BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed

Posted on December 8, 2023 by neozeed

It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows.

It was a late night browsing yahoo auctions Japan as one does, laughing at the absurd Famicom/Super Famicom games, and I went ahead and looked for BSD CD-ROMS, where I first came across BSD on Windows. And then I’d forgotten about it and went to work on some Darwin projects.

Fast forward 3 weeks, and vic485 had bought it, had it shipped, and uploaded on archive.org. So a big super thanks to vic485 for making this all possible!

So what is it? It’s not quite BSD, its a bunch of 16bit DLL’s that broke the kernel down into subsystems, that each rely on winmem32.dll to give access to flat/32bit address space. BSD on Windows (BOW) being a hybrid 16/32bit app is originally for Windows 3.1, with the later 1.5 update for Windows 95, which includes support for long filenames. I’m not sure if it’ll run on Windows NT or OS/2, as I don’t think

So what do you get?

The key media contents are the install floppy and the CD-ROM. Yes the setup program IS only on the floppy. Hope you get that disk image. I’m unsure what the manual is like, other than of course it is in Japanese.

It’s very much a single user mode BSD like environment complete with vi/gcc/csh/perl just to name a few. I’ve been able to test job control, and building some simple programs like Hack 1.03. I found a few issues however.

I haven’t tested enough with FreeBSD 1/2 but I can verify that from my ‘Ancient Linux on Windows‘ packages, the object format is the same, which is that early era when everything was a.out, although all different the reliance on GNU GAS & LD did make the object format the same. And it was nice to compile a hello world from my Linux cross compiler, link it on BOW, and get a running executable.

The memory is weird, in that you can add hundreds of megabytes to Windows and BOW will always run exhausted. In the bow.ini file you can set the heap for each program, and I found out from some silly trial and error that the maximum heap you can effectively give is 13 megabytes. It seems that winmem32 has a single chunk of memory where all processes run out of, hence the sub 16mb ram zone. Maybe there is a way to allocate it, but I’m unsure, maybe it’s in the book. CC1 was frequently having issues, so setting it’s heap to 13M sure helped, the linker ‘ld’ of course was running out of memory as well so setting it to 8M got me linking.

Filenames, especially on Windows 3.1 are a huge problem. All the LFN TSR’s I tried to load just resulted in a full crash. I had to point the linker to the CD-ROM live filesystem, which maybe would be tedious on a real machine, but under emulation it’s fine.

BOW does NOT like Qemu. At all. It won’t under otvdm either. I suspect NT is a no go but I haven’t tried. Oddly enough it’s not a timing issue, as it does run under VMware. There is an advantage to running it under Windows 95, is that it supports long filenames. 86Box works as well, I even was using the Pentium II Xeon at 400Mhz and that ran fine.

Probably the most annoying and silly thing is that the GCC C compiler doesn’t have C++ style comments turned on. Not being able to use ‘//’ is quite annoying.

Hack ran fine on my 386, which was a pleasant surprise!. It was really cool to have Word+Excel and Hack running at the same time.

Had I known about this, it would have been an incredible bridge product. Not to mention cross compiling to even Win32, or Linux. Not to mention at the time being able to run BSD with no real pain, just install and go

There is generic TCP/IP Winsock support in BOW 1.5 as it simply calls winsock. This also includes the ability to run daemons, however limitations in BOW are quickly exposed, such as missing setuid/setgid sno there is no ability to impersonate lower privileged users. MMAP stuff also doesn’t seem to work, although I was able to build a super simple port of Apache 1.3.1 to BSD on Windows (BOW).

While BOW may appear to be very BSD like, there is a lack of a the mmap Apache needs, along with user mapping & impersonation. I ended up using the EMX – OS/2 system code, since it’s very POSIX like without relying on the Unix like OS actually working.

I’ve been able to serve pages to myself, however BOW crashing out many emulators and hypervisors kind of stops me from putting it on the internet. BOW enthusiasts can download it from archive.org

Today, there is really no point to BOW, it’s an interesting oddity, but back in the day, for a jr network administrator being able to run the Unix version of the snmp tools, even if it’s only client side would have been great. If tftpd could be built to run this would have been beyond amazing, as you not only get BSD, but full Windows apps at the same time, much like MachTen.

It’s a shame I never knew this was a thing, I certainly would have been evangelizing BOW! Who knows what other treasures are in the parallel societies of Japan/Asia/Europe?

**UPDATE

Ive been able to cross compile from Windows to BOW using an old 386BSD 0.1 cross tool chain. You can read about it here: Cross compiling to BSD on Windows (BOW) from Win32

Running Graylog on Windows

Posted on December 2, 2023 by neozeed

For those who don’t know Graylog is a neat little event logging aggregate & search utility. Of course when I say ‘little’ its kinda on the massive size. It’s one of them new age web two-point-oh things, that of course has a few interesting dependencies.

MongoDB
OpenSearch

While I was looking at doing a deployment elsewhere, I went to get the latest versions directly from the vendors instead of relying on apt/yum/whatever. And much to my surprise, both Mongo & OpenSearch both have native Win64 versions! What a great time! Of course these will change, but for now

I’ve stashed a copy over on archive.org if anyone is insane enough to try this. One thing as of Graylog 5.xx is that it does say to stick with a MongoDB v6. So that’s what I did.

MongoDB

One thing to keep in mind is that the MongoDB is used for the configuration of the cluster, as Graylog is usually configured in a HA cluster, but there doesn’t need to be such an emphasis on the MongoDB as the size of the database isn’t so massive.

MongDB has a nice UI Compass, for exploring stuff. Although browsing around you’ll see it really is just system config stuff. So you won’t be needing some 100GB array for this stuff, more so VM’s for clustering it out if you want to go all high availability.

There isn’t much to say about the MongoDB install, just set it to a drive that you want.

Of course set it up as a service, make the user if needed/desired (I did!). I went one step further and compressed the data directory since it’s on NTFS. I don’t think it mattered too much, its been a few days and it’s only 300MB give or take. The graylog dataset is very tiny as mentioned it’s just the configuration, so it wont be that much.

After the install is done, start the service, and you can then launch Compass, and you should be able to connect to your local database. And that’s it!

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is where all the ‘magic’ happens, where the data gets written, along with where your searches through the logs run. If you want to emphasis something, this is it.

OpenSearch didn’t have an install program, rather just a batch file to run and start it. There is a opensearch-service.bat file to install the service.

There are a few config changes I had to make:

cluster.name: graylog
http.port: 9200
plugins.security.disabled: true

After those changes to config\opensearch.yml you can install and run the service. You can then hit the service via http as http://127.0.0.1:9200 and you should get something similar to this.

Graylog

As you may have seen from the downloads there is no Windows version of Graylog available for download. HOWEVER it’s a JAVA app. So other than one weird Unixisim of where to keep the config file, it’s just a java thing.

I did need a Linux install to set the required passwords. Although for this sake I used the admin/admin for maximum security, so you can always just work this diff into the server.conf file.

--- graylog.conf.example        2023-11-15 09:05:28.000000000 +0000
+++ server.conf 2023-11-30 21:53:13.580405300 +0000
@@ -54,10 +54,10 @@
 # Generate one by using for example: pwgen -N 1 -s 96
 # ATTENTION: This value must be the same on all Graylog nodes in the cluster.
 # Changing this value after installation will render all user sessions and encrypted values in the database invalid. (e.g. encrypted access tokens)
-password_secret =
+password_secret = ihEUzuJNJOOIVYaNB29ZHZimi438NxKKzSys5UH6O9CoE7jfsrygCbuzzLzkK6hk0xdDb6e8wyAmTNhD7g9JMNZHXr1q40Ps

 # The default root user is named 'admin'
-#root_username = admin
+root_username = admin

 # You MUST specify a hash password for the root user (which you only need to initially set up the
 # system and in case you lose connectivity to your authentication backend)
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@
 # modify it in this file.
 # Create one by using for example: echo -n yourpassword | shasum -a 256
 # and put the resulting hash value into the following line
-root_password_sha2 =
+root_password_sha2 = 8c6976e5b5410415bde908bd4dee15dfb167a9c873fc4bb8a81f6f2ab448a918

 # The email address of the root user.
 # Default is empty
@@ -102,7 +102,7 @@
 # If the port is omitted, Graylog will use port 9000 by default.
 #
 # Default: 127.0.0.1:9000
-#http_bind_address = 127.0.0.1:9000
+http_bind_address = 192.168.1.5:9000
 #http_bind_address = [2001:db8::1]:9000

 #### HTTP publish URI
@@ -192,6 +192,7 @@
 #
 # Default: http://127.0.0.1:9200
 #elasticsearch_hosts = http://node1:9200,http://user:password@node2:19200
+elasticsearch_hosts = http://127.0.0.1:9200

 # Maximum number of attempts to connect to elasticsearch on boot for the version probe.
 #
@@ -489,7 +490,9 @@
 #auto_restart_inputs = true

 # Enable the message journal.
-message_journal_enabled = true
+# message_journal_enabled = true
+# https://github.com/Graylog2/graylog2-server/issues/12949#issuecomment-1219146839
+message_journal_enabled = false

 # The directory which will be used to store the message journal. The directory must be exclusively used by Graylog and
 # must not contain any other files than the ones created by Graylog itself.

There is a few weird things in this config, The first one being the bind address to the external NIC, the elasticsearch_hosts being set to http as we ended up removing the SSL as Graylog didn’t like the self signed certs. However, since it’s all loopback traffic on the same machine, it does seem a bit silly to be encrypting to yourself. The other weird gotcha was message_journal_enabled, which fails after a few hours on both WSLv1 & a Win64 native. I don’t know why but it’s a common problem on non EXT2FS based filesystems, and sadly the solution everywhere is just turn it off.

Starting Graylog is kind of easy once you work out the CLI from the Linux script, using the JVM from OpenSearch. Take note of the log4j2, the one from that big deal vulnerability in all the fancy web apps.

\opensearch\jdk\bin\java.exe -Dlog4j2.formatMsgNoLookups=true ^
 -Djdk.tls.acknowledgeCloseNotify=true ^
 -Xms1g -Xmx1g -XX:+UseG1GC ^
 -XX:-OmitStackTraceInFastThrow ^
 -jar graylog.jar server -f server.conf ^
 -p graylog.pid

I run this manually. With any luck you’ll see it connect to the databases and go live!

2023-12-02 15:37:37,749 INFO : org.mongodb.driver.cluster - Monitor thread successfully connected to server with description ServerDescription{address=localhost:27017, type=STANDALONE, state=CONNECTED, ok=true, minWireVersion=0, maxWireVersion=17, maxDocumentSize=16777216, logicalSessionTimeoutMinutes=30, roundTripTimeNanos=29209200}
2023-12-02 15:37:45,518 INFO : org.graylog2.storage.providers.ElasticsearchVersionProvider - Elasticsearch cluster is running OpenSearch:2.11.0
2023-12-02 15:37:48,593 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - Graylog server 5.2.1+4337e8c starting up
2023-12-02 15:37:48,594 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - JRE: Eclipse Adoptium 17.0.8 on Windows 10 10.0
2023-12-02 15:37:48,594 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - Deployment: unknown
2023-12-02 15:37:48,595 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - OS: Windows 10
2023-12-02 15:37:48,595 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - Arch: amd64
2023-12-02 15:37:48,694 INFO : org.graylog2.bootstrap.ServerBootstrap - Running 67 migrations...

And from there you ought to be ready to run!?

I don’t want to re-install but it should offer a chance to setup the self signed certificate maintenance, and then you are dumped into the system. One nice thing on Windows is you can create UDP 514 Syslog captures with no silly port reflection. Although you could run them in WSLv1 or VM’s entirely by having all of this as native Win64 makes the memory and performance overhead much lower.

Apache

I use graylog to capture my blog’s Apache stats.

In my apache site config under the logging I added this:

LogFormat "{ \"version\": \"1.1\", \"host\": \"%V\", \"short_message\": \"%r\", \"timestamp\": %{%s}t, \"level\": 6, \"_user_agent\": \"%{User-Agent}i\", \"_source_ip\": \"%a\", \"_duration_usec\": %D, \"_duration_sec\": %T, \"_request_size_byte\": %O, \"_http_status_orig\": %s, \"_http_status\": %>s, \"_http_request_path\": \"%U\", \"_http_request\": \"%U%q\", \"_http_method\": \"%m\", \"_http_referer\": \"%{Referer}i\", \"_from_apache\": \"true\" }" graylog_access

CustomLog "|/usr/bin/nc -u 127.0.0.1 12201" graylog_access

Of course, keeping in mind that I do front with Cloudflare, so the source_ip will probably be different for you. Netcat does the job nicely, and since it’s WSLv1 all the TCP/IP is unified so it can intermix just fine.

Setting up the input as the stock boring GELF-UDP was a snap, and in no time apache is now sending the access log to Graylog in GELF, and all is well. It’s great!

I know that my setup is.. far from normal, and I do have quite a few VM’s but this old machine is more than capable of hosting this site, a few others, along with the overhead of Graylog.

Would I recommend this in production? I have to think that since so much of this is now available on native Win64 that at least 2/3rd of it is capable. I’m not to worried about the potential of Graylog dropping data if the host is interrupted as everything else is here. I can understand if other people have very different thoughts on that. Not everyone wants to run a 90’s datacentre on some old machine tucked under the Christmas Tree, but I guess I’m weird enough to do so.

I suppose the where to go from here, is to get everything else logging to graylog so I can build dashboards, and reports. But that sounds like a lot of work, and at the moment I think this is a good enough place to stop. I should add that it’s been running for nearly 2 days now, so that’s good enough for prime time right? RIGHT?!

Zork for the PDP-11 / RT-11 recreated

Posted on November 21, 2023 by neozeed

I know this is a weird one, but I’ve always wanted to run Infocom games from ever since I found out it was a thing.

The cover of the RT-11 Zork that sold on ebay for $2,348.31

I know you maybe thinking of the FORTRAN port of the full Zork game, which does run on the same system. But this is NOT the FORTRAN reverse engineered game, rather it’s a port of the Z-Machine to the RT-11 / PDP-11.

Also this is NOT a 3rd party reverse engineering effort, it is the official Infocom Z-Machine source.

;       Proprietary documentation of:
;
;               Infocom, Inc.
;               55 Wheeler St.
;               Cambridge, MA 02138
;
;       Copyright (C) 1982, 1983 Infocom, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Yes it’s the real deal!

Ok so what or where to do this?! First you need SIMH or any other good PDP-11 emulator, a copy of RT-11, and of course the source to the interpreter oddly enough named PDP11.ZIP. Just keep in mind that this is NOT a pk-zip file, it’s a text file. It’s Macro-11 assembler source.

First you need a very simple config/type in to the SIMH PDP-11 emulator:

attach rk0 rtv4_rk.dsk
attach ptr pdp11.zip
boot rk

All being well you should boot into RT-11.

Now we copy the source into the machine through the paper tape reader. Just type in ‘COPY PC: ZIP.MAC’

.COPY PC: ZIP.MAC
 Files copied:
PC:            to DK:ZIP.MAC

.

This will create a .mac or macro assembler source file. The extension matters as it will tell the compiler what file it is and what to do. But luckily this is a single file, and assembles quite easily. As a tip to Unix folk, I found that making the assembly source in MS-DOS CR/LF made life easier.

Compiling & linking is very straightforward

.COMPILE ZIP.MAC
ERRORS DETECTED:  0

.LINK ZIP.OBJ

.

Now we need to import a game file. I usually test with Planetfall, so I grabbed the data file, and placed it into the working directory and then attached it to the emulator

Simulation stopped, PC: 152644 (BR 152622)
sim> att ptr planetfa
sim> c


.COPY PC: PLANET.IML
 Files copied:
PC:            to DK:PLANET.IML

.

Notice the filenames are short, very 8.3 for some strange coincidence! Also I named it planet.iml, as that is what the interpreter is expecting. Now we can just run the zip and point it to the game data file!

.RUN ZIP
Line width (default is 80, end with LF for status line):
File name (current default is DK:$GAME$.IML) *dk:planet.iml
PLANETFALL
Infocom interactive fiction - a science fiction story
Copyright (c) 1983 by Infocom, Inc. All rights reserved.
PLANETFALL is a trademark of Infocom, Inc.
Release 37 / Serial number 851003

And there we go! We are now running Planetfall on our simulated PDP-11!

There is quite a few great 80’s systems in the github repository, I have no doubt the rest can be built, but I thought I’d tackle a system that was another bigfoot, a thing of pure legend!

Don’t waste money on a math coprocessor they said;

Posted on November 12, 2023 by neozeed

You don’t need it they said!

Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)

And almost always I’d get this fun error:

SYS0037: The system cannot write to the write-protected c: drive.

Followed by a crash trying to execute code at the top of the memory MAP (ABIOS?)

Then ending the program will just crash OS/2. Very annoying!

My goto test of v86 mode environments is an old game that I enjoyed as a kid, 1988’s BattleTech the Crescent Hawks inception.

It’s a great game, that runs on many 8-bit/16-bit systems of the era, and is surprisingly a very well behaved MS-DOS game. I mean if Windows/386 VGA machines can run it in a window using the CGA version, surely a super early OS/2 2.0 beta (6.123) can run it, right? However I found 6.123 to be incredibly unstable, and sadly not up to the task.

I tried to launch BattleTech over and over and had zero success. I couldn’t figure out why it was struggling on my model 80 board, where it runs just great on 86Box. What is going on?

One thing I had stumbled upon was that if I launched an ancient Infocom game in a DOS box, and then launched BattleTech it had a much higher chance of running. But this did not always equate to it working. How is launching an old COM file from the early 80’s excise the ‘devil’ of some 1988 EXE from running?

I wasn’t sure but I had this weird suspicion that it was that my system was lacking a math coprocessor. When I had the model 60 286 board in the PS/2 case I did spring for an 80287, and one thing I found is that OS/2 1.0 & 1.21 ran great. As a matter of fact I think it ran better than when I used to have a 386sx-16 and then later a 486SX-20. Now it’s been closer to 30 years, so I could have an absolutely false memory of all this, but I wasn’t sure I was onto something. So while shopping around a subscriber offered me a math coprocessor as they seem to be insanely expensive in the UK. I have no idea why the 80287 was so cheap, and no idea how to make any kind of adapter, but pJok was able to score one for super cheap in his homeland and send it to the barren wastelands of Scotland. As I was wrapping up the SSD G5 fun, the coprocessor arrived, and it was time to install it!

Note the purple 80386! It’s what we might call foreshadowing

The PS/2 8580 motherboard is really oddly designed with chip orientation going in every which other direction, and the 80387 socket isn’t keyed by pin, so it’s vital to see the notches on the silkscreen. Otherwise I just used compressed air to blow out the socket, and run the reference disk to add the processor.

The processor was instantly picked up, although I had the crashing issue with the BocaRAM/2 memory card again, which meant I had to remove the RAM card, re-configure with the math coprocessor, then add the RAM card, reconfigure, then run the util to patch the CMOS so it’d boot up. I really dislike this RAM card, but 32bit cards cost far more than this entire endeavor cost so I’m pretty much stuck with it.

Now let’s compare the Landmark scores between the 286/287 and the 386/ITT387

Landmark System Speed Test with the PS/2 model 60 80286/80287

And now the 386:

Landmark System Speed Test with the PS/2 model 80 80386/ITT 80387

The ITT processor is significantly faster than the old 80287, which is pretty amazing. The system bus is running at 16Mhz, although being 32bit vs 16bit yielding a nearly 2x in performance, although the ITT co-processor is so much more efficient.

Booting back into OS/2 6.123, and yeah now it just works! No fussing around, everything is just great.

I’m kind of lost too, as none of this should require the maths coprocessor, but the results speak for themselves. I used to wonder once I got some disk images for this ancient version of OS/2, why didn’t they ship it? Sure that insane fight with Microsoft on refusing something like Windows on OS/2, or even WLO like Windows IN OS/2 from being part of the product killed any hope of running apps, but this version of OS/2 is already caught in the trap that it can run MS-DOS so well, despite DPMI not being a thing right now.

As I’d mentioned it does run just fine in 86Box, so what is the deal? Well that lead me to look back at when it did crash I noticed an odd string 038600b1

So what does this mean? Well looking back at the CPU let’s try to decode some of it

First, it’s an A80386-16, which really isn’t that hard to figure out it’s a 16Mhz rated 80386. Next is the revision level, S40344. Searching around we can find this table:

S40276 - A1 (but probably 12 MHz as S40277 is 12 MHz)
S40334 - A2
S40336 - B0
S40337 is B0 stepping
S40343 - B1
S40344 is B1 stepping
S40362 - B1 (20 MHz)

So this places it at at the tail end of the introductory line of 386 processors. Checking over at pcjs, we find that there were quite a few more revisions to the 386.

And further that the B1 Errata is actually quite substantial. Maybe this is why the 386 had such a poor reputation for Unix ports in the day, and why it was shunned by CSRG?

As mentioned in the infamous 32bit multiply bug, this processor had been tested and was given the ΣΣ mark of approval. There are numerous issues listed with the presence of a math coprocessor, I have to wonder if beyond issues for using the full 32bit datapath, if there were some electrical issues with utilizing the full datapath as well? Much like an improperly terminated SCSI bus, did the simple presence of the ITT 387 help with signaling and improve system stability? Or am I hitting some weird bug in 32bit math that is simulated due to the lack of a coprocessor, that once one is in the system, the operation is performed on hardware, sidestepping the entire issue? I’m neither an EE or any good at reversing code, so I really don’t know.

The date code 751 does mean that this processor was manufactured in the 51st week of 1987.

Looking at how ancient this CPU is, I have opted to order one that was made in 1990, an SX218 or D1 stepping.

Although it hasn’t arrived yet, I have to wonder if it would make a really big difference in 32bit system stability? I have to wonder if there was such a massive delay in OS/2 2.0 because of the early 386 processors having so many defects that it just added an undue burden to the development, along with the fighting between IBM & Microsoft. While it would be interesting to see the difference between any of the Microsoft versions of OS/2 2.0, none have surfaced as of yet. Which is a shame.

Although it is nice to have this ‘mid’ IBM beta of OS/2, it does suffer from the ever so common issue of not being able to run any shipping 32bit executable, so unless you have source/object files to link, you are pretty much out of luck. The Microsoft Beta 2 tools are 16bit, so thankfully they run on pretty much any version of OS/2, and they ought to be able to run under Phar Lap 286 as well.

One thing that did recently surface on eBay, is a Microsoft tee shirt from their OS/2 2.0 group. With a minor bit of sleuthing, the Enterprise is from the 1989 ‘hit’ Star Trek V. Maybe I’m too much of a nerd to have recognized the GIF.

Back some 20+ years ago when I lived in Miami, I did have a loaded out PS/2 model 80 back then, and I ran AIX on it, as I thought it was really cool. But it was also incredibly unstable. I have to wonder now if it was a fault of the processor, or the system? Then again back then I had 6 registered IP’s and of course my PS/2 was on the internet! Although it was also the right height to double as a standing mouse pad.

So I guess this potentially leaves us with some painful lesson that you ought to get the math coprocessor for older systems if you plan on running anything other than DOS/Windows with a DOS extender. While I do have a PS/2 version of Xenix, I haven’t been able to dump them yet as my Power Mac doesn’t like NON FAT disks. One thing is for sure, it made a massive difference in OS/2. I don’t think 16Mhz/6MB of RAM is anywhere near enough to run OS/2 2.00 at any decent speed so I’ll stick with the much lighter 6.123.

Another G5, Another SSD nightmare

Posted on November 10, 2023 by neozeed

So I got this iMac G5 with a defective display super cheap. Turns out that all these displays fail, so if you find one with a good display it’s either been RMA’d or its going to fail. and quickly.

On the back of the unit there is a video out port, so you can hook up an external monitor, and now you have a chunky G5.. minmaxie.

Sadly the OS was a bit messed up, and had a bunch of user files, and I just wanted to do a fresh install. And the hard disk was LOUD and slow. Naturally I thought I’d install a SSD. I had forgotten what amazing luck I had with the Grandpa G5 back in the day, and did I just get lucky with that?

First I got this super cheap 2-Power SSD.

Of course it didn’t work, nothing shows up at all.

I had this fancy Kingston SSD, surely it’ll work?

NOPE, nothing from that either.

So I went ahead and ordered the cheapest Samsung I could find.

And yeah, whatever it is the Apple SATA controller does, that annoys all the other brands, the Samsung pulled through.

I did get an iMac G5 10.3 restore CD set, but sadly it didn’t want to work with this iMac. However I did get a deal on a boxed copy of OS X Tiger.

And yeah I was able to do a clean install, and patch it up. I’m still impressed that Apple keeps stuff up like the update servers & all the combined patches. I guess one thing worth mentioning is that the WiFi wouldn’t join the home LAN at all, but the 10.4.11 patch fixed that right up.

I should try some much newer Samsung SSD’s to see if it’s just this one generation, or are they just that much better? Also what about NVMe/SSD bridge?

32bits of disappointment, upgrading the IBM PS/2 model 60

Posted on October 27, 2023 by neozeed

While I had enjoyed this fully loaded 286, it was getting a bit annoying with all the 32bit limitations I was running into. Frontier Elite was a 32bit program, Obviously no WIndows/386 nor any DooM. It seems that most of the MS-DOS fun I had really was 32bit only. So with this PS/2 model 60, I did the only real thing I could do:

I swapped the motherboard with a PS/2 model 80 board. I had seen this on eBay for a bit of an excessive price, offered 40% of said price, and woke up to having shockingly won the bid. Of course it also means that I need special 32bit RAM to boot the board, because “IBM”.

I picked up 2 of these 1MB modules, they are 3 chip much like the SIMMS I had used on the PS/2 model 60 motherboard. So these are no doubt parity 256k in each row, and 2 cards giving it 2MB of RAM right off the bat. I got lucky to find these 2 cards in country and at a really reasonable rate, when compared to all the others. They did make 4MB & 8MB cards, but naturally they are incredibly expensive.

Luckily for me the board & RAM worked (the board was listed as working), and running setup from the gotek was painless. However for the heck of it, I put in the Boca RAM/2 board to see if it works. It does. It also does the same thing where once the Boca RAM/2 board is configured the setup program only crashes on running it, meaning I need to disconnect the battery backed RAM.

I thought I could avoid setting up the RAM card, but oddly enough until I did so it would not initialize the SCSI card. Oh, sure it showed up in the setup program, saw all my disks and everything, but it would not boot or show up from a boot disk.

So now let’s re-visit the painful world of SCSI disks. I had bought one SCSI controller, and tore some pads off for being impatient, bought another and had it working fine with the approved cable, crashed the PS/2 MCA SCSI market, and then bought the caching faster controller card, to only reveal that it is in fact slower than the stupid card.

But it’s a 32bit card!

And now I have 32bit slots and a 32bit processor! Surely it’s going to ROCK!!!!….?

It’s 0.3% faster.

What the actual FUCK. I mean ok BlueSCSI is great, and we’ve seen it perform faster with the ‘stupid’ card. I can’t imagine paying the $999 MSRP of this faster caching card to find out its slower. Nor the massive upgrade cost of going 32bit to find out its only slightly faster.

Wow.

Just Wow.

LANDMARK 6.00

That said, v86 mode is really cool!

My goto test for v86 is BattleTech the crescent hawk’s inception. I mean if Windows/386 can run this, everything else should be able to. And yeah, 16Mhz is almost enough to run this in a window. It screen tears like crazy and is just slow. But at least it runs!

Warning beeper music!

Although football was capable of doing this full screen in 1987, and Windows/386 could run it in a window in 1987 as well, it wasn’t until 1989/90 that OS/2 could with the much delayed 32bit version. Of course, the divorce happened after Windows 3.0 became such a massive seller, and OS/2 was delayed. again. While I had no issues under 86Box, I had plenty of weird issues on real hardware that seem to magically sort themselves out by running Infocom’s Planetfall first. I don’t know why either.

16Mhz Wing Commander

And luckily there is some difference in running at 16Mhz. Although I haven’t tried EMM386 on/off yet. The 286 had it’s excuse of copying pages in & out of protected mode, and the switch time being so horrific. But the 386 should be instant, only limited by it’s slow bus and I guess 4MB of slow RAM.

But what about DooM?

DooM v1.1 low resolution not quite postage stamp sized

Yes DooM v1.1 runs! I’ll have to try some Fast DooM later to see how much faster it can be! I’d like to think itll be faster but I am not holding out much hope.

Many of the bench stuff I had setup on the 286 to compare to the 386 sadly depend on a math processor. The problem of course is that 80287’s are very cheap for some reason. 80387’s however are not.

And the majority of them look like this. I don’t know how on earth people have hundreds of 80287’s to sell at super cheap prices, but 80387’s all seem to have been trampled, or had their inner core’s turned into slag. I will keep a lookout, although knowing my luck it may be cheaper to find another motherboard with a 386/387 paring.

Speaking of OS/2 and weird crashes, I got this fun one from OS/2 trying to run sysinfo:

While I’d seen plenty of trapcodes in my time, but I know less than nothing about reading them. Maybe it’s burred in there somewhere. The one odd thing was the 038600b1 part… Since the 386 is a 16Mhz part, maybe it’s a crazy old version? While it does have the ΣΣ mark, maybe there is other troublesome 386’s? I really don’t know. Or maybe OS/2 is just really more sensitive to having 2MB 32bit RAM + 4MB 16bit RAM.

Way back in the old times, I had upgraded from a 12Mhz 286 to a 16Mhz 286, and life was great, although I left out of all the 32bit personal computer revolution. After a lot of hard work, I managed to secure a 386sx 16Mhz board with 4MB of RAM. It was awesome although yeah SLOW. Clock for clock, task for task the 386sx was at best the same speed. Sometimes I’d swear the 286 was faster. A few months later though I made the insane trade of some complete in box Infocom games, along with cash and was able to score a 386DX 16Mhz, along with 4MB of 32bit RAM on some massive board. Surely this was going to be great right? I found pretty much the same thing there was no perceivable difference at all. At least back then it was 1992? and the capacitor plague was still decades away, and you could just call the BBS of the motherboard vendor and download the disks if needed (I didn’t need to). It was, frankly, a big letdown after so much ’32/32 is far superior to 32/16′ and here we are again in the future and the SCSI card bears it out, that id basically didn’t matter.

I guess it really comes as no surprise that the 386 does everything the 286 can just better.

So, what have we learned? The PS/2 model 60/80 chassis is the exact same thing. The low clocked 386 chips are super unimpressive, no doubt the magic in the intel family really didn’t hit until the DX2/66 and beyond. Beta versions of software act weird, oh, and that the backup program from MS-DOS 5.00 can actually backup a dual booted OS/2 install & restore it just fine. That was a bigger surprise for me, as the great thing about the BlueSCSI i that I can have so many drives, so I made a backup of the C: OS drive and trashed it quite a bit. Not expecting anything, but yes, a restore actually worked.

DVD-RAM? More like DVD-WRONG

Posted on October 26, 2023 by neozeed

I’m not sure why I never heard of this format back in the day when it was relevant. On the surface it sure sounds great, 4.7GB capacity, widespread vendor support, and there is no ‘sessions’ to close, or the entire disc needing to be erased to re-use the disc.

Enter DVD-RAM, it’s not a MO (magnetic optical drive), it works by cooking the disc to flip the bits. But still it’s a read/write optical disc, that uses lasers, what isn’t to love?

Well sadly the answer is pretty much eveything.

I think I found the format from the video “DVD-RAM: The Disc that Behaved like a Flash Drive” from Technology Connections.

Curiosity got the best of me, I paused the video, and bought 2 used discs for a whopping 3.99, and a 4.99 drive. Sure, it’s all cheap but how bad could it be? The discs were used in some DVD video production, and formatted UDF. I used XP to format them as FAT32. First thing is format from the CLI so you can clearly see what is going on.

I did this after the fact, and yeah bad sectors. This is the hint of why everything I tried on this blasted disc at best ‘kinda worked’ but for the most part didn’t. It’s not a little damaged, its totally worthless.

Battle Tech is so small it’ll fit with a copy of Windows/386 on a 1.44mb floppy disc, and yet the DVD-RAM struggled with this level of data.

I was going to do some kind of SQL bench thing of how terrible it was, but I couldn’t even create a database.

Everything I tried was non-stop failure.

I then tried the other disc for the hell of it.

Format complete.
    4,471,152 KB total disk space.
    4,471,136 KB are available.

       16,384 bytes in each allocation unit.
      279,446 allocation units available on disk.

           32 bits in each FAT entry.

Volume Serial Number is 941A-7AA7

And yeah, it worked. All my “simple” tests just worked, and they completed in a fraction of the time the other disc struggled and failed with. Using MS-DOS level file sized stuff it seemed to work great with, however remembering the optical drive they do love to spin up and down, and if the disc is spun down, reading files can take SECONDS… So that kind of sucked.

Formatting the disc takes 30-45 minutes. It is not fast by any stretch of the imagination. During the format you can hear the drive constantly spinning up and down. Clearly you can see why hard disks rock, as they can keep the media spinning at the same rate. I’m not sure if it’s seeking around a lot or what is going on. I have to wonder if it was possible for any drives to maintain a constant speed? Would it have mattered?

I’ve seen outrageous claims on how long the media should last, far too long for it to be viable. When I hear about all the early SEGA CD drives all dying, turns out those lasers don’t last for centuries, there is no way this media is going to be viable at all.

I have to wonder if there really is any validity to this medium. I mean I have 2 discs that were recorded on in 2008, and in 15 years I have a 50% failure rate. Not good.

It’d be really terrible to recommend this stuff for pretty much of anything. The spinup/spindown basically kill any hope of using it for random access.

It’s no surprise that the ever increasing capacity of flash drives, and the economies of scale driving prices of flash down killed any hope for optical media.

The real question is will any 8/16MB flash sticks work in 2024 and beyond?

It’s all so depressing. If you have anything even remotely important on any optical disks, get them over to NVME or hell anything else.

Building OS/2 apps from QuickC for Windows

Posted on October 23, 2023 by neozeed

Back in the olden days of when Microsoft had pivoted out of OS/2 in a hurry, I’ve always felt that the common ‘OMF’ objects ought to link for OS/2. But for some reason I never tried. But for some reason I thought I’d try it today.

I first installed Microsoft C 6.0, and set it up for a native OS/2 to OS/2 1.2 setup. This way I get a pure OS/2 include/library directory set. In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t just use 2 include / library directory sets to far easier target stuff, without dealing with changing the default names, and making linking an all around living hell.

So the first thing to do is to tell QuickC for Windows to default to the OS/2 include directory (turns out it wont link anyways). Compiling is nothing special. When setting up the project you’ll need a DEF file, I use this simple one:

NAME        QCO2 WINDOWAPI
PROTMODE
CODE        PRELOAD

Nothing to it!

I tried to fight the Windows linker, but it figures out what you are doing and won’t do it. But can you manually link? Well QuickC for Windows does include a DOS linker, and it’s oddly enough newer than the one for Microsoft C 6.0!

C:\proj\o2>msdos \WIN16APP\QCWIN\bin\link hi.obj

Microsoft (R) Segmented-Executable Linker  Version 5.15
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1991.  All rights reserved.

Run File [hi.exe]:
List File [NUL.MAP]:
Libraries [.LIB]: doscalls SLIBCE
Definitions File [NUL.DEF]: qco2.def

C:\proj\o2>msdos hi.exe
This program cannot be run in DOS mode.

Manually invoking the linker wasn’t all too hard, just answer the 30 questions. I did set the LIB environment variable so it picked up the libraries just fine. And yes, it created my OS/2 binary no problem!

And as you saw from above, yes it does run!

I do suppose the graphical editors would have been nice some 30 years ago, but in today’s era, sadly it doesn’t matter. QuickC for Windows won’t run under WLO, so this prevents it being a backdoor GUI/Protected mode compiler for OS/2. It’s a shame too as at least running under Windows 3.0, QuickC for Windows is WAY faster than using Microsoft C 6.00 in either read mode, protected mode with smartdrive.. I’m not sure what the deal is. Even with the advanced caching SCSI controller.

Not sure if anyone cares, but I think it’s cool.

Since there had been some confusion on how to install MacOS 9 on OS X

Posted on October 23, 2023 by neozeed

I thought with this iMac G5, the least I could do is make a quick video of how to do it.

Low effort video

I’ve done the hard work of converting the eMac 9.2 install CD to read-writeable, updating the system folder, then converting that back to a read-only image so the MacOS install can happen.

I’ve uploaded the file over on archive.org: ro-macos9updated.dmg.

The steps are somewhat simple basically download & mount the disk image.

Open up the prefrences, go into classic and select the

Then hit start to boot the image.

Then go and run the installer

Uncheck everything from the options

Customize the install and ONLY select Mac OS 9.2.2 & Internet Access.

The install took less than a minute on my G5

Go back to preferences, and stop Classic

Unmount the disk image, and open classic again & select the System Folder on the Hard Disk.

Start up Classic from the hard disk, and OS X will want to update the System folder

MacOS will want to run the setup wizard but since the ‘Bluebox’ isn’t a real Mac, I just cancel it

And then you are good to go!

Knights of the Old Republic PowerPC

Posted on October 22, 2023 by neozeed

I just scored a G5 iMac for £20 with a damaged panel. It doesn’t bother me at all as I’m not going to use it for anything serious, I’m just wanting something mainstream.

I did want one thing which was KOTOR.

So I looked up eBay, and yeah turns out it’s a collectors thing?

£147!! No way!

I saw this for far less, the Star Wars Mac Pack!

vBut at the flip side had this ominous warning….

I thought I’d just try the disc anyway.. nothing to lose?

and yeah, not only is KOTOR is PPC, but yes it does run on OS X 10.4!

granted it’s on steam, gog and of course available for pretty much anything modern. And sure yeah, it was originally PC/Xbox, but for some odd reason I’m feeling nostalgic for that last gen PPC.

Virtually Fun

Fun with Virtualization

Author Archives: neozeed