Monthly Archives: September 2016

MIDI Mayhem on Windows 10

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So I know it’s ‘probably’ the super cheap generic USB to MIDI dongal I got on the cheap, but it just doesn’t work on Windows 10.

Using DOSBox, I get the following output when cycling between devices on the console:

MIDI:Opened device:win32
MIDI:win32 selected Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth
MIDI:Opened device:win32
MIDI:win32 selected USB2.0-MIDI
MIDI:Opened device:none
MIDI:win32 selected MIDIOUT2 (USB2.0-MIDI)
MIDI:Opened device:none

As you can see it clearly can see the USB device, but when it opens the device it fails. And yes I’ve tried Administrator.  And for the hell of it, I fire up Windows XP on VMWare, connect the USB dongal, and amazingly:

MIDI:Opened device:win32
MIDI:win32 selected USB Audio Device
MIDI:Opened device:win32
MIDI:win32 selected USB Audio Device [2]
MIDI:Opened device:win32
MIDI:win32 selected Microsoft GS Wavetable SW Synth
MIDI:Opened device:win32

Yes, I can open the out port just fine.  So now I run a virtualizer to run my emulator to drive a physical peripheral… Ugh.  Has MIDI been this messed up all along and I never noticed?

Oh yeah, the GS Wavetable Synth works fine, as did MUNT before I uninstalled it, thinking it was somehow interfering with anything.

I know I’m using this fine device, the QinHeng USB MIDI adapter, which apparently is notorious crap, but my recently acquired Yamaha MU 80, works fine with it on Windows XP.

QinHeng USB MIDI adapter

QinHeng USB MIDI adapter

Ugh.

Cross compiling Linux 0.95c+ & 0.96c from Windows

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The first thing is to build GCC 2…  I couldn’t find any of the Linux patches for 2.0, 2.1 or 2.2.. I only tried to build 2.0 from source as targeting a.out i386 but it looks like the 2.0 files on the FSF’s site are missing files?

Anyways GCC 2.3.3 actually includes builtin support of Linux!  I was able to build most of it, but just like GCC 2.5.8 for OS/2 EMX, But this time I used the gcc driver from GCC 2.6.3, which added support for Windows NT 3.5 native builds, and I now had my GCC cross compiler!

D:\aoutgcc\src>gcc2 -v -c hi.c -o hi
gcc version 2.6.3 -Linux 2.3.3
cpp2 -lang-c -v -undef -D__GNUC__=2 -Dunix -Di386 -Dlinux -D__unix__ -D__i386__ -D__linux__ -D__unix -D__i386 -D__linux hi.c C:\Temp\cca09324.i
GNU CPP version 2.3.3 (80386, BSD syntax)
cc12 C:\Temp\cca09324.i -quiet -dumpbase hi.c -version -o C:\Temp\cca09324.s
GNU C version 2.3.3 (80386, BSD syntax) compiled by GNU C version 5.1.0.
a386 -o hi C:\Temp\cca09324.s

Thankfully the prior binutils and assembler I was using in my GCC 1.40 cross compiler, still cooperated just fine, and I could happily build and link just fine.

From there it was a matter of fighting the makefiles as for some reason as make calls other makefiles they are not passing variables, so I just cheated, and changed the paths, along with editing the dependencies to finding stuff in a more sane manner.  Plus all the Makefiles have include paths hard coded into the build process as expected.  After fighting for a while, it linked and even better, it runs!

linux-0-96c-71-cross-compiled-from-windows

Linux 0.96c-71 cross compiled from windows

So yeah, using the MCC hard disk image from oldlinux.org and it boots!

Cool stuff, indeed!

As an added bonus I was also able to get 0.97 & 0.98 to compile as well!

Download your copy @ MinGW-aout-linux–001_010_011_012_095_096_097_098.7z.

NetBSD 1.0 i386

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It had just hit me that I’d never actually installed NetBSD 1.0

So here we go!  For whatever reason Qemu and NetBSD 1.0 see the floppy as a 1.2 MB, so I had to make 1.2 MB images.  For anyone feeling like shuffling a whole lot of floppies here you go!

For everyone else, here is a pre-installed VMDK + Qemu all set to run (for Windows).

I’ve setup the networking, so you can telnet into the VM, and of course access outside, but remember with SLiRP, things like FTP & NFS aren’t going to work.

NetBSD 1.0 on Qemu

NetBSD 1.0 on Qemu

Darwin 1.4.1 installs on Qemu 2.7!

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Darwin 1.4.1 on Qemu

Darwin 1.4.1 on Qemu

I tried the x86 version from Apple’s Darwin web site.  For those who don’t know Darwin was (is?) an open source version of the OS X kernel and userland.  This was on parity with the OS X 10.1 release.  It was notoriously picky about hardware back in 2001, let alone anything today, and much to my amazement it installed fine on Qemu 2.7.

Source code to the packages should be about here. and the ISO is still on Apple’s site here.

Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

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For those 2-3 people still searching for this thing, it’s the old ‘free’ CLI C++ compiler from Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.3052 for 80×86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

Although Visual C++ .NET 2003 SP1 gives you a later version of the compiler…

Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.6030 for 80×86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

I’m not sure if you can service pack this toolkit.

You can download it from my site as VCToolkitSetup.exe

For anyone who wants to run this under newer versions of Windows as I know I can’t install it on Windows 8 or 10, I installed it on my Windows XP x64 machine, and uploaded it here as vc2003toolkit.7z

By the time this came out, Microsoft had started to admit that they had lost serious ground to GCC, as for years they had neglected the low end $99 market that they had dominated during their fights with Borland in the QuickC vs TurboC days.  Once Borland had withdrawn from the market, Microsoft felt no need to compete and this left plenty of time for GNU tools to take hold in the marketplace.  This was a stopgap reaction as a prelude to the Visual Studio Express that would happen in 2005 onward.

Elsewhere I’ve been able to find an old Windows 2003 SP1 Platform SDK image, it should certainly let this compiler build far more interesting things.  Although unless you really need 2003, you really ought to look at newer stuff.  Unless you like really old stuff, then as a reminder the Win32s 1.1 SDK includes the version 8.00 compiler from 1993 as well.  You can download it from here: win32s-1.1-build-88-msvc32sdev.7z 

Adding some SSL via Let’s Encrypt

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Maybe this will work, maybe it won’t.

I know one thing right off is that the quake server status is ‘mixed content’ aka it’s retrieved over http.

The new version of Chrome is going to start alerting to non HTTPS sites, so it’s only a matter of time before everyone else starts to require it.. Sigh.

CP/M Exchange and the CP/M Player

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Exchange & CP/M Player

Exchange & CP/M Player

While on the road, I stumbled onto a link that referred to this program called Exchange, which is a decapitated ‘port’ of CP/M that simply allows you to read and write CP/M disk images.  While on the surface it may not seem much, but the fact it actually uses the 68000 kernel from CP/M seemed really interesting to me.  With minor fighting I had it running on MinGW!

http://anachronda.homeunix.com:8000/~rivie/exchange/

And what fun would that be if we left it there? Oh sure you can get files in and out of standard 8″ images, but can you run them?

Over at the Takeda Toshiya’s page, not only does he make the MS-DOS player, and a whole host of other Japanese machine emulators, but he also has a CP/M player that works in the same style!

http://takeda-toshiya.my.coocan.jp/

So, combine the two, and now you too can trivially export and import files for emulators like SIMH, or just run files naively at the Win32/Win64 command line!