Scriptom

Three and a half years ago I was experimenting with using PowerPoint to create screencast videos. I found one of them, last night, that used Scriptom. This is clearly a test video, and kind of interesting. It did remind me that I never got Scriptom working. Scriptom is a Groovy wrapper around JACOB, the Java COM Bridge. I had another try, using an updated @Grab statement. It still fails to find JACOB's jar on the path. I'm tempted to try with Gradle.

JACOB is a bridge to COM, thus it has a DLL component. The error is due to the DLL not being on the path. Having enabled Grapes logging, at level 4, I can see the DLL is being pulled down. But its name doesn't include "X64". Looks like Grapes is grabbing the 32-bit version despite running on 64-bit Windows 10. Java looks for a JACOB DLL that includes the version No. and bit size. JACOBV19.DLL doesn't work, as it's not found. I dug out the "correct", 12 years old, version from SourceForge. This tries to run, but fails with a Windows access violation (error 5).

Apparently SCRIPTOM is an optional component in the Groovy Windows installer. I'm using a portable version of Groovy 2.5.8, so no installer was involved. The most recent commit to SCRIPTOM's GitHub repository is from July 2015. The build.gradle file mentions JACOB 1.14.3, which is the same version my @Grab of SCRIPTOM uses. My SCRIPTOM is 1.6; looks like the latest version is 1.61. Will that point release fix the problem? The latest SCRIPTOM targets Groovy 1.8.

RSTS/E

I tried firing up my emulated PDP-11 with run.cmd. It gets errors due to PuTTY not being installed. Not surprising, as all my development for the RSTS project was on my Surface Pro 2, while away from home. I am running the latest version of simh, which to be stable. i.e. new releases are infrequent.

I downloaded PuTTY 32-bit, 64-bit and the documentation. I downloaded the zipped versions, not the MSIs, as PuTTY can run as a standalone app. It's quite small so I copied it to the RSTS project folder, then spent some time playing with RSTS/E via a PuTTY console. The lack of command line editing is irritating.

To start the emulator use:

run.cmd V8

This brings up RSTS/E V8.0 with KB0: attached to a telnet port. PuTTY is fired up and attached to the port automatically. The emulator drops to a prompt after firing up PuTTY. Type G␍ to continue and it will start the system, auto-filling the date and time prompts. It does not mount DM1:. This is awkward as DM1: contains the help files. Use:

mount DM1:TEST

to bring it online.

09-FEB-2020 👈 Top of page 👉 11-FEB-2020

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Table of Contents

Scriptom

RSTS/E