The new dynamic recompiler appears to be much more faster, although if you want maximum performance, make sure to set your video card to the fastest possible performance.
I was doing my typical DooM thing, and the performance was abysmal. But I did have an 8bit VGA card selected, so what would I really expect? Interestingly enough in ‘low resolution’ mode it performed quite well, but setting it to the artificial ‘fastest PCI/VLB’ speed it was performing just great.
New machines added – Zenith Data SupersPort, Bull Micral 45, Tulip AT Compact, Amstrad PPC512/640, Packard Bell PB410A, ASUS P/I-P55TVP4, ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, Epox P55-VA, FIC VA-503+
New graphics cards added – Image Manager 1024, Sigma Designs Color 400, Trigem Korean VGA
Added emulation of AMD K6 family and IDT Winchip 2
New CPU recompiler. This provides several optimisations, and the new design allows for greater portability and more scope for optimisation in the future
Experimental ARM and ARM64 host support
Read-only cassette emulation for IBM PC and PCjr
Numerous bug fixes
Thanks to dns2kv2, Greatpsycho, Greg V, John Elliott, Koutakun, leilei, Martin_Riarte, rene, Tale and Tux for contributions towards this release.
This was a lot harder than it should have been. And not because of gcc or surprisingly ancient binutils.
I didn’t have much to go on, as ancient threads like this, or this end up unanswered or without any good conclusion. I guess it’s not surprising that all the attention is to MiNT & MINIX rather than the native platform. But I was not deterred.
The reason why this was so freaking hard was how so much of key parts of gcc for the ST have been purged and what remains being scattered to the winds. Amazingly the hardest thing to source is the include files. There is a GCC 1.30 file on all the usual GNU mirrors but to save a few kb it has no headers, instead it wants you to reuse the ones from the 1.25 binary distribution. Which is gone. There survives a pl95 binary and source package, but again no includes. Instead I got lucky with all three for pl98. Which has a lot of GCC2 hooks so I cheated on getting the 1.30 hello world by using the 2.5.8 pre-processor.
It’s kind of annoying how all these seemingly tiny files get purged to save a few kb. Just as I can’t for the life of me find the old original GNU libc.
Speaking of files, ZOO has to be the worst compressor ever. Not only is it just overall worse than ZIP, but there are 2 incompatible compression methods, like the introduction of LZD, which any of the good versions of UNZOO can’t deal with. And sure there is zoo210.tar.Z but despite being able to build it on multiple platforms it never does anything useful. All these ancient fileformats sure don’t help anything. And sure there is a MS-DOS version that the MS-DOS Player can run, but get ready for 8.3 filename renaming.
The one good thing that came out of this experience is that since I am building form i386 to 68000 I found that this setup uses the G++ linker which has endian swapping. So maybe I can complete the chain for Mint and MachTen.
I even got the 1987 Infocom interpreter running. Although I don’t know what the deal is, it seems the larger the GCC based program is the higher chance it’ll just crash on exit or force the next program to crash. Building anything native under emulation was an impossibility.
In the same effort, I’ve had the same luck with sozobon. It took way too long to find a working dlibs. I don’t know why people couldn’t either package them together or at least in the same directory. It took far longer just to find the libs… But it was still fun to get that one running as well.
It’s a far more manual process to compile as I have to invoke each stage manually, but at least I’m finally able to get things going.
One of the bigger issues is that I would always find libraries in this olb file format, that the linker from Sozobon wouldn’t recognize. And almost every attempt of trying to build the G++ linker would also fail on. It wasn’t until I was able to get the pl98 include files that I could finally get a linker to actually recognize this … seemingly different for no apparent reason format to actually link. After then I managed to finally find a build of this dlibs that would actually link with Sozobon, which naturally didn’t use olb at all.
So yeah that was an adventure.
I haven’t cleaned it up at all, and really wouldn’t expect anyone else to care, but all my mashed together work (source & binaries!) is here: MinGW-AtariTOS.7z
UPDATE
I started browsing more cd.textfiles.com and amazingly found a ‘home made CD-ROM set’ of Atari software, and buried in the gigabytes of stuff was 4 of the 5 disks of the original GCC-1.23! Namely the source & includes to the first GCC library. I didn’t think this article was going to get any traction, let alone downloads. So many people downloaded the above download.
The default download set is for GCC-1.30, with the headers & lib, along with source. It’s crazy small which just goes for how this old stuff is, and how impact full for losing a few kb.
Also the shell that you use apparently makes a BIG difference. The shell that I was using EmuCON doesn’t show any output from the GCC 1.x libs. However other shells most certainly do. I’ll have to do another update regarding shells/emulation.
While looking around for simple compilers to see how easy it is to modify their assembly output syntax, I ran across this tiny file, cc68iii3.zip which bills itself as:
This compiler consists of various modules that build up a front end — these modules are common to all versions of this compiler — consisting of parser, analyzer and optimizer, of modules that are specific for the target processor, namely *68k.c (for the 68000) and *386.c (for the i386), and of assembly language output modules that are further dependent on the (syntax of the) target assembler.
Well isn’t that interesting! So instead of doing something 68000 based, I setup the i386-gas compiler, and tried it with MinGW. And amazingly a hello world program worked!
Well that was unexpected, but great! So I thought I’d modify the simple Infocom interpreter to build with this. I came up with this as a block for gnumake to read in a Makefile
The key substitute is $* which is the 'root' of the file being passed in. Although it's lame doing it this way but it works in a nice automatic enough fashion.
The compiler must be K&R only as it doesn't like standard includes, so I built file.c/io.c/term.c using GCC but all the rest were able to be built just fine. And even better it works!
Infocom '87
Although I'd never recommend using something like this in a place that matters. If anything GCC 1.x is probably a better choice, but it's still kind of neat.
Linux supports ELF binaries for ~25 years now. a.out coredumping has bitrotten quite significantly and would need some fixing to get it into shape again but considering how even the toolchains cannot create a.out executables in its default configuration, let’s deprecate a.out support and remove it a couple of releases later, instead.
I can’t say I’m all that surprised, maintaining backwards compatibility has not really been a Linux thing, as most people are incapable of doing any troubleshooting in the myriad of hundreds to thousands of independent packages, and instead find it far easier to switch to a different distro entirely.
At the same time, the vast majority of Linux packages are available in source code, so re-building things as ELF most likely has happened in the last 25 years.
During the great ELF migration, it was a gigantic PITA having basically 2 copies of all the libraries as things were converted over, and a.out stuff quickly evaporated. For me, the beauty of a.out was for later kernels to be able to mount and run older stuff. But as we are in the era of both ‘cheap’ user mode kernels along with virtualization will the old executable format truly be missed?
Linux has survived the removal of native support for the 80386, and even the detection logic for the NexGen processors (yes they were real, and yes they did ship), so no doubt this further amputation won’t matter to the vast majority.
I have to wonder how long until the i386 32bit target is removed? Distros like Debian have long since removed support for 80486/80586 classed processors to bring the minimum up to requiring SSE-2 based instructions, and I can’t imagine anyone who is running a 32bit OS for their main OS in this day and era.
And Alan Cox points out that the a.out binary loader _could_ be done in user space if somebody wants to, but we might keep just the loader in the kernel if somebody really wants it, since the loader isn’t that big and has no really odd special cases like the core dumping does.
So retrohun is doing their blog thing on github of all things, and the latest entry, is of course Xenix tales. As mentioned in comments on this blog & other places they found another driver for Xenix TCP/IP!
Going back years ago, the tiny NIC driver support for the elderly Microsoft/SCO Xenix 386 v2 included 3COMA/B/C and SLIP. However it’s been recently unearthed that D-Link had drivers for their DE-100 & DE-200 models, and as it happens the DE-200 is a NE-2000 compatible card!
That means that Qemu can install/run Xenix, and it can get onto the internet* (there is a catch, there is always a catch).
You can download the driver either from github or my password protected mirror. Simply untar the floppy under Xenix (tar -xvf /dev/fd0) and do the install via ‘mkdev dlnk’
Setting up the driver is… tedious. Much like the system itself. I found Qemu 0.90 works great, and is crazy fast (in part to GCC 3) even though Qemu 0.9’s floppy emulation isn’t good enough to install or read disks. With all the updates to Qemu 3.1 use that, it’ll read the disks, and allow for networking.
To give some idea of speed I ran the age old Dhrystone test, compiled by GCC 1.37.1 and scored the following:
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 5000000 passes = 8 This machine benchmarks at 625000 dhrystones/second
When compared to the SGI Indy’s 133Mhz R4600SC score of 194,000 @ 50000 loops that makes my Xeon W3565 322 times faster, under Qemu 0.90! And that’s under Windows!
Setting up the commandline/launching is pretty much this:
qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -net nic,model=ne2k_isa -net user -redir tcp:42323::23 -hda ..\xenix.vmdk added SLIRP adding a [GenuineIntelC] family 5 model 4 stepping 3 CPU added 16 megabytes of RAM trying to load video rom pc-bios/vgabios-cirrus.bin added parallel port 0x378 7 added NE2000(isa) 0x320 10 pci_piix3_ide_init PIIX3 IDE ide_init2 [0] s->cylinders 203 s->heads 16 s->sectors 63 ide_init2 [1] s->cylinders 0 s->heads 0 s->sectors 0 ide_init2 [0] s->cylinders 2 s->heads 16 s->sectors 63 ide_init2 [1] s->cylinders 0 s->heads 0 s->sectors 0 added PS/2 keyboard added PS/2 mouse added Floppy Controller 0x3f0 irq 6 dma 2 Bus 0, device 0, function 0: Host bridge: PCI device 8086:1237 Bus 0, device 1, function 0: ISA bridge: PCI device 8086:7000 Bus 0, device 1, function 1: IDE controller: PCI device 8086:7010 BAR4: I/O at 0xffffffff [0x000e]. Bus 0, device 1, function 3: Class 0680: PCI device 8086:7113 IRQ 0. Bus 0, device 2, function 0: VGA controller: PCI device 1013:00b8 BAR0: 32 bit memory at 0xffffffff [0x01fffffe]. BAR1: 32 bit memory at 0xffffffff [0x00000ffe].
In the file /etc/tcp the default installation does a terrible job of setting up the NIC. I changed the ifconfig line to this:
Which at least brings it up a bit better. I added in a gratuitous ping also in the startup script to build the arp for the gateway.
ping 10.0.2.2 32 1
Which brings us to the next point, the routing command is broken after loading the D-Link driver. I tried all the available TCP/IP drivers for Xenix (1.1.3.f 1.2.0e).
# route add default 10.0.2.2 1 add net default: gateway 10.0.2.2 flags 0x3: No such device or address
So no dice there. And yes, for SLIP/no interfaces the route command works as expected, just not with the DLINK driver.
However local connections from the host machine do work, so yes, you can telnet into the VM!
Welcome to 1990!
This makes using Xenix far more usable say for managing files, control/compiling etc.
For you die hard IRC fans, all is not lost, you can simply run a local proxy (See: Teaching an old IRC dog some new tricks) on your host machine, and point the irc client to 10.0.2.2
IRCII on Xenix/Qemu
So there you go, all 20 Xenix fans out there! Not only a way to get back online, but to do it in SPEED!
Thanks to Mark for pointing out that there has been tremendous progress with version 3.1 of Qemu, and it’s TCG user speed is up to the 0.90 levels of speed (at least with dhrystone/Xenix), and it just takes a little (lot) of massaging to get up and running with Xenix with the right flags:
While I’m writing this, I’m listening to Neuromancer via WinAmp & the ancient Speex plugin I had updated about 8 years ago.
x86 node running on Windows RT
I took my Surface, and downgraded it to the North American 8.0 version without updates, added my MS ID, and from there ran the jailbreak and win86emu (sometimes called x86node) and from there I was able to run some simple Win32 exe’s.
Even though I had done a simple cut down QuakeWorld port with the GDI only display, using win86emu it’ll run the 80386 build as well. while I haven’t thrown much at it, I’m just amazed that so far things are working.
When you think that between the jail-break to unlock the ability to run programs combined with a CPU translator, and Win32 to Win32 thunk / translation program, why on earth did this thing ship without it? It’s amazing that between trying to launch a platform with no inertial for applications after Android & Apple were selling millions of hardware units, and billions of software units, and cutting the past applications. It’s just crazy.
And then Microsoft did their normal thing when something goes wrong, which is basically end it, and destroy all evidence it existed. There is no Windows 10 upgrade for the Surface, even though Windows 10 IOT has been hacked to run from a USB stick on the Surface, but it’s insanely slow.
I was kindly sent these a while ago from an avid reader, and I tried to get them to boot up into anything useful and didn’t get anywhere. I’m sure emulators of today are probably up to task, be it Bochs/PCem/86Box or even Qemu.
I stumbled onto these three disks, seemingly out of place in history. Windows/386 version 2.0 is a strange one in that it shipped to OEM’s in late 1987, making it & Xenix part of the initial 386 wave of Operating Systems/Environments and beating out not only the OS/2 launch in 1988, but taking advantage of the 80386’s v86 mode, something that OS/2 wouldn’t be able to do in a shipping product until 1992.Â
This version itself appears to be a retail version of Windows/386 lacking any clear OEM identification that was so prevalent for the era. Indeed setting it up it offers a few interesting platforms:
Getting this to run was a little bit of a challenge as much as I prefer Qemu, these older 2.0x versions of Windows/386 have a BIOS/disk incompatibility with the hypervisor resulting in errors reading the hard disk. Although PCem/86Box have no such issues. I think it’ll run off floppy/CD-ROM/Network without any issue though.
Windows/386 v2.03
Once installed it reveals itself to be version 2.03 of all things. While I was hoping for some kind of retail version of 2.00/2.01 this appears as close as it may get as it has more in common with the PCjs version of 2.01 (which you can try live on his site!)
The PCjs version of 2.03 has 138 setup files (not counting the PIFs), compared to the eBay’s 141, while the PCjs 2.01 has 59 files.
That said, well it’s Windows/386 mostly from 1987 with slightly updated EGA/CGA VMM drivers from early 1988 that just didn’t quite make the cut. To me what is confusing, is that it identifies as 2.03 while it’s closer to 2.01 in file count and functionality, unlike 2.03 it really ought to have been a 2.02, if there even was such a thing.
Windows/386 2.03 in CGA
Otherwise it’s really not all that interesting short of the timestamp. It’ll run on CGA/EGA *IF* you have the proper adapter in place, although VGA is compatible, the environment will detect that it’s not actually the proper card and refuse to run. I tried to put in the 2.01 CGA/EGA drivers, but that resulted in an OS version mismatch (I didn’t check if 2.01 was locked to the Compaq OEM of MS-DOS)
No mixing drivers!
I installed the infamous pair Word & Excel. Despite Word 1.1a demanding at least Windows 2.11, it appears to run okay. Excel 2.1d loaded without complaining. There isn’t very much convential memory for either, but they both can use expanded memory, which the hypervisor can create and share out without any emm386 or any equivalent driver. I can only imagine the incompatibles of trying to balance these drivers at the time, and how much the coming DPMI specification was needed.
Memory trouble in Windows 2.x
 And as the old saying goes the three top problems in Windows version 2 is memory, memory and memory. Trying to run anything graphical will exhaust convential ram, forcing you to single task anything graphical which kind of defeats the whole point of Windows. You go from this:
BattleTech CGA in a Window
To this:
Windows is out of memory!
Oh well it’s 1987, and users were kind of used to being disappointed as such. It’s really no wonder why Windows 3.0 became the smash it it was.
And of course you can't talk about Windows/386 without this gem. (Video in MPEG-1/Audio MPEG-2 care of JSMpeg).
It’s incredible how much it’s improved since I last touched on WineVDM, the port of Wine to run on Windows using the MS-DOS Player (and Mame 80386 emulation) at it’s heart.
The latest source build WineVDM_2018_07_30b.7z is now capable of loading and running Sim City for Windows 1.0.
I found it best to install Windows 3.0 into DOSBox, and then your application. After the install I copy the application so the physical drive of the hosts matches where it was installed, and then unpack the 7z build archive into that directory. There is a ‘WINDOWS’ directory and I xcopy the installed Windows directory into there so it has all the INI files, fonts and all that jazz. To make sure it doesn’t conflict I delete the following from Windows 3.0:
del windows\system\*.drv
del windows\system\*.exe
del windows\system\*.mod
del windows\system\WIN87EM.DLL
Since these files are most certainly going to be emulated by WineVDM. After that it’s time to run stuff!
130 KLOC!
I should also add that I’ve been able to use QuickC for Windows, and build a ‘non trivial’ program, the Fortran f2c compiler weighing in at 104,245 lines , and use that to compile 16,182 lines of Fortran 77 into C, and then compile the resulting C + the Fortran runtime library a staggering 130,405 lines of code, and the resulting binary works, just like it did on Windows 3.0!
I’ve also been able to print a text file using Microsoft Word 2.0 much to my amazement, although anything involving fonts just locks or crashes. I can’t say I’m all that surprised.
So no need to wait for Win3mu, there is WineVDM which is being developed RIGHT NOW, and the source is already available. You can see my notes on building it here.
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