Well this is a bit ambiguous. As Im waking up to check emails I get this notice:
Congratulations! Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows has just been recognized with the following awards by SourceForge:
Community Choice SourceForge Favorite
These honors are awarded only to select projects that have reached significant milestones in terms of downloads and user engagement from the SourceForge community.
This is a big achievement, as your project has qualified for these awards out of over 500,000 open source projects on SourceForge. SourceForge sees nearly 30 million users per month looking for, and developing, open source software. These award badges will now appear on your project page, and the award assets can be found in your project admin section.
So since Im going to share my pain, did you know that Windows 11 updated notepad?
YES.
And it’s BROKEN.
Here I have a simple file, It’s very MS-DOS like and I want to change it to Unix. Yes I could use SED but I have NOTEPAD so let’s change the backslash to a forward slash. Something notepad.exe could do going back to 1985.
And it’s become a bunch of spaces. Great. Check the search/replace and yeah it’s gone and done it’s own thing.
And you may think wow thats broken but come one it’s not *that* bad. And you’d be wrong. So very very wrong.
My next attempt got me this.
I don’t even know what the hell happened. I guess I should be happy the slashes changed, but at what cost? AT WHAT COST?!
My god Microsoft how could you fuck up notepad this badly?
So due to recent economic events I’m having to consolidate all my VM’s back to the office I’m currently renting. I had a fancy 1gig internet connection installed and I’m still under contract for a year. Before the c00f it made sense as I did a lot out of that office and was getting ready to do something fun and big. I had planned on making a cloud service, I’d bought a bunch of Xeon boards, and started the initial build of my cloud to shop around but then the world ended the following weekend. As they say, bad timing.
So as a fan of old junk I still have some NT 4.0 stuff, and it’d been running on VMware for years, no issues everything being great. But I need to do double+ duty at the moment and to make it easier than trying to get GPU passthru working, I’m just going with Hyper-V on the Windows 10 desktops that I have running. May as well make people doubly useful!
In some idea of ‘performance’ I had converted all the virtual disks to ‘flat’ VMDK’s and never thought twice about it as it worked, and all was well.
Naturally to start with I uninstall VMware Tools while running under ESXi and shut down the VMs.
Well after rsync‘ing my disks back, I converted them with qemu-img and got this weird error that my VMDK’s were not VMDK’s. They are infact FLAT disk images. With really screwed up geometry that prevented both qemu and Hyper-V from mounting the raw converted disk images.
And sure enough yeah it’s like a typical DOS disk with the start 63 sectors in. So to mount this under Linux (WSLv2 too!) we need to tell the loop driver the offsets, which is the start and size * 512 or:
# mount -o loop,offset=32256,sizelimit=2097414144 USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk /mnt
And all is good. Yes even a type 7 for HPFS/NTFS it mounted find and the data is there.
Now the ‘fix’ was an old one from back in the day, when moving stuff around and things get goofed you can try to xcopy and permissions always get messed up or cheat, and just use another NT installation and format a floppy disk and copy the following system files to it:
ntldr
ntdetect.com
boot.ini
In my case that’s all I needed to do, I re-ran qemu-img to convert from raw to vpc disk images:
qemu-img convert -f raw -O vpc USENET-AltaVista-flat.vmdk USENET-AltaVista-flat.vhd
And setup Hyper-V to boot my virtual diskette first, and in no time my NT was back up and running.
Naturally be sure to install the legacy network adapter for the VM, and re-configure NT for the DECchip 21140 adapter.
DECchip 21140
Dont’ forget to re-run service pack 6, and the update. Since these disks & VMs were pre-installed I didn’t have to mess with the “CompatibilityForOlderOperatingSystemsEnabled” flag. Although that was quite the fun adventure at the time.
In my case there was some IP addresses to change, but it’s back online with minimal effort which is always fine. Hyper-V doesn’t have any real integration stuff for old Windows so it’s pretty much a set it an forget it thing, or use Terminal Server for remote access.
So yes, many of the hosted things I have are down. I know. Yes it sucks. And yes I think the disk I put this on at the moment kind of sucks too. It’s been super cold here lately and I didn’t want to be exposed out there riding around getting soaked in the high winds so I’ll keep shuffling stuff later. But for now I got to save some hosting fees. And things like the gopher are dead. for the moment.
So it’s the END OF THE WORLD, and sadly that means that all the old media of the 1st gen ‘rich’ web experence is all gone with the long end of Adobe flash. At one point Flash was not only ubiquitious but all sponsored a C/C++ compiler but that stuff sadly won’t work.
So yeah, sad. However, check out ruffle! Naturally it’s a chromium extension, but everything is chrome now so it’ll work fine. It plays many of the early flash type stuff with little to no issues!
Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.
Currently Ruffle only supports games written in ActionScript 1 and 2. This includes all games before 2006 and only some games released later.
Unfortunately, your content was using Actionscript 3, which Ruffle does not yet support.
It’s hard to think it’s been over 20 years since the whole ‘eStudio‘ thing, but it’s cute to keep it going. Although we are at the point where you can run Windows 2000 in javascript so there is that brute force path…
So I wanted to capture some composite PAL signals, and well yeah I have a fancy capture card but it’s only HDMI of all things. NO VGA, EGA/CGA and sure no composite. So I headed down to Sun CHeong Computer Co. Ltd. 246 Apliu Street Shum Shai Po, and picked up one of these.
Although it’s not all that great, I have a webcam, and toggling between the display inputs can trigger a bluescreen.
So yeah it’s not so great.
I can’t really comment on the quality of the capture as it turns out I don’t have any RCA cables, so this is me running a jumper wire to the device directly. This is FAR from ideal but here we go:
So yeah…. It’s probably me, but there you go. at $99 HKD ($13 USD?) it’s not great. Actually its damned near temperamental. But its better than nothing.
For many people across the world, and I suspect the majority the deathmarch rollout of IPv6 has been about as obtainable today as it was in the early 00’s. Absolutely no traction from ISP’s. Where I live in Hong Kong, none of the residential or even commercial connections I have access to have native v6. Instead there was this fantastic option of tunneling IPv6 into IPv4, using a technology called 6to4 which gave everyone with a registered IPv4 address suddenly had 65535 networks to build out their own massive IPv6 deployment.
Simply put 6to4 put the individual onto the map for a NAT’less IPv6 world. 6to4 allowed two IPv6 hosts to talk to each other through the IPv6 Internet backbone, with zero changes on the Internet required. It just worked.
And of course Silicon Valley knows best, and decided that this network democratization must be stopped. Power to the People is the anthesis of the megacorps.
Google DNS Primary: 2001:4860:4860::8888
Google DNS Secondary: 2001:4860:4860::8844
Cloudflare DNS Primary: 2606:4700:4700::1111
Cloudflare DNS Secondary: 2606:4700:4700::1001
Quad9 DNS Primary: 2620:fe::fe
Quad9 DNS Secondary: 2620:fe::fe:9
This is a list of some popular ‘common’ IPv6 DNS servers. Windows 10/11 (probably 8/8.1 but who uses that?!) are not only IPv6 capable but actually IPv6 native, with a preference for the IPv6 DNS servers.
TP-Link Wireless N Router WR840N choices
I have this low end TP-Link Wireless N Router WR840N router, as where I live the maximum speed is 30Mbit/10Mbit DSL. There was no point in buying anything crazy expensive. My ISP has zero IPv6 deployment. The only way I can participate is buying a tunnel, or using 6to4. So I’d been using 6to4 for a while, and things have been great. But the last while it’s been super downhill. Sadly the firmware doesn’t give an option to force IPv6 DNS, but it automatically chooses Google.
C:\Users\neozeed>ping 2001:4860:4860::8888
Pinging 2001:4860:4860::8888 with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 2001:4860:4860::8888:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss),
And sure enough I’m getting massive timeouts, and the web had basically become utterly unusable. Fantastic.
I’d even gone through the steps of creating a local DNS server and having it VPN to the United States thinking that’d help me, as the DNS errors felt like the encroaching Great Firewall of China. However the source of all my problems just turned out to be out of touch Silicon Valley arrogance.
This is where they chose to kill over IPv6 for the masses, because local firewalls work as expected.
Authors' Addresses
Ole Troan
Cisco
Oslo
Norway
EMail: [email protected]
Yeah what a surprise. And of course Google cut off IPv6. These tech giant oligarchs are not your friends.
The good news is that the other ISP’s Cloudflare & Cloud9 still honor 6to4.
Configuring IPv6 DNS on Windows 11
Windows 11 supports DNS over HTTPS, so you just need to enable it. I’m hardwired so under the settings -> network then -> Ethernet for me, maybe Wi-Fi for you?
Then just hit Edit over the DNS server assignment:
Then go ahead and pick a NON GOOGLE DNS service, and select DNS over HTTPS for the ‘ultra secure’ wave of the future.
Of course you won’t be able to connect to anything from Google over IPv6, but that is the price you pay for not living in the precious Silicon Valley tech bubble.
Personally I think it’s a good thing when elitists lock themselves away from the world, and decrease their relevancy to everyone.
Obviously the end game won’t be some magical rollout of IPv6 over Asia, rather it’ll be the end of IPv6. As always the problems stemmed from the backbone, even the 512MB limit of the cisco 7200 was overcome, but NAT got around the limitations of the fixed and exhausted IPv4 network. Too bad they had to kill it, but of course it’s just because random people could just host stuff on their own network, and well network democratization isn’t what cisco et all is all about.
I’m not sure why but I seem to be getting pulled into the ZX spectrum. Maybe it’s because I’ve yet to have seen one, and find it interesting about this massive parallel space I knew nothing of.
I’d found this review of the game, by sinc LAIR, which goes over a bit of history behind this port of the game. Very cool stuff, but for non русский speakers like me, be sure to turn on the auto translated subtitles!
The game is for sale for a mere €3 zxonline.net. One thing I had issues with, is because it’s Russian, normal Pay Pal blocks the transaction of account to account, so you have to use incognito mode, and tell Pay Pal to process it as credit card and it’ll work fine. Keeping in mind since Pay Pal does the CC charge, your # never goes to Russia. And it’s a damned shame, it’s not like ever Russian hacker is all about online crimes, some just want to make cool games.
Game play is challenging as hell! It’s very much a ‘one touch and you are dead’ game. I cheated and uses save states from the EmuZWin emulator.
ABSOLUTELY GET A JOYSTICK!
I don’t know why I was playing with the keyboard, holy crap don’t do that, don’t waste your time!
Would I recommend nothing for the ZX Spectrum 128k? Absolutely. It’s totally worth the €3, you can feel the love in this game!
sinc LAIR is going to have a live stream of it in a few hours, so I can see how to get past the spinning monster thing on level 2. Maybe I’ll post some video of me constantly dying.
