Yearly Archives: 2013

TTPod restricted ip address…

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So my wife loves this Chinese application TTPod, which lets you listen to music.  And oh joy last night it suddenly stops working because of an error of “invalid ip address”.

Well it seems that the application will now only fully work in China.  Even though we are in a SAR (Hong Kong) it isn’t good enough it would seem.

I haven’t used Pandora in ages, and I thought I’d try that to get the same thing.

So for people who like this kind of thing, (esp my wife who just must have facebook while we are in China) I use OverPlay which has VPN endpoints in numerous countries, and supports things like OpenVPN & PPTP which is perfect for devices like iPhone & Android Phones.  So I can still get my BBC & CBC Fix, along with access to my Hulu subscription while abroad.

I swear that IP restrictions are so retarded, all they do is make you funnel traffic to get around them, and punish expats.

Kali

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My friend, Mara’akate is working on locating all the versions of Kali, and it’s precursor iDoom/iFrag.  His collection is available here.

Briefly this software let you play Doom (and other Doom variants) with other people over the internet.

I’ll have to write something up about this later on, but before I head out this Friday evening I thought I should at least give him a quick shout out, and hope that anyone out there has anything further to contribute could do so.

I wonder how hard it’d be to organize a Doom match in 2013…. probably just as hard as it was in 1993 if not more difficult.  Although the main issue today would be time, not finding a capable machine like it was back then.

Restoring the MIPS Magnum in Qemu 1.6.0

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As many of you Windows NT MIPS fans may know (apparently there are more than 3 of us now!) the MIPS Magnum target is broken in the current build of Qemu.  The problem lies in the firmware as it accesses unassigned memory.  Luckily I just received an email from Hervé that details how to fix this!

The good news is that the fix is VERY easy, all you need to do is comment out a single line in target-mips/op_helper.c

In the function mips_cpu_unassigned_access:

void mips_cpu_unassigned_access(CPUState *cs, hwaddr addr,
bool is_write, bool is_exec, int unused,
unsigned size)
{
MIPSCPU *cpu = MIPS_CPU(cs);
CPUMIPSState *env = &cpu->env;

if (is_exec) {
helper_raise_exception(env, EXCP_IBE);
} else {
helper_raise_exception(env, EXCP_DBE);
}
}

Simply comment out the line

helper_raise_exception(env, EXCP_DBE);

And you’ll be able to boot up the NT PROM.

MIPS Firmware

MIPS Firmware

Remember you’ll want to run it something like this:

qemu-system-mips64el -L /tmp -M magnum -m 64 -cdrom WindowsNT4.0-MIPS.iso -hda MIPS.disk -net nic -net user -global ds1225y.filename=nvram  -global ds1225y.size=8200

Where I’m keeping my NT PROM is /tmp (although that is probably a bad idea…)  But you’ll need the NVRam stuff to add extra space for the ethernet MAC address.  The clock is always trashed but at least it is doing something this time!

For the uninitiated, some installation notes can be found here.

Qemu 1.6.0 for Win32

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I updated my glib2 to the same version that works great on OS X, and it feels like the Win32 binaries are just slower than ever.  Now I am running this under VMWare, so maybe that is why it is so slow.

Can someone give this a shot?

Any and all feedback would be nice.

Oh I included the Doom 1.1 in there run it like this:

qemu-system-i386 -L pc-bios -m 16 -hda doom11.img -soundhw sb16,adlib

And you should be able to run doom with sound.

Qemu 1.6.0 binaries for OS X

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I was kind of a slacker on this one, but here we go, all built for OS X. For anyone new, you’ll want 7za to extract the 7zip archive.

I’ve included the glib2 that I’m using that performs pretty well with Qemu, along with pixman & libintl.

  • Extract glib.tar
  • Copy the contents of glib (so all the files in ./usr/local/lib/) to /usr/local/lib on your local machine.
  • Copy libintl.8.dylib and libpixman-1.0.dylib to /usr/local/lib

And that should get you going.

I’ve tested it with MS-DOS & Doom 1.1 along with QuakeWorld for MS-DOS.  Both work fine.  The other things I have tested that don’t work is OS/2 1.21 and Novell Netware 3.12.  Although -M isapc is working again, Netware still hangs when mounting any volumes.

QWDos running

QWDos running

I may try to see if I can get a Win32 build going with the same version of glib2 (2.23.6) that works fine on OS X.

Running Synchronet on an Amazon EC2 instnace

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Well apparently Amazon will even let you have a free ‘micro’ instance on their EC2 cloud for free!  From this blog post, you can see how easy it is to setup a Windows Server 2008 instance, download & install Synchronet.

I would imagine that with the 32bit version of Windows Server, you should be able to even run NTVDM stuff (meaning old MS-DOS Doors).

Screen Shot 2013-08-27 at 4.32.12 PM

Although I’m going to keep mine running on the old Qemu on top of a Linux VPS.  But this may be easier for some of you who wanted to run one, to get things going.

OS/2 1.21 under Qemu 1.6.0

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Microsoft OS/2 1.21

Microsoft OS/2 1.21

 

So close, and yet so far away.  I’m using a ‘restore’ image to do this.. Basically I have an existing OS/2 1.21 machine that I made a backup of, using MS-DOS & OS/2.  I restore the MS-DOS backup with an altered config.sys that dumps me to a cmd.exe prompt with no Presentation Manager.  Then I restore the OS/2 image onto itself and then reboot into OS/2.  I know it works since I’ve used this to setup OS/2 onto VirtualBOX & a physical PC before.  Qemu boots half way through but the letter ‘o’ is corrupted for some reason, and the keyboard doesn’t respond once it’s booted.  But the cursor blinks away like it is waiting for you to type anything.  It is worth noting that OS/2 1.x doesn’t know what IDE CD-ROM’s are, and you have to remove the physical drive to boot this up.

Oh well it is a shame.

Qemu 1.6.0 pre-3 OS X binaries

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I’ll do a release version later, but for those who want it, the i386 & PowerPC emulators.

On the i386 side, I did notice that with an older glib2 installed in /usr/local/lib that Qemu was slow, buggy and all around crappy.  But with a newer lib I’d recently built on my MacPro, it works fine, along with SOUND (tested with DOOM).  So yeah test with the i386 version first, I included the demo DOOM v1.1, and see how that works for you.  I’ve included the libintl & pixman libraries, along with a tar of my glib2 install.  Backup & replace as necessary.

It runs fine on my laptop, which up until now hasn’t run Qemu.

Qemu on OS X 10.8.3

Qemu on OS X 10.8.3

 

QNX 2.21 Arrived Today

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(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

So that QNX 2.21 from the previously established purchase fund has arrived today. As an added bonus, I expected 4 x 5.25″ disks, but the media turned to be a single 3.5″ floppy disk. So it’s better suitable for more modern 286 machines and emulators.

qnx221 floppy

I have imaged the floppy to a raw disk dump and booted in VMware Workstation for verification.

qnx 2.21 on vmware

The floppy disk image was sent to those who contributed in the previous post.
Manuals are always available here.

Update: the floppy disk image is here…