For all the 286 fans, which… I never understand, good news, it turns out that using the same method for installing Xenix 386 works on Qemu 0.14.0!
Booting up a kernel on a 1.2MB floppy disk image I get this:
Notice that the device is fd096ds15, which then corresponds to 2,52 for the major minor. Armed with this information you can install happily. And enjoy your segmentation, and SMLH memory models. Ugh.
I still say the 80286 was the worst thing to mainstream IT.
So I’ll leave you with this gem, from tenox..
MICROSOFT STRIKES GOLD.
Yea, it is unfortunate that the 286 was released in early 1982, which was months after the introduction of the IBM PC. Of course MS screwing up the protected mode transition on the DOS/Windows/OS/2 side not only with the 286 but also with the later 386 certainly don’t help either (FYI I have a private email thread with MichalN and Larry Osterman of MS about that one).
In fact, notice the filing date of this 286 patent:
http://www.google.com/patents?id=T4g-AAAAEBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=4,442,484&hl=en&ei=UpbUTr2ZA8jc0QH98-DuAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA
Add to the fact that Intel did not release the 386SX until 1988!
heh I can remember when they came out, a college kid up the road had one, and I’d trade him stuff.. He was lucky, I know he had VGA, I forget how much ram, but he couldn’t figure out how/what to do with it… I still had a c64, I didn’t start to piece together my 286 until . … 1990? Its been too long that is all I remember.
I have made an autoinstaller for xenix286 with (cool) games. Sent you a mail 🙂 Feel free to put on vpsland (and there are typos like digigial instead of digital on it)
real 8m12.575s
user 0m32.796s
sys 0m7.772s
The autoinstaller script can be modified to use vboxmanage (virtualbox CLI tool)
Update, published here:
https://github.com/retrohun/blog/tree/master/dt/xenix286ondemand
If anyone is interested. Try commenting out this line:
QEMU_EXE+=’ -display vnc=127.0.0.1:1′
TL;DR idles about 4-5 minutes and then a ready-to-run xenix286 diskimage will be created, with games of course.
Have fun!