Qemu entering the 1.2 rc phase!

I just got word that Qemu is now aggressivly entering the 1.2 release phase.  Of interest to people who like old OS’s, namely Windows NT 3.1 this is going to be in the release:

  • Three new SCSI host bus adapter devices are available: am53c974 and dc390 emulate respectively an AMD PCI PCscsi and a Tekram DC-390 device, both of which are supported on older operating systems including MS DOS 6.2, MS Windows 3.11, 98 SE, NT 3.1 and NT 4.0. megasasemulated an LSI SAS1078 RAID controller. The next version of SeaBIOS will support booting from am53c974 and dc390 disks.

That’s right!  With the Tekram DC-390 you will be able to install Windows NT 3.1 with only a install floppy & CD-ROM.  I also hope this includes stability fixes for Novell Netware..

I’ve naturally added in my sdl update for a quick control-alt-delete & reset


case 0x13: /*r on US keyboard */
qemu_system_reset_request();
break;
case 0x20: /* 'd' key on US keyboard */
kbd_put_keycode(0x1d); /* left ctrl key */
kbd_put_keycode(0x38); /* left alt key */
kbd_put_keycode(0xd3); /* delete key */
kbd_put_keycode(56);
kbd_put_keycode(29);
kbd_put_keycode(157);
kbd_put_keycode(184);
kbd_put_keycode(29);
kbd_put_keycode(56);
kbd_put_keycode(224);
kbd_put_keycode(83);
kbd_put_keycode(224);
kbd_put_keycode(211);
break;

And to configure it with the parameters…

$ ./configure --audio-drv-list=dsound,sdl,fmod --audio-card-list=ac97,es1370,sb16,adlib,hda,gus --disable-curl --fmod-lib=/mingw/fmod/libfmod.a --fmod-inc=/mingw/fmod

I’m not too thrilled on the audio aspect, while I’ve managed to compile in Direct Sound & Fmod, fmod doesn’t produce any sound, and Direct Sound is very laggy.  Another thing I don’t “get” is that inside of mingw SDL displays Qemu with a normal aspect ratio and runs fine, but copying the same binaries  & DLLs out of Mingw gives me that weird and slow display.. So I’ve removed the full screen capability (did anyone use it? it never worked right anyways…) as I had done before, and it seems ok.

I haven’t gotten around to looking at the new SCSI adapters or how to configure them, but I hope to do that real soon! It will be cool for sure!

Doom on Qemu 1.2.0 rc1

Doom on Qemu 1.2.0 rc1

That said it is a *LOT* faster than 1.1.1 or 1.1.0 !

As always, my binary is here.

18 thoughts on “Qemu entering the 1.2 rc phase!

  1. Also, does this RC1 version already support booting from DC390 disks? I tried configuring the SCSI bios for the DC390 (I have the drivers for NT 3.1) but I was unable to do so, I still can’t install from CD.

      • From the Qemu Mailing List: “Difference with AMD PCSCSI is that DC-390 contains a EEPROM,
        and that a ROMFile is available to add INT13 support.”, that means you need a ROM image from the original card, (although you can extract it from a bios update archive if you find one) for the card, to get the necessary boot support… Also you require that ROM file to use the drivers supplied by TekRam (them will not work without it).

        So… if the only thing that you need is install Winnt 3.1 without booting first to MSDOS to an IDE drive, you will be better using the PCSCSI emulation with the AMD drivers (The AMD card doesn’t have a rom file and doesn’t support booting from itself).

        Greetings.

          • To your working QEMU commandline you should add the following:

            -device am53c974 -drive file=winnt31.iso,if=scsi,media=cdrom,bus=0,unit=3

            where “winnt31.iso” is you path to your NT31 CD iso, and “unit=3″ is your SCSI ID for you CDROM (As far as i know NT31 doesn’t like CDROMS using the first 3 IDs).

            Remember that NT31 CDRoms don’t have boot support, so you will need all the following to you QEMU working command line.

            -fda nt3btdsk.vfd -fdb amddrv.vfd

            Where nt3btdsk.vfd is your NT31 bootdisk (you can make it with the NT31 winnt.exe app), and amddrv.vfd is your AMD PCSCSI NT31 driver disk.

            Greetings.

  2. To your working QEMU commandline you should add the following:

    -device am53c974 -drive file=winnt31.iso,if=scsi,media=cdrom,bus=0,unit=3

    where “winnt31.iso” is you path to your NT31 CD iso, and “unit=3” is your SCSI ID for you CDROM (As far as i know NT31 doesn’t like CDROMS using the first 3 IDs).

    Remember that NT31 CDRoms don’t have boot support, so you will need all the following to you QEMU working command line.

    -fda nt3btdsk.vfd -fdb amddrv.vfd

    Where nt3btdsk.vfd is your NT31 bootdisk (you can make it with the NT31 winnt.exe app), and amddrv.vfd is your AMD PCSCSI NT31 driver disk.

    Greetings.

    • For some reason, even if I set the SCSI CD ID to Unit 3 (also tried IDs 4, 5 and 6), the driver gets recognized, but still says that there are no SCSI CDROM drives during setup (by using the cdinstall.ima CD bootdisk, not DOS based)

      • Then try to use the SCSI ID No.2.

        From the SETUP.TXT Readme: “When you are installing Windows NT from a SCSI CD-ROM device, make sure that the device does not have an ID of 0 or 1. Some SCSI BIOS programs reserve 0 and 1 for hard disks. If you set your CD-ROM with an ID of 0 or 1, you will likely see an extra partition in Setup that does not exist. ”

        “The SCSI and CD-ROM support built into Windows NT 3.1 requires that CD-ROMs provide SCSI parity to function properly. For many drives this is a configurable option or is active by default. Check the documentation for your CD-ROM to find specifics on how this is configured for your drive.”

  3. finally, installed NT 3.1 from CD with the Am53c974 adapter, works fine, but every floppy image after it is installed says that it is in Unknown Disk Format.

  4. Good!

    For some reason, normal “-drive” syntax don’t work well with other devices besides the default supported scsi adapter, so you need change the whole “-drive” default command parameter to this:

    -device scsi-cd,drive=scd0 -drive file=winnt31.iso,if=none,bus=0,unit=2,id=scd0

    Where “winnt31.iso” is your NT3.1 CD image. “id=scd0” can be any recognizable tag for you, as this is only a identifier so scsi-cd device can take over the “-driver” directive.

    For the record, dc390 emulation works well, supposing that you provided the correct Adapter ROM to QEMU. Even you can have a SCSI-Only NT 3.1 setup using this emulation.

    You can upload a good ROM copy from there:

    ftp://ftp.tekram.com.cn/Storage/SCSI/PCI/DC-390X/DC-390/BIOS/V203/

    User: down
    Pass: down

    Drivers:

    ftp://ftp.tekram.com.cn/Storage/SCSI/PCI/DC-390X/DC-390/Driver&AP/DOS&WIN/v321/

    Greetings.

    • I know that :P, but when I put the AMD PCnet drivers from a floppy image (either IMG or IMA or VFD) or any floppy image, it gets that damned error which is “The Disk media is not recognized, it may not be formatted” on Qemu

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