Author Archives: tenox

modern.ie Virtual Machines

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

Ran across this curiosity today: Microsoft Edge Dev Center provides a bunch of ready made virtual machines with different versions of IE web browser. But they can be used for different purposes if you need to quickly spin up a specific version of Windows quickly.

http://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/windows/

This is whats available:

modeirnie1Different hypervisor type images on Windows, Mac and Linux are available:

modeirnie3Very handy stuff. This is beloved Windows XP after it booted first time:
modeirnie2Very handy and not only for browser testing.

There also is a Remote IE which opens IE window straight from Azure. I wonder what are implications of it for censorship in some countries as well as piracy etc.

VenturComm Venix/86 on MESS/MAME

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(This is a guest post by Tenox)

This is follow up to a previously posted challenge to virtualize VenturComm Venix/86 so that it can be run on a modern machine under an emulator. The competition was a huge success and the rest of this post is an entry by the winner – Jim Carpenter. Enjoy!

Install MAME/MESS 0.164 and get the “at386” machine running. Standard issue ROMs.

Create a new hard drive image with “chdman createhd -chs 615,4,17 -c none -o hd.chd“. This is only 20MB. You can certainly use larger drives but make them a standard type, something that is a defined drive type in the BIOS. I’d stay away from user defined types.

Start the emulator, configure the first floppy drive to be DD and the second to be HD. Restart so it takes effect. Attach XFER.IMG to the first floppy and your hard drive image to the hard drive. Restart again. (Venix uses the BIOS for *everything*. So if you attach without rebooting, chances are the BIOS missed your hard drive which means Venix won’t see it either.)

Go into the BIOS and configured the floppy and hard disk types. The command above creates a type 2 drive:venix1Save and exit and let it reboot.

We wish to prepare the winchester hard disk:
venix2 Continue reading →

Venix/86 Challenge

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

I’m extremely busy with some matters and unable to spend much time with computer archaeology. I would like for some much overdue projects to progress independently of myself, so hopefully the community can participate and help out.

Let’s start with Venix/86 which has been awaiting my attention for a while. I have been recently contacted by Alex aka uav1606 who wanted to get it to work. I have since decided to open this up to anyone else interested.

To my knowledge actual install media did not surface so far. However a while ago I came in to possession of a boot disk and a backup of a live system, in form of nine floppy disks which look like a tar archive. In theory it should be possible to boot the xfer disk, format a hard disk and restore the backup system to get a working system.

VenturCom Venix/x86

VenturCom Venix/x86 running on a real AT/286

I’m offering $100 prize via PayPal to the first person who will run Venix/86 on an emulator of any kind (PCE, PicoXT, QEMU, Bochs, Vbox, MESS/MAME, etc NOTE: it doesn’t have to be strictly XT emulator as long as the system works), compiles Aclock and sends me a binary + complete working virtual machine. I will also of course publish it on this blog featuring all your hard work! It will be awesome to see your progress and collaboration in the comments 😉

Everything I have is here: http://www.tenox.net/get/venix21.zip

Update #1: From Frode van der Meeren who is the owner of the floppy disks: “The disk images are not corrupted, the disks only use a different track arrangement. The disks image format arranges the tracks by cylinders, storing head 0 and then head 1, while the actual disks arrange tracks by all cylinders on head 0 then all cylinders on head 1. If you want to mount the images into something else than Venix/86 then you need to rearrange the tracks in the image file.”

Update #2: the competition has been won by Jim Carpenter! Congratulations! Jim has just received the $100 prize. I have received detailed install instructions and will post it in a follow up post 🙂

Update #3: The winning entry, how to install Venix/86 on MESS/MAME

Venix running on MESS/MAME

Venix/x86 running on MESS/MAME by Jim Carpenter

It was a real pleasure to see great community response, participation and most importantly to see Venix/x86 run again!

Stay tuned for another one 😉

I don’t use Windows XP very often, but when I do…

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

I recently needed to install Windows XP. Because I don’t do that very often nowadays I decided to document the “pro way” of doing it.

First you should consider getting a volume license copy of Windows XP CD because it doesn’t require activation over the internet. The process below will work with any version, but it will require activation.

Then you need to download and install nLite which lets you add SATA/AHCI, network, display, audio, drivers and customize a fully unattended installation, including the product keys, and some tweaks like autologin, themes or show extensions/hidden files in explorer. Create your own bootable XP .iso file. You should probably test it in VMware/Vbox/Qemu first to see that all the settings are to your liking and the setup prompt screens are gone.

Second you need WSUS Offline Update, version 9.2.1 (which is the LAST version supporting Windows XP). It will let you roll out your own Service Pack 4 for Windows XP, including all the updates and goodies like .NET framework, Silverlight and DirectX updates. Create your own SP4 .iso file.

Booting Windows XP from a regular USB pen drive is notoriously difficult, so this is where ISOSTICK comes handy. Put both of the iso files on to the stick, insert to the PC and watch the magic happen.

It’s quite easy to integrate the SP4 in to the boot cd itself, but then it outgrows size of a physical CD, which is not a big deal with ISOSTICK, but I don’t mind installing the updates in a second step.

Finally if you need to install apps automatically you can consider something like Ninite.

Enjoy!

Atari System V UNIX Saga – Part III – SCSI Disk Replacement

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(note this is a guest post by Tenox)

In previous posts from ASV series I have explained why I got hooked on Atari System V UNIX and what I had to do to get a decent resolution out of Atari TT. Having built the VGA monitor adapter, the next challenge was to replace the internal SCSI hard disk with a flash storage of some sort. I really don’t like spinning hard disks and especial the old ones.

I have mentioned that there are two surviving ASV disk images. The better one was made out of a rather large old, loud and obnoxious Maxtor. I’m definitely not having this monstrosity inside of my beloved Atari!

Maxtor LXT340SY

Maxtor LXT340SY

 

So how can you replace an old SCSI hard disk with a modern flash device? There actually are several different ways.

If you have the money you can go industrial route, which is a SCSI disk replacement for various machinery and embedded systems produced by ReactiveData. You can buy one of these for a little over $1000 USD. The good part is that they substitute a specific real hard disk model and are exceptionally good in quality of emulation. However, spending a lot of money on my TT and TenoxVGA already, this really wasn’t an option without getting a divorce.

Another approach is to use SCSI to IDE bridge combined with IDE to CF adapter or possibly SCSI to SATA bridge and SATA SSD disk. These are widely used by Atari / Amiga / Mac 68k community. The most popular bridge come from a company called Acard. I actually had one of these at hand, AEC-7220U which I used for TOS/GEM work.

acard front

acard front

 

Did it work? As you can guess – of course it didn’t! The initial boot loader errors out unable to read disk capacity.

Atari SYS V failed to boot

Atari SYS V failed to boot

 

Atari ST/TT, somewhat similarly to 68k Macs require a hard disk driver, present on the hard disk itself. There are several 3rd party implementations, some of them, like HDDRIVER maintained up to present date. Unfortunately these drivers are TOS specific and obviously don’t work with Atari Unix. The system comes with it’s own hard disk driver which seems to be obsolete and with limited hardware support.

The next step was to research and try out some other SCSI to IDE bridges in hope one would just work. And surprisingly there are several to choose from.

The second on the line was I-O Data R-IDSC21-E/R. No longer produced and supported, however still fairly popular. Usually regarded as the ultimate bridge with most fancy options bells and whistles. It has most jumpers and modes of all tested devices. For instance ATA PIO and DMA modes.  Unfortunately this didn’t help at all and same error was observed.

idsc21e

idsc21e

 

Another device tried was Yamaha v769970. This bridge was conceived to allow use IDE CDROM and Hard Disks with Yamaha samplers. No longer produced and obsolete, it’s somewhat most easy to set up, robust and stable. It’s actually my favorite bridge for day to day use, except for ASV where it just doesn’t work.

v769970

v769970

 

More recent kid on the block is an integrated SCSI2IDE + IDE2CF in one device called Aztec Monster. Recently designed and currently produced in Japan (you can buy one on eBay) is a fairly decent choice, which I recommend to every one. I had a lot of luck with these, except for ASV of course…

CF_AM_r1_1

CF_AM_r1_1

 

I also looked in to SCSI to SATA bridges, like this one, but they have additional issues, like need to convert LVD to SE on one end and SATA to IDE to CF on the other. Little bit too complex for what I wanted.

Being out of luck I started researching if it would be possible to build an open source version, which can be easily diagnosed and fixed. Doing so I found out that there in fact is one open source SCSI adapter called SCSI2SD.

SCSI2SD_V3.0_plain

SCSI2SD_V3.0_plain

 

I was bit skeptical in the beginning but then I though that being open source it can be debugged and fixed if it needs to be. So I immediately ordered one.

Once it arrived, I plugged it in, applied the image to the card and BAM! It worked! The system booted fully and worked flawlessly!

Atari Unix System V – Boot Sequence from Antoni Sawicki on Vimeo.

 

Over time SCSI2SD proven stable and flawless. One feature that Mac users will appreciate:

--apple Set the vendor, product ID and revision fields to simulate an
        apple-suppled disk. Provides support for the Apple Drive Setup
        utility.

In the next article I will write about my first steps in the system post boot and then bringing it to a more or less usable state. Stay tuned!

Fun with Windows Timeout command…

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(this is a guest post by Tenox)

I’m pretty good at finding bugs in Windows and I get a new one every couple of weeks or so. Today I found out this unbelievable gem:

So there is this (cmd.exe) command called timeout. It works roughly similar to sleep(1) under Unix. It is supposed to stop execution of a batch script for a given period of time. Example:

In reality just wishful thinking, because apparently this is not always the case. Sometimes it does and sometimes… it doesn’t.

Wait… what?

Sounds unbelievable but it appears the timeout command uses Real Time Clock for it’s sleep function. If you change the clock while timeout is running…

t2LOL 🙂

I found this because my batch scripts were stuck for rather long time when a machine would have time changed by NTP. If the change was negative the timeout command would wait x thousand seconds. When the change was positive the integer rolled and timeout stopped immediately causing avalanche of problems.

So beware to timeout eating your batch scripts…