Loading KD11-EA microcode…
PDP-11/34 front panel
888888 000000

                    
REGISTERS

                                
MMU

                            
DISASSEMBLY
BREAKPOINTS
LISTING

                            
MEMORY

                    
Sequencer

                            
ALU

                            
Bus

                            
Shift Registers

                            
Available signals
Captured signals
Trigger
Value
Mask
Depth
Rate
Pos %
IDLE
Analysis
ns

ll/34

ll/34 is a cycle-accurate, circuit-level emulator for the PDP-11/34A (1976). It runs the original ROM tables, either dumped or reconstructed from the schematics, and is essentially a direct translation of the KD11-EA engineering drawings.


Read more at https://github.com/dbrll/ll-34

Damien Boureille, 2026. MIT License


Fun facts:

- The power switch on the front panel is silent. The loud clicking sound comes from the relay in the PSU.

- The CPU is cooled by two large AC fans running at mains voltage. They are about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.

- The KD11-EA CPU uses a remarkably simple design. It is roughly a third of the complexity of an Intel 8086 in transistor count, yet achieves comparable performance. Just 512 words of microcode control the CPU, and open-collector ROMs combine their outputs by wire-OR to decode instructions without arbitration logic.

Programs

Default (ODT)

ODT (Online Debugging Tool) is the console monitor built into the M9301-YF boot ROM (what would be called a BIOS or EFI nowadays). It allows loading, running, and debugging code from the terminal.

ODT consists of four commands:

  • L XXXXXX Load address (in octal) ODT uses the "space" key instead of "Enter".
  • E Examine word at current address (auto-increments)
  • D XXXXXX Deposit word at current address (auto-increments)
  • S Start execution at current address


Example:

L 1000 [space], then E to read address 001000.

Type D 777, then [space] to write 000777 there.

Finally, S [space] to start execution from that address.


Note: ODT may seem spartan, but the only memory it requires to run is the CPU registers!

ATTN/11

A small Transformer (1216 parameters) for the PDP-11/34, written in baremetal assembly. Training takes about 5:30mn. Read more at github.com/dbrll/ATTN-11/

Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life, loaded from an ASCII object file. Runs continuously in the console.

RT-11 V4

RT-11 SJ V04, Digital’s single-job real-time operating system. Boots from a virtual RK05 disk. It uses TOPS-10 commands, like OS-8, CP/M or MS-DOS: cd, dir, type. Run a program with RUN followed by the program name. Programs use a SAV extension.

The disk image includes the original Tetris game written for the Elektronika 60, a soviet PDP-11/03 clone. Type RUN TETRIS to play. Controls: 7/9 left/right, 8 rotate, 4 speed up, 5 drop.

Note: the game runs roughly 2× faster than intended since the PDP-11/34 is faster than the original target machine.

V6 UNIX

Sixth Edition UNIX (1975), the first version of UNIX to be widely distributed outside Bell Labs.

Type rkunix at the RK05 disk drive bootloader (@ prompt). Log in as ken or root (no password). On V6, cd is chdir, and SIGINT uses DEL instead of ^C.

Xortran

A small neural-network written in Fortran IV under RT-11 V3. It uses backpropagation to train a multilayer perceptron on the XOR problem.