In the past I did some and some more work on SimCity/Micropolis to bring it to vintage computing. This old DUX SimCity / Micropolis works remarkably well, but because of the TCL/TK and X11 UI, platform availability is quite limited. I have previously also ported Micropolis to Windows NT (RISC) as WinTown.

But thats not enough! I wanted to run SimCity on a vintage Unix without dependency on X11 and TCL/TK. The game graphics (basically a map) is quite simplistic and structured. I was wondering if text mode rendering would work. Quite a while ago I winged up a quick ncurses based map/city viewer and it was quite promising! Fast forward to today… Behold TTY City!

The game is quite usable and playable. In a modern terminal it even supports mouse with panig and simple animations. Earthquakes look pretty cool!

The monochrome terminals are little more difficult, but I’d say is playable.

Here is a picture from an actual DEC VT420! Not bad!

When perfecting the letters and characters, I had this idea… what if modern terminal amenities could be used… like Unicode Emojis perhaps? After all you can have these and these in rendered in a terminal

Behold Unicode Emoji Terminal SimCIty!

Available from: https://github.com/tenox7/ttycity – there are no releases or packages yet, as it’s work in progress but expect it to be available for most modern and vintage operating systems!

PRs welcome!

Have fun with Virtualization!

Previously I have cobbled up this FIrefox+VNC Docker container – “VNCFOX” to address some shortcomings of web browsing on vintage computers.

It worked quite good but I did not particularly like some of the Firefox/Mozilla foundation controversies and policies. Started looking for alternatives, but the situation was quite grim. Ladybird Browser is still in active development. Chrome exterminated Ad Blockers. Brave was overbloated with crapware.

TIL Brave has released “Origin” version which is minimal and void of all the garbage, but has fully functional Ad Block. Normally Origin asks for a one time license purchase, however Linux version is free. Since Docker is Linux… a perfect fit for the use case! VNCBRAVE was born.

https://github.com/tenox7/vncbrave

https://hub.docker.com/r/tenox7/vncbrave

Running:

docker run -d \
    --name vncbrave \
    -p 5900:5900 \
    tenox7/vncbrave:latest

You may also want to create a volume to store settings, cache etc.

docker volume create vncbrave
docker run -d \
    --name vncbrave \
    -v vncbrave:/home/vncbrave/.config/BraveSoftware \
    -p 5900:5900 \
    tenox7/vncbrave:latest

In practice is so nice that I wrote this article on HPUX 10.20 with VUE desktop.

A collection of TightVNC ports for old OS is available here.

If you can, please suport folks at Brave with one time license purchase!

This is one of these “note to myself” and hopefully it will help someone else as the internets and robots are not very helpful.

Problem: on a Mac, Brave Browser will not connect to anything on the LAN. 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x, etc. Maybe with exception of the router / default gateway.

You tried everything, disabling shields, changing https/ssl/tls options, flags, advanced network settings. Nothing helps. The internet and AI tells you this is how Brave is, secure by default nonsense, nothing can be done about it. Well BS. This is how to actually fix it:

System Settings → Privacy & Security → Local Network → “Brave Browser ON”.

Thats it! After you toggle it, Brave will be able to connect to anything on the LAN, even without HTTPS if you allow it.

SABRE is a little known flight / fighter combat simulator set around F-86 and MiG-15 jet fighters and Korean War. Developed by Dan Hammer and originally hosted at sabre.cobite.com. It was available for Linux and Windows. While GPL the Windows source code was not widely available for download, but Dan eventually released it on his website. Someone put it on github. There has been an Alpha AXP version floating around. But no MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium or ARM.

I got to work and with help of robots was able to downgrade VS2008 code to compile on VS4 and got it built for Alpha AXP, MIPS and PowerPC! It’s surprisingly fast and high FPS even on slowest machines! Great game for your NTii!

https://github.com/tenox7/sabreNT

Also, if you don’t have NT RISC hardware to try it, it works on NT MIPS QEMU. There also is a port to MacOS including Apple Silicon.

A couple of years ago 1984 aka Nitton Åttiofyra ported OpenTTD to Alpha AXP Windows NT. This was a monumental work and we’re extremely grateful for this!

However I was not fully satisfied with this, as I could not run it on MIPS or PowerPC. This port required Visual Studio 6.0, which is not available for either of these platforms. Downgrading the code to compile with older visual C was quite a lot of work for which I did not have time.

Fortunately now we have a tireless army of robots to perform code rewrites. With help of LLM I got it to build on Visual C 4.0. Now available for all NT RISC platforms!

Download from here.

Have fun with virtualization!

SDLPoP has been ported to Windows NT for RISC – Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC.

Download from here.

In addition SDL2 is also now available for NT4. Hopefully this will enable more ports of various games and apps!

Previously and previously

If you ever wanted to play SimCity on a NT RISC machine, your dreams finally came true!

The initial port happened some time last year but it was quite buggy and not fully playable. This release fixes all major bugs. Most importantly however it wraps around the original Unix SimCity C code from DUX instead of re-implementing it. Only the Win32 / GDI, dialogs, etc is custom Windows code.

Rlease 0.6 binaries: https://github.com/tenox7/wintown/releases/tag/0.6

Supports Alpha AXP, MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium (IA64) and ARM. Currently targets NT 4.0 and above, but work is being made to make it run on NT 3.1.

Github Repo: https://github.com/tenox7/wintown

Please report bugs and contribute, PRs welcome!

I wanted to recompile the new smg$routines version of aclock for vax/vms and started messing with SIMH VAX emulator. Thought it would be cool to be able to run it as a Docker container. Here it is:

https://hub.docker.com/r/tenox7/openvms73

https://github.com/tenox7/docksimhvaxvms

To run, simply:

docker run -it --rm tenox7/openvms73:latest

If you want to telnet to it add -p 23:23.

If you want to persist state of the OpenVMS image add -v .....:/data.

Login as system / system

Have fun with virtualization!

UPDATE: Now it also includes a built-in VNC server that does XDMCP Query to the DEC Windows X-Server. Just VNC in to the container! VNC Password is "vncvms"

UPDATE: Because it’s fun with virtualization…

Other software installed:

• Mosaic & Mosaic 4
• Netscape 3
• Word Perfect 5
• DEC Flight Simulator
• SoftPC
• DEC Write
• NEdit 5
• ALL-IN-1 (login as office / office and type manager for profile)

Q: How to run ALL-IN-1 ?
A: login as office/office (set host 0 in decterm).

I perviously covered x64 OpenVMS release on VMware. This was insanely cool achievement for the operating system. While it had no practical ramification there was one small annoyance. The OS console was on a serial port. In VMware it meant another VM connected via named pipe.

Now OpenVMS x64 supports (limited?) local console on OPA0. To enable it you have to type opa0 before boot in the bootmgr prompt:

Once the system boots your will be greeted with a login prompt on the local VGA console!

Does it support clear screen, cursor movement, etc? Yes! You can even run a text editor locally!

The default terminal size is 80×24. You can make it bigger by typing

$ set term /width=140 /page=70

This means we can have aclock on x64 OpenVMS local console!

Prior aclock binaries for VMS were compiled using Unix Curses library. To celebrate all this, I have created a new version using the native SMG$ screen management routines. So this is now a truly native VMS app. The binary is here. The source code here.

Have fun with virtualization!

Some 12 years ago I ran a short series of articles about my efforts to run Atari Unix on an actual Atari TT 030 machine. Which by itself is not an easy task, as it requires specific late models of TT (or hardware fixes by Atari), copious amounts of TT RAM and a high resolution mono framebuffer graphics (which requires a very special monochrome monitor or an adapter which I had to build instead). I have later exhibited my ASV setup on VCF West:

Behold! This time I present ASV virtualized under Hatari!

This work is not mine, all credit goes to Plamen! This is absolutely amazing as now more people can experience this legendary OS. The works is still in progress. Will post updates and more screenshots regularly!

Update: X11, screenshot courtesy of Andrew W:

Update: Complete setup available here!