There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about how Simics sessions are started and the mechanics of system setups in Simics. It also has a link to a Youtube video demonstrating various ways of starting Simics simulation sessions.
The main purpose of the post is really to describe the way Simics sets up simulations, as it is a pretty unusual method based almost entirely on programs rather than static configuration files. The simulation system is so dynamic and flexible that this has turned out to be the best method available. Fundamentally, any static configuration system will basically define a simple language to describe configurations — and that will always have a lower expressive power than a real programming language. Alternatively, it just turns into a Turing-complete language of its own, and then you have a programmatic system anyway. Thus, it makes little sense not to use a standard programming language to express the dynamics of a simulation setup.