Welcome to the GIER simulator!

1.	What it can.

All GIER opcodes have been implemented.

The main and auxilliary control boards work.

The typewriter (both input and output) works.

You can press the start button on the main control panel to start 
execution. You can also right click on this button to single step through
the program. One a real machine, one would hold the stop button will
pressing the start button to do this, but this is impractical if you
only have one mouse :-)

Two programs are included for conversion between ASCII and Flexowriter
code (Only necessary in the Linux version).

a2flx <input.asc >input.flx

converts the file input.asc (in ASCII) to input.flx (in Flexowriter code).

Similar,

flx2a <output.flx >output.asc

converts the file output.flx (in Flexowriter code) to the ASCII
file output.asc.

In Windows, the reader can read ASCII tapes and they are converted
internally into flexowriter code.

The ASCII code used has the following exceptions:

Multiplication is written as "*".
Logical and is written as "&".
Logical or is written as "£" (Pound symbol).
Subscript-10 is written as "'" (apostrophe, not accent).
The underline symbol or vertical bar must be written in front
of the character to be underlined or overwritten, i.e. the
word "begin" written with underlines is written as: "_b_e_g_i_n".
Any character value can be written as this for a2flx:

#xxx

where xxx is a three-digit number, >= 0 and <=127. E.g., a STOP CODE
is written as: #011

This version of the GIER microcode will always stop on
tape parity errors.

Enabling sound (if your machine supports it) makes the simulator
run at "true" GIER speed.

If "Use Sound" under "Options" is grayed out, no sound is
available: Either no device driver has been loaded, or
/dev/dsp can't be opened.

The program, flx2ps, converts Flexowriter files into PostScript,
ready for printing.

Upon exit, the contents of memory (core, drum/disc, all
registers and flags) are stored in a file, default.gier.
This will be loaded the next time GIER is started.
If GIER was running while the simulator was quit, it would
resume where it left the next time it is started.

There are system tapes in the "tapes" subdirectory,
and config files in the "configs" directory.

2.	Installation.

The Windows version has been compiled and is included
ready-to-use as GIER.exe.

The Linux version has been tested on an Intel RedHat 7.2 machine.

You'll need to have the compilers, development libraries, and
OpenMotif installed. The OpenMotif stuff is on the powertools CD,
or you can get it from http://www.openmotif.org

Simply write "make -f Makefile.linux" and run GIER afterwards.

The default fonts used for the typewriter and tape reader are
Monotype Courier New and Monotype Symbol. They are easily obtained
by fetching (at least) the files cour.ttf and symbol.ttf from c:\windows\fonts
of a Windows distribution. Store the files in a Linux directory, run:

/usr/bin/ttmkfdir >fonts.scale
/usr/X11R6/bin/mkfontdir

The path of this directory should be added to the
catalogue list in /etc/X11/fs/config. Restart the
font server by:

/etc/init.d/xfs restart

The ttmkfdir program is from the freetype .rpm file.

3.	Thanks

Thanks to the rest of the guys at Dataarkæologerne in Ballerup
and especially Henrik Jacobsen from http://www.prg.dtu.dk/
for help on the indicator problem and reading old paper tapes.

March 14, 2002,

Mogens Kjaer
mk@gier.dk