/display/PT/emulationServicesMigration taken on 2011-02-08.
The original wiki at wiki.opf-labs.org is being decommissioned.
emulationServicesMigration
Services: Dioscuri and UVC
Overview
The first 3 years of PLANETS saw (further) development of Dioscuri and UVC by KB-NL and IBM respectively. In Year 4 as part of an emulation integration project Dioscuri and UVC were developed into a version with a PLANETS wrapper. This way they could be deployed in the Interoperability Framework (IF) in a local deployment as migration by emulation services.
An important step was the development of the [CreateView?] command used to fire-up the emulators from within the PLANETS Testbed and PLATO. In the second half of Year 4 the wrapped Dioscuri and UVC were further developed into webversions so they could be deployed on the Central Instance also.
Dioscuri
Dioscuri is the name for the emulator developed by Planets partners the National Library of the Netherlands (KB-NL) and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands (NANETH). Dioscuri refers to the Greek myth of the twins Castor and Pollux of who one of them is mortal while the other is immortal. This symbolically represents the idea behind emulation: giving mortal digital objects their immortal equals.
Dioscuri is especially designed for digital preservation by being more durable and flexible than other emulators. The design shows a modular emulator, whereby each hardware component is represented as a module in the emulator. By combining all modules a full hardware emulator is created.
Functionality
Dioscuri is capable of running PC software from around the 80s and 90s era. It mimics the following hardware:
- 16-bit Intel 8086-based CPU, DMA-support, IRQ-handling
- 1 MB RAM
- Storage devices: floppy, HDD
- Input devices: keyboard, serial mouse
- Output devices: VGA, screen
- System BIOS: Bochs BIOS
- VGA BIOS: Plex86/Bochs VGA BIOS
Target Platforms
- MS DOS 2/3/4/5.0
- FreeDOS 1.0
- Linux kernel ELKS
Other features
- Easy to use interface (GUI) offering process control, media management and configuration editor
- XML-based configuration of emulation process
System requirements
As Dioscuri runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) it is very flexible in running on most current computer platforms. It requires JVM 1.6 or higher.
- Windows XP running JRE v1.6.x
- Linux Fedora Core 4 running JRE v1.6.x
- Sun Sparc Solaris running JRE v1.6.x
About the software
- Programming language: Java 1.6
- Current release: version 0.5.2
- Release date: 11 May 2010
- License: GNU GPL version 2
- Development start: February 2006
- Development overview: Dioscuri project (Jan 2006 - June 2008), Planets PA/5 (June 2008 - May 2010), KEEP (Feb 2009 - Jan 2012)