some flashterm updates

well I’m no great php coder.. lol but I’ve managed to slap together an extension for wikimedia that launches the terminal!

superglobalmegacorp.com

I’ve been mirroring a bunch of the pages I wrote over on gunkies, and included a bunch of quick connect profiles etc…

Right now I’ve got the following there…

Access research Unix v1
Access 4.2 BSD
Access 4.3 BSD
Access 4.3 BSD Uwisc
Access 4.3 BSD Quasijarus

I was thinking….

Just as there is HECNet for DECNET, there isn’t anything comperable for NetBIOS… would anyone even be interested in such a thing?

I would be trivial to modify the hecnet bridge program to transport netbios… And I’ve done SIMH, I suppose other emulators (qemu) could be modified to talk to a hecnet style bridge with netbios….

Anyone interested?

flashterm_

I came across this the other day.

And I must say, it’s an excellent way to make older machines more ‘accessible’ to everyone.  I know it’s only going to encourage ‘kids’ to get into VAX’s etc, and of course as many are aware, Vista and beyond have removed the telnet client.. (and hyperterm for that matter!!!).

We are now living in a world devoid of telnet & rs232.

Enter flashterm_

Flashterm, is one of those fancy GCC for flash projects that uses the flash socket API to create a telnet client!  Right now they are focused on ANSI emulation geared towards BBS’s.  But if you’ve got a firewall to redirect ports, or if you are running the ‘policy’ server directly you can let people into your machine, and all they need is a modern browser/flash combination which you can safely say all ‘kids’ machines will have (and yes even my parents, as they LOVE those silly flash games, and dancing cats).

Anyways, the control key is NOT captured, so there is no control+d to kill your session, but a ‘reload’ of the browser, or closing the tab will do it just as well.  Robots doesn’t work correctly, but all & all it’s a super simple way to get back to your machines!

I’ve set one up in the meantime as a test…

http://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/telnet

Although I don’t know how long I’ll keep it online.  But it does create the possibility now of having not only information on various ancient UNIX but to allow others to use them!.. And for most internet users, with no real downloads as that flash thing is EVERYWHERE…

_flashtelnet in action

_flashtelnet in action

OpenBSD / amd64 fun

 

Don't you love days like this?

So here I was installing OpenBSD 4.5 amd64 on some HP DL386’s with.. AMD Opterons, and during the install it crashed out with the error message:

fatal machine check in supervisor mode
trap type 18 code 0 rip……….

And odds are if you may be here for the same thing, as google came up with 0 hits on fatal machine check in supervisor mode.

Nothing.

Nill.

But I’ve got a crash screen to prove it.

Now here is a kicker, I found in the bios if you turn off the “Page directory cache”, for “older Linux kernels”, you can complete your install!!

The downside, is that a dmesg causes a kernel fault.

Sigh.

So annoying.

Quake 1 fun

Well I started playing some more with the Quake source, looking to get a dedicated server at least running on Windows NT 3.1 . The problem is that every time someone connected I got this error:

SV_ReadClientMessage: NET_GetMessage failed

And they were disconnected. Some digging thru the source code revelaed that they were being dropped because they had ‘timed out’. But they did not timeout, the real cause is that the null_sys driver is TOO FAST!!! So this gave me a good excuse to re-use my failed SDL build for NT 3.1 (it has no video) but the timer works great! So with a little fun with the linker & Visual C++ 1.0 I managed to get it running!

I’ve put the source and build script for building the dedicated quake server here

The SDL.lib will probably link with every version of Visual C++, but I’m no promising. Also it wont work video wise on NT 3.1 so don’t get all excited.

Anyways no I havent put one on the internet… I dont know if there are enough people even slightly excited about quake… but it’s FYI….

Qemu test…

*Edit, this is completely out of date, and replaced by the much more improved Apache 1.3 for Windows NT 3.1.  Not that it’s visible to a visitor, but it’s live @ http://winnt31.superglobalmegacorp.com/

Well I figured I’d try Qemu on the PowerPC 64 platform… (AKA Playstation 3), and I loaded up NT 3.1 & Serweb… Not exactly a ‘high performance’ solution but I wanted to see it work..

And you can too!

http://216.75.197.51

I just put some minor things on NT 3.1 on there, although I’ll have to get something… better on there.

In the meantime, enjoy some old cat stuff.

Quake for the MIPS (NT4)

Well I started this off hoping I could get Quake running on Windows NT 3.1 … I’m almost there I have the null version running just fine. However I’m not all that great with DIB programming so I was looking thru SDL and saw that it has a WINDIB driver!

So with a LOT of tweaking through SDL 1.2.13 I got it to compile with Visual C++ 1.0!! However it is lacking one critical call, the CreateDIBSection api call in GDI is not present in NT 3.1. So remembering all the MIPS stuff as of late, and that I have Visual C++ 4.0 which should easily support this call, I first got it running with Visual C++ 2.0 on the i386 (Under XP of all things). So it was just a matter of building the source, and making sure there is no errors, uploading it to the emulator, and rebuilding for the MIPS.

And after 30 minutes, I got my exe, and it ran!

Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT

Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT

I’ve included a link for any other MIPS people out there that want to play quake. I haven’t built the networking as I was having issues with my network earlier and couldn’t get it working…

The exe is available here.

And the source code with all the bits is right here.

In this build I’m not building SDL as a DLL or static library, but rather compiling Quake right into the source. Now that SDL is running on the MIPS, and possibly other Win32 OS’s (I have yet to test Win32s… I suspect the inherent threading in SDL will prevent it, but could the DBI calls be made directly stripping out SDL…?) but who knows, I think anything past 3.51 would work.

Tip on memory for Windows NT 3.1 users

I just found out that if you replace the ntldr & ntdetect.com from Windows NT 3.51 service pack 5, you can access as much memory as the 32bit platform will let you!!! This is of course, 2GB per process, 1GB for Windows NT, the other 1GB is reserved for PCI hardware (remember the upper 384k in MS-DOS??). I have to say it’s GREAT to shatter the 64MB barrier of the earlier PC’s.

Anyways it’s quite simple to do, just download and extract service pack 5, then just copy the ntldr & ntdetect.com in the c:\ directory.

And here is a screen shot for the heck of it, of my Windows NT 3.1 with NT 3.51’s loader running with 3GB of ram! This makes compiling bigger things way easier, and I don’t have to page like crazy with Netscape…

Windows NT 3.1 with 3GB of RAM!

Windows NT 3.1 with 3GB of RAM!

For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t go beyond 3GB, as you’ll never get to use any more then that much, just as it is with Windows 2000,XP,2003,Vista on the i386 32bit platform. That is just the way it is, and yes XP & Vista that tell you about your 4GB of ram are simply reporting installed ram, not available memory.

Minor tip for Virtual PC 2007 users

On vista with some fancy multi core machines I’ve found that some OS’s will just DOG big time, inducing major latency, disk errors, and of course it’ll eventually corrupt the guest OS into not working.

As an instance, NT 3.1 takes about 30 minutes to install (compare to Qemu in about 2 minutes tops) and every time I’d try to convert the disk to NTFS it would either corrupt the disk so it couldn’t boot or it would fail saying the disk was unable to convert

Anyways back when Virtual PC was a connectix product it was meant to run on a SINGLE CPU/CORE.  Back then multiproc machines were servers  And who would be running Windows NT 4.0 server on a Windows NT 4.0 server??

Anyways the ‘fix’ here is to set Virtual PC’s affinity to a single core BEFORE you start any VM’s.  I’ve been setting mine to 0, but i suspect it doesn’t matter as long as no other VM’s have started before hand.  Anyways start up Virtual PC, then launch task manager, and set it’s affinity to a single core, then you’ll be good to go!

So far it would seem that Virtual Server is not hit by this, and I have to wonder if you install Virtual server onto a machine running Virtual PC with the new ‘core’ would it work correctly..?

Anyways this fix is good enough for me.  It’s nice to boot up in a few seconds.