Bochs powers off nicely, so I should
be able to implement automatic runs of PDOS.

BFN. Paul.