Yearly Archives: 2009

While on holiday, I had some access to a PowerPC mac

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so I’ve made some builds, of stuff…

Starting with f2c:

http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/f2c/

This built pretty straight forward, and it’s not that crazy CPU intensive so I would imagine it’d run fine with the rosetta code on OS X i386…

I’ll have to make some more cpu/os builds as it’s a fun test….

The second thing I built was some SIMH binaries, but they would be SLOWER on i386 mac’s then the PowerPC stuff… Hopefully someday I can have intel Mac access….

Anyways I’ll have to upload those later, so I’ll just post back….

ML648s & video files…

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So I got one of these ML648s video players for christmas. And it says it’ll play WMV/WMA files so it seems to be pretty straight forward to convert stuff right?

Wrong.

Right now I’m taking the output from handbrake and passing it through AMV convert then copy it to the device from windows explorer and you are good to go!

It’s a shame they didn’t write on the box, that it needs this AMV format thing….

But after a LOT of googling around here is the solution.

DOSBox 0.73

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Well I’ve been playing with some old MS-DOS software, and putting stuff together for it, I’ve had some MAJOR issues with SDL, between mapping my keyboard incorrectly, to the video not refreshing correctly when it’s not in focus or if another window overlapped it.

It’s a shame as DOSBox is usually pretty cool, but on my x64 system it’d been flaking out with the most annoying being the \,/,{,} & arrow keys not working right. Well for the heck of it, I downloaded & built my own SDL.dll for Qemu, and overwrote the one that comes with DOSBox… And it works PERFECTLY…..

This has been a WAY better fix, then messing around with my HID, removing drivers on EVERY reboot.

 

IDE-CDROM for OS/2 2.0

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I’ve slowly been trying to piece together my old Netware 4.1 stuff to try to run it on Virtual PC… the best I can find is that I’d need parts of Netware 6 to get the networking to run….

But then the other day, I had remembered that you could run Netware 4.1 under OS/2 (the 32bit ones)..

The only ‘snag’ is that I’d need a working CD-ROM driver… And IDE-CD’s didn’t become somewhat popular until the 3.0 WARP days.

Well I did manage to find this zip file, CL_ATAPI.ZIP (Mirror CL_ATAPI.ZIP) that contains the IDE drivers!.. And as it mentions in the BBS description it’ll work on 2.0! Except that it gives NO hints on how to install it.

After a LOT of googling around, I was able to piece together a working solution. Adding this to the config sys by first commenting out the ibm1s506.add.. (Naturally unzip CL_ATAPI.zip into the os2 directory!

BASEDEV=IBM1FLPY.ADD
rem BASEDEV=IBM1S506.ADD
BASEDEV=IBM1s506.add
BASEDEV=IBM1s506.add /A:1 /U:0 /ATAPI
ifs=c:\os2\cdfs.ifs /q
basedev=ibmidecd.flt
device=c:\os2\os2cdrom.dmd
BASEDEV=OS2DASD.DMD

And there we go, drive D all set!

Polling around….

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This weekend has been kind of crappy as we had some cisco switches flake out, but nobody knew anything happened… I’d been pulled away on so many things over the last few years that monitoring them kind of fell by the waaaayside.

Well in this economic environment nobody is going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for some simple syslog/polling system that pages people. I needed one for free.

And years ago, I wrote a simple one that revolved around SQL Server 7/MSDE 1.0

Anyways I’ve made it as 2 CD images, and if you are bored, or in the need to poll devices with a basic TCP connect you can download it here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/simplemssqlnetw/

What may be useful for people is that I’ve put some impossible to find software on the prerequisite CD…

Namely:

NT 4.0 sp6a
MSDE 1.0
Option Pack (IIS4)
SQL 7 sp4

For some reason all the above stuff is getting dammed near impossible to find on Microsoft’s site. I guess it is end of the road for the NT 4.0 heyday. So at the least, this is my way to keep a location to download this software, as I’m sure someone will need it someday.

MSDE 1.0 for those who don’t know was a redistributable version of SQL Server 7.0 that had a 10 user limit, and a 2GB database size limit. Also there was no GUI management but it was great to use, because unlike SQL Express, it included the SQL Agent. The agent can run tasks at certain times, say like run a TSQL script that dumps a list of machines from a table into the hosts file, then tries to connect to each machine and record the state into a database…..

It was VERY useful stuff for the time.

There is no exciting screnshot, as I never did make an interface to the thing, instead I opted to configure everything through Access.

Other then that, I’ve been playing with a BackOffice 1.5 CD set I got on ebay… NT 3.51, MS Mail 3.5 & SQL 6.0!! It’s been so long, but MSSQL 6.0 was the first SQL server that I ever was payed to manage… It’s amazing how far we’ve come as an industry, and at the same point how things stay the same, although the installation of NT 3.51 is SO FAST!!!

partitioning with debug

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If you’ve ever decided to use a ‘new’ pc for some old OS’s or whatnot, you’ll probably find partition tables that will NOT clear under MS-DOS…

Well after looking around for a ‘quick’ and easy method of wiping a partition table, I found this neat little script for DEBUG to do the trick….

Don’t try it out on any machines you care about…!

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/106419

—————————————————————-
Debug Enter Debug Comments
Prompts Commands
—————————————————————-
– A 100 Assemble from CS:0100.

nnnn:0100 INT 13 Call interrupt 13.

nnnn:0102 press the (nnnn in the segment address).
ENTER key

– RAX Replace AX register.

AX 0000

: 0301 Write on sector.

– RBX Replace BX register.

BX 0000

: 0200 Start from ES:200.

– F 200 L 200 0 We want to write zeros.

– RCX Replace CX register.

CX 0000

: 0001 Cylinder, 0, sector 1.

– RDX Replace DX register.

DX 0000

: 0080 First physical hard disk, head
0. (Substitute 0081 for this
entry if you are clearing the
table on the second physical
hard disk, 0082 if you are
clearing the third physical
hard disk, and so forth).

– P Proceed (Debug will display
several lines of information).

– Q Quit Debug.
—————————————————————-

Some updates..

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I had a request for the qemu 0.90 binaries to run NeXTSTEP… I don’t own Vaxenrule.com anymore so for now I’ll put them here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1694005/qemu090%20for%20nextstep.zip

Sorry for the bitrot stuff… 😐 At least I’m still here.

Also while working on Tradewars C today, I came across this great package called OpenDoors. Even better is that it’s under the LGPL. The only “downside” is that OpenDoors requires Visual C++ 6.0 or higher to build, because of the toolbar.. Also I’m not sure if going from VC 1.0 to 9.0 didn’t flake some stuff out as well… I’m not 100% sure about it, but the trading part of the game feels.. weird.

The examples are pretty straight forward, and it took a few hours on & off for me to convert the standalone tradewars into a door program. I like the feel of it so much I may try to see about converting SIMH to run with it.. Maybe even dumbfrotz.

OpenDoors trade wars

OpenDoors trade wars

Above is a picture of what the console looks like.

More ports… more tradewars…

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more etc…

Some of the stuff is getting ironed out, it plays better for sure.

I had to start separating things out to make some older C compilers happy…

I still do not understand how ‘float’ types keep changing sizes between 16bit/32bit compilers…. Was there ever ANY consistent floating point types in C between 16/32bit? It really sucks to have binary data and find out you cannot ‘read’ it…..

Did people just force people to dump their data into ASCII, and reload it into 32bit formats, and tell everyone to ONLY use 32bit?

I know I’m like 15 years late to this party, as everyone is going through the win32 to win64 thing… Although I’m surprised Tradewars C’s win64 version runs happily with a win32 generated data file…….

Oh and ports in this version:

MS-DOS (realmode)
Win16 (QuickC for Windows’s QuickWin)
Win32 (Visual C++ 1.0’s CLI libc.lib exe… )
Win64 (Visual Studio 2008 cli)
Linux (x86 built with debian -static…..)
OS/2 (16 bit built with Microsoft C 6)

Although it supports multiple users, it’s still a single player game… I suppose it shouldn’t be too hard to constantly check the user record & sector record of where they are with stuff changing…..?

Anyways my work is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tradewarsc/

9/11/2001 pages…

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Ok, it’s not virtual stuff… but I’m sure you’ve heard that wikileaks has a few hundred thousand pages…

These two stuck out to me:

2001-09-11 08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA
Someone just told me there was an explosion at

The first plane went in at 8:46 AM

2001-09-11 09:04:03 Skytel [002386438] B ALPHA
[email protected]||HUGE explosion just rocked the World Trade Center….the second tower is now on fire.

The second plane hit at 9:03 AM

And this one is just plain eerie:

2001-09-11 09:02:31 Skytel [004696708] B ALPHA
BREAKING NEWS: PER OPB, IT APPEARS AA 757 HIJACKED AND RUN INTO THE WORLD TRADE CENTER. THIS IS NOT A JOKE AND JUST BREAKING NEWS> RICK-Rick

Funny how us little people… knew so little.

And it’s funny how the NSA/CIA spies on us, but this offers a glimpse of the power they hold….

MS-DOS lan client for Virtual PC 2007

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So while I was going through the motion of making my tradewars more… multi user friendly, I needed to test between all kinds of clients and a server…

Since I’m using MS-DOS, Windows 3.0 as my test bed (if it’ll run there, it’ll run anywhere!) I had MAJOR issues with the 3.0 lan client… But digging around on the NT 4.0 Server CD I tried the lanman.dos client.

Using the lan drivers from here: http://wiki.oldos.org/Downloads/DriversAndBootdisks

It was a snap!

I’ve built an NT 4.0 domain controller with both NetBIOS & TCPIP protocols that way all my machines can map into it…

I wonder if there ever was a ms net requester for MacOS..?