Installing the emulator

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Preparing for installation

Before starting the installation it is a good strategy to take inventory of the existing Alpha configuration, this will aid you when configuring the emulator. A normal "show device" listing from OpenVMS will be sufficient for this purpose.

Also prepare a method for data transfer. Ethernet is the easiest and fastest way to do this. It allows you to make disk copies over the network. Make sure that the network addresses of both systems are different to avoid conflicts on the network.

Installing the emulator

Place the CHARON-AXP installation CD in the CD-drive. Normally the system will startup automatically, but in case your system does not support that you can start the file setup.bat manually from the CD-ROM. Just follow the instructions from the installation procedure until completion.

CHARON-AXP is now installed on your system.

Also a user interface is installed that manages the emulator environment (configuring, license key management, start/stop emulator, utilities). When active this user interface appears as an icon in the windows tray (green: a emulator is running, red: all emulators are stopped, yellow: intermediate state).

When the icon is not present the CHARON-AXP user interface has to be started from the Windows START-menu manually.

Right-click on the icon to call up the menu and manage CHARON-AXP.

First you will find the alpha configuration you want to manage. There can be multiple configuration names which may be running concurrently depending on your license.
Add Configuration allows you to add new ones.
System configuration sets the number of CPU's used for IO
Make disk image creates logical Alpha disks on the host systems disks (container files in Windows directories).
SCSI check is a utility that reports the SCSI configuration on your host system.
Key Update extracts your license key content for update or implements the updated version.
View license displays the licensed products on the license key
Help gives you this documentation and Exit stops the user interface (note: running CHARON-AXP instances continue to run).

The second menu window allows you to start or stop that particular Alpha configuration, edit its configuration file, view its log file and location. Delete removes a certain configuration file.

Create and assign your Alpha disk images

Click make disk image from the menu. This will present the following Window:

Where you can select the disk type and location for the container file. These locations you can enter in the configuration file.

System configuration allows you to reserve CPU's for IO for the emulator instance(s).
Especially for systems that run multiple instances it can be useful to set the number of reserved CPU's to 2 or more, depending on the amount of disk and network IO required.

Create a new configuration

This section provides a quick configuration advise to get you started. For more detailed information about the possible settings of all configuration file parameters we refer to the configuration section of this electronic manual.

Select Add Configuration from the menu. this will open a window where you can select the location and name of your configuration and log file (default example configuration files can be found in the directory you installed the emulator).

Checking the option "Auto start" will start the Alpha Emulator every time you start Windows. The "Auto restart" option will perform a restart if the emulator stops for any reason.
Append logfile will make the logfile contiguous so history of previous boots will be preserved.

As many configurations as needed can be added to the tray icon, but the amount of configurations that can be started at a time depends on your license key. It is possible to run multiple emulators on a single host with a single license key, but the host system must have enough CPU cores and memory to emulate the Alpha's.

Please note that when you run multiple instances on a single host you need to specify different TCP/IP ports for the OPA0 in the configuration file, otherwise it will not work due to conflicts.

Open for example the configuration file AS4000.cfg which is to be found in the directory where you installed the software (typically /Program Files/CHARON-AXP/AS4000.cfg). After initial installation of the Alpha Emulator this configuration file contains a setup that you can use for first startup after adding a few values.

Configuration lines that start with # are considered comment lines and ignored by the emulator on startup. For reasons of clarity we summarize the initial configuration file setup here, with only the uncommented lines.

# Putty is a freeware terminal emulator delivered with CHARON-AXP
OPA0.type=socket
OPA0.port=:20000
OPA0.command=putty -raw -P 20000 localhost

#Define the system disk to install the operating system upon
load 1 PK
load DKA0
DKA0.image="C:\Alpha Emulator\<bootdisk>.vdisk"
load DKA103
DKA103.image="C\Program Files\Alpha Emulator\<datadisk1>.vdisk"
load DKA300
DKA300.image="\\.\CDcrom0"

#Define the Ethernet adapter
load 1 EW
EWA0.iface="<name ethernet adapter>"

# Start the emulator
power on

Replace the red marked sections <....> with the information you select. The Ethernet adapter name can be found in the properties window of the Ethernet adapter you plan to use. Please make sure that all communication options are disabled (unchecked) except for the option "Alpha Emulator Packet Protocol".

This setup will allow you to start the Alpha emulator and perform a clean install of the operating system. This you will need to do to prepare the Alpha emulator to communicate with the original Alpha before you can copy the system and data disks contents. To add additional devices to this configuration file we refer to the configuration section of this document that describes the configuration options for each device in more detail.

Place the Alpha operating system disk in the CD-ROM device and boot the Alpha emulator.

Select a VT-terminal emulator for the OPA0 console

As the OPA0-console you may connect a VT-terminal to a console port, using the standard COM-port of the host platform or connect via the LAN using a TCP-IP/port address. You may use a software VT-terminal emulator like Putty that is delivered with CHARON-AXP. We refer to the VT-terminal configuration instructions in the Configuration section of this manual to configure different VT emulators.