Comments on: Fun with Caldera WABI

By: tenox

tenox — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 04:50:31 +0000

In reply to lumpython. oh damn, thanks for letting me know, the password is "caldera" not root ... sorry for the confusion

By: lumpython

lumpython — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 08:10:59 +0000

Hi
Can you double check the root password for the OVA file? root doesn’t seem like the correct one.

Thanks

By: tenox

tenox — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 20:22:32 +0000

In reply to Chris M.. WABI was originally working on SPARC, both 32 and 64bit. I suspect there should be no problem for it to work on x64 kernel. Let me know!

By: Chris M.

Chris M. — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 20:15:51 +0000

In reply to tenox. The doc mentions no v86 or GDT requirement. Wonder if the Linux x86 version is free of this "requirement" too. It might have a shot at working on a x64 kernel!

By: tenox

tenox — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:38:25 +0000

In reply to raijinkai.

I found this doc which explains in more details how WABI works. https://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc08/2_Mon/HC8.S2/HC8.2.1.pdf – looks like they hook a few core windows dlls and translate ISA on the fly. This a very interesting doc historically as SPARC was still 2x performance of Intel at that time and expected to be 3x in future. Didn’t turn this way.

By: raijinkai

raijinkai — Fri, 13 Nov 2020 05:02:34 +0000

Looks like this WABI thing is a sort of DPMI server under *nix and a set of drivers for Windows, like DOSEMU in “WinOS2” mode. Would be nice to see what actually it does to Win31 files, if it patches them in harddisk, or the DPMI server patches them in memory.

By: tenox

tenox — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 17:40:45 +0000

In reply to Stefan Ring. Oh sorry looks like I forgot to include the root password. As for graphics performance the OVA was build on Vbox with SVGA driver patched specifically for it. Unfortunately the performance is quite poor. You should change the video driver to Cirrus Logic for example which will give you much better performance. For 86box it's set to S3. Just run XF86Setup and change it there, in qemu add `-vga cirrus`.

By: Stefan Ring

Stefan Ring — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 11:39:29 +0000

I had to remove the root password from your OVA image because you did not clarify how to log in. I used qemu (on Linux/x11) to run it, but unfortunately the drawing speed is abysmal. The WABI part is a bit faster than the native X11 parts of the user interface, but still quite slow.

But it’s a cool project and may have been the best way to run WinWord 6 back then. What I really don’t like about it is how fonts are rendered. Apparently this does not employ the Windows font renderer, but a built-in font server, and the result does not look nearly as nice as in native Windows.