I found minuszerodegrees simply looking for the IBM 5170 technical reference manual. Â Amazingly it’s online now!
And there is a bunch of other things in there, like the 5150, and the sound blaster manual.
All kinds of old EGA cards, some ATI VGA cards as well.
While trying to see if STAC ever went into the disk compression busness again, I ran across this interesting bit of software, DMSDOS, which is a kernel module for versions 2.0.36 and 2.2.3 of the Linux kernel support read/write access to STACKER version 3 and 4 containers. Â It also support’s MS-DOS’s drive space, and doublespace!
The latest version dmsdos-0.9.2.3-pre2-alt2.tar.gz even runs on modern x86_64 and i386 boxes!  Although in library mode.
# ./mcdmsdos list /tmp/STACVOL.000
mcdmsdos version 0.2.0 (for libdmsdos 0.9.x and newer)
libdmsdos: DMSDOS library version 0.9.2pl3-pre2(alpha test) compiled Jun 12 2014 17:14:06 with options: read-write, doublespace/drivespace(<3), drivespace 3, stacker 3, stacker 4
libdmsdos: mounting CVF on device 0x3 read-write…
libdmsdos: CVF end padding 1 sectors.
libdmsdos: CVF is in stacker 4 format.
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 10396254 Dec 16 1993 13:35 doom.wad
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 68923 Dec 15 1993 01:01 setup.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 20850 Dec 15 1993 01:01 readme.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 627155 Dec 16 1993 13:53 u1_94.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 579187 Dec 16 1993 13:47 doom.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 439 Dec 15 1993 01:01 file_id.diz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 190 Dec 15 1993 01:01 use1_95.bat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 218 Dec 15 1993 01:01 use1_94.bat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 7527 Dec 15 1993 01:01 license.doc
How cool?
Even better it can extract files from the stacker volume!
# ./mcdmsdos copyout /tmp/STACVOL.000 /doom.wad doom.wad
mcdmsdos version 0.2.0 (for libdmsdos 0.9.x and newer)
libdmsdos: DMSDOS library version 0.9.2pl3-pre2(alpha test) compiled Jun 12 2014 17:14:06 with options: read-write, doublespace/drivespace(<3), drivespace 3, stacker 3, stacker 4
libdmsdos: mounting CVF on device 0x3 read-write…
libdmsdos: CVF end padding 1 sectors.
libdmsdos: CVF is in stacker 4 format.
# md5sum doom.wad 981b03e6d1dc033301aa3095acc437ce doom.wad
#
And if you google ‘981b03e6d1dc033301aa3095acc437ce’ you’ll know it’s the registered DOOM version 1.1 data file!
The author tired to get it to work with Microsoft Visual C, and it does not. Â It also doesn’t work with MinGW or Cygwin, and the reason is once more again the way GCC handles it’s structures on Linux vs Windows. Â Sadly there is no silverbullet fix for this, the structures oddly enough are too small on Windows, and too big for what they should be on Linux.
But at any rate, I though it was cool. For anyone interested all versions that I’ve found I put online on my cvs server, unix.superglobalmegacorp.com.
Shoebill!
Good news, as mentioned here, the Shoebill emulator was recently given some much needed SDL love, and ported to Linux.
Well that’s great and all, but the vast majority of people who run anything these days do it with Windows. Â So I decided to try to get it to compile with MinGW to see how far I could get.
And the short version is that I got it working!
The long version is that in the first pass there is some SIGUSR2 stuff that is undefined. Â And for a good reason, since it won’t work. Â So I just commented them out. Â The next minor problem was the lack of bzero. Â Honestly I don’t know why bzero is missing from MinGW, but who knows why.
Shoebill also processes some internal macros with a perl script that for some reason was dropping in binary values into the source, making GCC mad. Â I just commented out a line that was adding in more comments into the header. Â This let me compile with a simple pass.
There was some issues reading the ROM file, since the 68000 is a BIG ENDIAN processor, and the 8086 is LITTLE ENDIAN, Shoebill makes extensive use of hotns and hotnl, ntohl, and ntohll.  These can be found in the winsock library, and even better they dont need any winsock initialization, they work right away.  I just have to make sure I include winsock2.h, and link against the winsock library.
However when trying to boot, the checksum was 0x00000000, not the expected value! Â Luckily there was an assert to catch that and crash. Â This led me to notice that in Linux files are opened in binary mode by default, while on Windows, they are opened in ASCII mode. Â A quick change of all the fopen calls, and I was reading the ROM, but now crashing on the disk.
As it turns out newer versions of GCC go all crazy when it comes to structs, and try to automatically align to boundaries for quick access. Â Which sound nice, until you try to read in some binary data, and expect things to be in certain locations and find out that your structure is larger than expected, and data is read in the wrong place.
The solution is to force the compiler to leave it alone with
__attribute__ ((__packed__))
HOWEVER as luck would have it, Microsoft apparently packs structures a different way, and you have to either make a macro to do a bunch of work to force it to make the structure 1:1 of what you expect, or use the CFLAG option of
-mno-ms-bitfields
And now MinGW’s GCC will build something along the lines of what it’d build on Linux.
Putting it all together, I amazingly got this!
Shoebill on Windows
Phew! Â So for those interested, here is the source code drop(Use the updated one here!), and here is the binary.
If you ever wanted to see the “OS X” of the 1980’s, now is your chance!
HECnetNT in action!
So I have my little project working well enough to let it out into the world.  I call it HECnetNT, and it’s available out on sourceforge.
It’s a port of  Johnny Billquist‘s bridge program to Windows.  This isn’t a MinGW or Cygwin build, but rather, a native build, compiled in Visual Studio 2003.  I’ve been able to run this build on NT 4.0, 2000 and Windows 7.
I also made some additions to the bridge program, by allowing it to bridge IPX/SPX Ethernet_II frames, so you can now build legacy networks that let you logon to NetWare servers, or even play those old IPX/SPX games.
Back when I first got DOOM v1.1 working on IPX/SPX I noticed that it sent an incredible amount of packets that were mostly empty. Â To work around this, I incorporated LZSS to compress data between HECnetNT bridges. Â Even better, I don’t see any significant CPU utilization, even with DOOM blasting packets like crazy!
The best part is that you can mix compressed & uncompressed bridges. Â So you can have an uncompressed connection to one host, and a compressed connection to another.
I’ve been able to bridge CTERM with SIMH to hosts using compressed, and uncompressed links, and this also includes a LINUX box with the original bridge software!
To take it one more step, I also setup a Windows NT box with an ethernet adapter, and the MS LOOPBack adapter, setup TCP/IP on both interfaces (a dummy address on the loopback is enough, but there needs to be something there), and then installed DEC Pathworks 7, on NT, bound it to the loopback adapter, ran the HECnetNT software, and I’ve been able to connect my NT instance. Â Logically I could go one more step, and install PPTP support, so I the NT server could then use PPTP to VPN to a HECnet bridge, and then join it.
So the larger question is, the DECnet enthusiasts have their hecnet, is anyone interested in making a Novell like equivalent? Â With older Linux that supports IPX/SPX or even NT we could even do routers, and build a large-ish sized network.
Years ago, I was given an image of VMS 4.7. Â I only tested it for idle capabilities, and that is as far as I got with it. Â I never used it for anything else.
But today I needed to verify my Win32 Hecnet project works, so I needed to generate some legit DECNet traffic. Â Luckily I still have the VMS image, and in the prevailing years I managed to get a copy of PathWorks for Windows NT (And one for MS-DOS as well!).
So googling around, I found blinkenbone who mentions the command needed to setup some DECNet love.  Now the one thing that is strange about DECNet is that the MAC address needs to be changed to the DECNet area & node id.  Thankfully there is an online calculator, powerdog.  Since I’m just testing, I’ll put my VAX in area 1, node 1, that means the VAX MAC needs to be set to:
AA-00-04-00-01-04
So in SIMH, I just use the line:
set xq mac=AA-00-04-00-01-04
Cool. Â Now I use ansicon, in the hopes it’ll make the console better, and fire up VMS.
VMS 4.7 booted
And then login as system/manager
Now I can setup decnet very simply like this:
Username: SYSTEM
Password:
Welcome to VAX/VMS version V4.7
Last interactive login on Saturday, 20-SEP-2008 17:32
$ @sys$manager:netconfig
DECnet-VAX network configuration procedure
This procedure will help you define the parameters needed to get DECnet
running on this machine. You will be shown the changes before they are
executed, in case you wish to perform them manually.
What do you want your DECnet node name to be? : rabbit
What do you want your DECnet address to be? : 1.1
Do you want to operate as a router? [NO (nonrouting)]:
Do you want a default DECnet account? [YES]:
Here are the commands necessary to setup your system.
————————————————————————–
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:NCP
PURGE KNOWN OBJECTS ALL
PURGE MODULE CONFIGURATOR KNOWN CIRCUITS ALL
$ DEFINE/USER SYS$OUTPUT NL:
$ DEFINE/USER SYS$ERROR NL:
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:NCP ! Remove existing entry, if any
PURGE NODE 1.1 ALL
PURGE NODE RABBIT ALL
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:NCP
DEFINE EXECUTOR ADDRESS 1.1 STATE ON
DEFINE EXECUTOR NAME RABBIT
DEFINE EXECUTOR MAXIMUM ADDRESS 1023
DEFINE EXECUTOR TYPE NONROUTING IV
DEFINE EXECUTOR NONPRIVILEGED USER DECNET
DEFINE EXECUTOR NONPRIVILEGED PASSWORD DECNET
$ DEFINE/USER_MODE SYSUAF SYS$SYSTEM:SYSUAF.DAT
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:AUTHORIZE
ADD DECNET /OWNER=”DECNET DEFAULT” –
/PASSWORD=DECNET –
/UIC=[376,376] /ACCOUNT=DECNET –
/DEVICE=SYS$SPECIFIC: /DIRECTORY=[DECNET] –
/PRIVILEGE=(TMPMBX,NETMBX) –
/DEFPRIVILEGE=(TMPMBX,NETMBX) –
Press RETURN to continue
/FLAGS=(CAPTIVE) /LGICMD=NL: –
/NOBATCH /NOINTERACTIVE
$ CREATE/DIRECTORY SYS$SPECIFIC:[DECNET] /OWNER=[376,376]
$ RUN SYS$SYSTEM:NCP
DEFINE LINE QNA-0 STATE ON
DEFINE CIRCUIT QNA-0 STATE ON COST 4
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR STATE ON
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR EVENTS 0.0-9
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR EVENTS 2.0-1
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR EVENTS 4.2-13,15-16,18-19
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR EVENTS 5.0-18
DEFINE LOGGING MONITOR EVENTS 128.0-4
————————————————————————–
Do you want to go ahead and do it? [YES]:
%UAF-I-ADDMSG, user record successfully added
%UAF-I-RDBADDMSGU, identifier DECNET value: [000376,000376] added to RIGHTSLIST.
DAT
%UAF-I-DONEMSG, system authorization file modified
%UAF-I-RDBDONEMSG, rights database modified
%NCP-I-NMLRSP, listener response – Success
Logging sink type = monitor
%NML-I-RECADDED, Database entry added
The changes have been made.
If you have not already installed the DECnet-VAX license, then do so now.
After the license has been installed, you should invoke the procedure
SYS$MANAGER:STARTNET.COM to startup DECnet-VAX with these changes.
(If the license is already installed) Do you want DECnet started? [YES]:
%%%%%%%%%%% OPCOM 28-OCT-1987 15:42:37.64 %%%%%%%%%%%
Message from user DECNET
DECnet starting
%RUN-S-PROC_ID, identification of created process is 00000109
%RUN-S-PROC_ID, identification of created process is 0000010B
$
%%%%%%%%%%% OPCOM 28-OCT-1987 15:42:42.67 %%%%%%%%%%%
Message from user DECNET
DECnet event 4.10, circuit up
From node 1.1 (RABBIT), 28-OCT-1987 15:42:37.69
Circuit QNA-0
It basically set itself up.
And on the Windows NT side, I simply set itself up as node 2 in area 1.
Windows NT + Pathworks
And now I can use CTERM to connect to the VAX.
CTERM
Nice!. Â And it even works through my port of HECNet.
On reboots you have to manually start the network. Â I don’t have EDT, or I don’t know where to find it (remember the gold key? ugh).
Manually starting the network
But it’s a simple command:
@SYS$MANAGER:startnet.com
And you are good to go!
Likewise shutting down is accomplished with this:
@SYS$SYSTEM:SHUTDOWN.COM
And that’s about all I know about VMS. Â But it’s good to see that configuring this was pain free!
You can find the source in their git here.
Games include:
Catacomb, The Catacomb, Catacomb 3D, Catacomb Abyss, and Hovertank3D
However this does not include the data files (of course). Â Also this is not 100% of the source code, as I noticed that libraries are required.
I haven’t taken too much of a deep look though.
when I stumbled onto Haruhiko Okumura’s lzss.c, but I was really intrigued.  Every time I’ve seen anything to do with compression, it’s insanely massive.
Except for this.
Including the ‘main’ portion of the source, it’s 180 lines long. Â 4.3Kb. Â That’s microscopic by today’s standards. Â On OS X I get a 13kb executable, compared to 76kb for gzip, or 1.6MB for 7za.
And googling around I found a few other variations. Â So I figured it would be slightly fun to have a ‘bakeoff’ with the ‘tradtional’Â Calgary Corpus, which includes some variable types of data.
Unsurprisingly, 7zip is the best of the bunch.
$ ./testcomp.sh
compiling……..
cleaning up
unzipping
running…….The winner (smallest) is :
261057 6 Jun 20:18 book1.7z
53167 6 Jun 20:18 geo.7z
9472 6 Jun 20:18 obj1.7z
17322 6 Jun 20:18 paper1.7z
43596 6 Jun 20:18 pic.7z
15060 6 Jun 20:18 progl.7z
16748 6 Jun 20:18 trans.7z
30716 6 Jun 20:18 bib.7z
169894 6 Jun 20:18 book2.7z
119399 6 Jun 20:18 news.7z
61758 6 Jun 20:18 obj2.7z
27310 6 Jun 20:18 paper2.7z
12605 6 Jun 20:18 progc.7z
10428 6 Jun 20:18 progp.7z
But the source to 7zip is unwieldy at best. Â So how did the small lzss and variants stuff do?
Compression percentage
Honestly I’m surprised gzip put up a good fight. Â Bzip2 & 7zip really fought for the top, The surprise to me was lzhuf leading the old stuff, which has it’s roots back in 1988/1989. Â So let’s look at the data without anything modern in the way.
Old Compression only
So from the numbers, we can see that lzs2 and lz3 run almost identical, with lzs & lzs4 at the bottom. Â Now when we look at time, we get something different.
Compression duration
Both lzs & lzs4 take eight or more seconds! Â So they are both out, as I’m shopping for something good/fast, and taking this long is out of the question! Â So it comes down to how complicated lzhuf2, lzs2 and lzs3 are.
| Source | Lines |
| lzs.c | 4360 |
| lzs4.c | 4632 |
| lzs2.c | 8308 |
| lzs3.c | 12844 |
| lzhuf.c | 18323 |
| lzhuf2.c | 22556 |
While lzs.c is still pretty impressive for the size, for what I’m going to try thought, I’m going to use lzs2.c as it’s 8kb, and seems to fit the bill.
For anyone who’s interested in running this on their own, here is the package. I only tested on OS X, it may run on other UNIX stuff, it may not. Extract it and run ‘testcomp.sh’. And it may even work! The only thing on OS X I had to add was ‘-Wno-return-type’ for compiling, as clang doesn’t like ancient source like this…
Well it’s kind of skinny to be honest. Â It works, Kinda though.
You can either have AdLib/OPL3 emulation, OR the PCM/Wave.
You can’t do both at the same time.
Really.
Edit the .vmx file, and look for the sound section..
sound.present = “TRUE”
sound.virtualDev = “sb16”
sound.opl3.enabled = “TRUE”
sound.autodetect = “TRUE”
sound.baseAddr = “0x220”
sound.dma16 = “7”
sound.dma8 =”1″
sound.irq = “5”
sound.mpu401baseAddr = “0x330”
sound.Opl3BaseAddr = “0x388”
And add in something like this. Â To get the opl3 emulation set it to TRUE, but the PCM won’t work. Â Set it to false and you’ll get sound.
And of course set your environment variable for MS-DOS
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H7 P330 T6
yay.
I’ve tested it with Doom v1.1, and it works. Â Of course you can ‘cheat’ and setup a network game, with one player with Adlib, and the other with the Sound Blaster. Â But I know that’s crazy!
A glimpse!
A preview of what is to come!
More details later… and apologies, I should have done this years ago.
Looking at my Netware configuration, and the MTU issues I was having, I was right to think that it used to work with serial links with an MTU of 1500 along with stacker compression. Â No doubt with the world moving away from traditional HDLC links, and Novell Netware, the code is in 12.4, but it doesn’t work.
Luckily someone sent me 11.3 for the 2600.
Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software
IOS ™ C2600 Software (C2600-D-M), Version 11.3(6)T, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Copyright (c) 1986-1998 by cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Tue 06-Oct-98 18:07 by ccai
It’s still strange to think of 1998 being old. Â Or legacy. Â But back then I had an IOS 9 device running as a terminal server, and whole lot of 2500’s & 4000’s running 10.3, and some 7000’s with 11.0. Â Good times for sure!
Since I setup a simple IPX network the router config’s are pretty simple. Â I didn’t even bother with TCP/IP.
R12
ipx routing c809.1dfc.0000
!
interface Ethernet0/0
no ip address
ipx encapsulation SAP
ipx network CAB2
!
interface Serial0/0
no ip address
bandwidth 1966080
ipx network BEEF
clockrate 2000000
compress stac
R13
ipx routing c808.1dfc.0000
!
interface Ethernet0/0
no ip address
ipx encapsulation SAP
ipx network CAB3
!
interface Serial0/0
no ip address
bandwidth 1966080
ipx network BEEF
clockrate 2000000
compress stac
As you can see the configuration is pretty bare bones. Â But the only thing I’m interested in is compressing that serial link. Â I didn’t have to do any MTU sizing games, instead logging into the server ‘just worked’. Â Then I turned on the compression, and copied the server’s system folder to the local disk.
Stacker Compression!
And you can see I’m getting about 1.5:1 . Â Not bad for a simple setting change.
Serial0/0
Software compression enabled
uncompressed bytes xmt/rcv 8733770/81026
1 min avg ratio xmt/rcv 1.577/1.121
5 min avg ratio xmt/rcv 1.578/1.070
10 min avg ratio xmt/rcv 1.606/1.083
no bufs xmt 0 no bufs rcv 0
resyncs 0
Additional Stacker Stats:
Transmit bytes: Uncompressed = 279855 Compressed = 5124744
Received bytes: Compressed = 72387 Uncompressed = 0
But naturally dynamips is slow for doing what it does. Â And to know that I’m not totally crazy, as this stuff did work before. Â This should also serve as a warning to people new at the fun world of cisco, just because you have a ‘newer’ version of IOS doesn’t mean that feature XYZ is going to work correctly. Â Oh sure the statements may work, but when it comes down to it, it may not work at all, or poorly. Â In case you ever wondered why people hoarde IOS versions this would be why.