Category Archives: games

AberMud

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I never was that much into MUD’s but after reading this and this, I decided to go for it. Looking here, I thought I’d go with David Kinder’s revamping of the version 2 source.

I figured I’d try to run AberMUD on 2.11BSD / PDP-11 which didn’t go so well.. I know there is issues with the word size (it tries to switch on longs which it doesn’t like, I changed them to int’s and.. well sigbus. Not to mention I had to link with overlays and well.. I get the feeling you actually have to do something not just trust the linker.

32v is just too crusty, along with 3.0 BSD. 4.2 BSD was lacking a few functions (memcpy/strchr) so I grabbed some replacements and it just crashed. Looking back AberMUD dates from the late 1980’s so I figured 4.3 BSD would be a far better match. And I figured 4.3 from Wisconsin would certainly work the best for my needs. This time, only a minimal amount of hacking on the source was required, and more importantly it worked!

So here is a tape file with the source & binary.

The next thing I figured I’d do is put it online. Now my VPS runs a 64bit version of Linux, and seeing this is a VAX exe/OS I’ll need to run it on SIMH. Since I’m going to allow people to telnet it (I guess I could go thru some hell with the serial line mux) I’ll need my SLiRP build of SIMH, which only runs clean as a 32bit exe. So to get things started, first install 32bit support on x86_64 debian like this:

apt-get install ia32-libs

Then using Slackware 13.37, I made my exe, and uploaded it… And it worked fine! I also set the cpu to throttle at 3% so I don’t get into trouble for running 100% of the time, and it’ll be about as slow as a real VAX 11/730… It’s a simple line in SIMH, but I tend to misplace things so here it is.

set throttle 3%

Simple, right?

Well I thought I’d make one more change. I hate those systems that make you login to run the designated program that you went there for in the first place. At the same time, this VM is born to MUD, why not let it MUD all the time? Simply replacing /bin/login with mud.1 let me do just that. And of course I could just add an option in mud.1 to allow me to have a normal OS login. Simple, right? Not to mention it works on the console just fine.

So, let’s connect!

telnet vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com

I suppose I could hook up flashterm to it later, but for now, telnet on in. I’ve never run a MUD before so I guess we’ll see. Worst case it’ll suck and crash and the only evidence will be the tape image, and this post.

Lemmings demo for Win32s

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Lemmings on Windows Vista

Lemmings on Windows Vista

While digging around I came across this demo of Lemmings for WinG/Win32s. And what’s great is that it runs on Windows 7 x86_64! Pretty snazzy!

The game play is still there, but the ‘speed up’ stuff is instant in the world of Ghz CPUs.

Oh well, it’s worth having some fun with. Here is the download.

I just remember this game when it was an Amiga thing…

Quake in FLASH!

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Sure we’ve seen iD’s Doom in flash, but what about something more intense, say, Quake?

Quake in flash (actionscript)

Try it out here, The only requirement is that you have a flash 10 plugin, which supports the Alchemy VM. Source code is available here as well.

Sadly there is no networking play, perhaps it’s a limitation that you need a socket server to allow inbound connections from flash..? Maybe if I can get Alchemy to build anything under x86_64 maybe I’ll play with it… But no promises.

WinDoom, WinG, Win32s on Windows 3.1 (on Qemu)

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So since I was looking at the Doom stuff, I thought I’d try to track down the WinG version of Doom, and luckily someone pack ratted away two versions! Needless to say the older one didn’t work for me, but the last one, the April 13th, 1995 build, worked just great!

WinDoom on Windows 7 x64

Even on Windows 7 x86_64, sp1!

So how much of a chore was this to run back in 1995, before Windows 95?

Well to start WinDoom requires a display capable of at least 256 colors. I thought I’d use Qemu for this, but this proved to be… exceptionally difficult to locate a satisfactory display driver. I know lots of people point to the SVGA.EXE update from Microsoft, that uses VESA extensions to drive the video. Oh sure it sounds great but this is what I got:

And.. corruption.

Ok, so you say, there is this great patch to enable better VESA support right?

Wrong.

Yeah. I also hunted down various cirrus drivers for the specifically emulated chip (I checked the source) and they were all consistently defective. So I tried using a lower chip driver from HP and amazingly the 640x480x16MM colors works! (well, works ‘enough’).

Installing the right driver.

It’s the GD5430 v1.25f, 640x480x16.8M

The next thing is that Doom in both MS-DOS and Windows are full 32bit executables. On the MS-DOS side, it relies on the DOS4G/W extender. For Windows, it relies on the then new Win32 standard, and Windoom was written to conform to the Win32s standard, meaning with an addon it can run on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, And Windows NT. I just fished around the internet and scored a copy of Win32s 1.25. I just remember this being a somewhat stable version.

Installing Win32s

Win32s installs pretty smooth, (as long as you remember the share.exe). Now we just need the WinG runtime to be installed. WinG was Microsoft’s first real attempt at high speed gaming video under Windows. From what I understand it kind of went down because it was ‘too difficult’, and buying DirectX seemed to be a better fit.

Setting the midi mapper.

Another thing I’ve found is that if you change the midi mapper from the default “Ad Lib” to “Ad Lib general”, you can at least get the midi working in Doom.

Once WinG is installed, then it’ll want to do some blit tests…

WinG calibrating.

And after that, we can even bump it up to glorious 640×400, something the initial MS-DOS version couldn’t do easily as VESA wasn’t a big standard with INSTALLED cards at the time, and it’d require lots of work from the iD team, where the move to Windows pushed all the peripheral development to the Vendors to work around Microsoft. Even to this day, it’s still a big deal with video and audio.

One thing that is cool about Qemu is that at compile time, you can put in adlib & soundblaster cards to give the ‘full’ Windows 3.1 multimedia experience. There is also GUS (Gravis Ultra Sound) support
in Qemu, but I’ve never played with it..

With all of that out of the way, WinDoom will launch.

WING dispdib.dll missing error that turned out to be Video for Windows.

Then it’ll throw an error, because Windows 3.1 doesn’t have the same video backend as Windows NT 3.5 (and higher), hit ok and then …

And it works! WinGDoom running on Windows 3.1 on Qemu!

Sadly on Windows 3.1 the sound effects do not seem to work, but overall it’s a GREAT little port, mostly because as it comes up on 16 years old, it still works, and with sound. I wish other OS’s could give this kind of support for legacy applications, even ones that had such a brief window of support.

Anyone crazy enough to even think of playing along can download the blob of software I used to get this going here (Updated on archive.org here: Windows-3.1-WING-doom)

I should also add if you want sound effects to work on WinDOOM you really should install the Video for Windows Runtime, and it’ll work… poorly on Qemu/SoundBlaster 16, but it does work!

Failed Quakeworld port to OS/2 2.0

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Yeah, I guess I just couldn’t salvage this thing… Sometimes when you stand on the shoulders of giants you fall off.

So what had started as a seemingly simple thing turned into a nightmare.. I took the source to my MS-DOS port of Quakeworld, and decided to build it under OS/2. And to be crazy about it, I thought it’d be awesome to get it to work under OS/2 2.0 .

Which means no sound, locked to 320×200 256 colours, full screen only, since the VGA driver won’t do anything but. Years ago on ebay I managed to score IBM TCP/IP for OS/2 2.0 & 2.1, with the LAN support!

IBM OS2 2.0 syslevel 1

IBM OS2 2.0 XR02000 (no fixpacks)

 

 

ibm os2 2.0 syslevel2

IBM TCP/IP for OS/2 with no fixpack

So as you can see from my syslevel’s I’m running a pretty bare machine, even the graphics subsystem is still 16bit!

Well the good news, is that with EMX and a HPFS disk, I was able to quickly get the null version running. With a minor amount of work, I had TCP/IP connectivity and things were going well. I had ripped apart a video demo, and got the display up, although it was ungodly slow.. Until I found out that when you are full screen you can request access to the physical video memory, under OS/2 so that sped things up a great deal!

Then all that really needed to be done was get the keyboard working.

And here is where I slipped up.

OS/2 is weird for interactive programs that want to know key states. It seems the best and most common way to do this was to setup a ‘monitor’ for the keyboard device, and try to read the stream as keys are pressed. Sadly idiots that slamm the keyboard, or gamers that hold down an arrow key for a minute lock the thing, and the key then is ‘jammed’ down until you hit it again for the release.

I’m pretty sure that I did it wrong, so I borrowed code from a more ‘advanced’ OS/2 port and it did the same thing. Maybe it’s OS/2 2.0? I don’t know, I did service pack it and update and still the same result.

I really didn’t want to spend that much time on it…..

QuakeWorld for OS/2

QuakeWorld for OS/2

I feel hesitant to release a binary as you will get killed, and I haven’t even tried the mouse yet, but I suspect it’ll still suck.

So for anyone that cares, here is the source… misspellings and all.

Duke Nukem 3D for the Macintosh (68020)

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mini vmac II duke nukem

mini vmac II duke nukem

I had no idea this even existed… I guess it’s to be expected, all the popular games of the time (doom) were ported to pretty much everything and anything.

So after stubmling across this site, Emacualtion, I had to fire this thing up!

The first thing I needed to do was get the latest source to Mini vMac. What is different about this is that you get the source from within the emulator. Basically you pass a program what config you want and it’ll spit out source code. So for me to build on windows, a mac II with 256 colors, I gave it..

-t wx86 -m II -depth 3

Easy right?

There is some help on the mini vmac site, but it’s kind of in places.

With the emulator built, the next fun filled thing was to dump the ROM from my SE/30, which was.. an exciting adventure in floppy disks, but with it in hand I was ready!

The next part of the puzzle was System 7.5.3, which apple still thankfully provides, along with HFVExplorer, and Stuffit, and I was all set to go!

I created a target diskette of 100MB, then used hfvexplorer to copy 7.5.3 and it’s 19 segments into the disk. Then I booted the emulator with a minimal System 7 floppy. I then installed 7.5.3 into the 100mb disk, then shut down the emulator. Then using hfv explorer, copy over Duke and stuffit.

Boot back into MacOS, install stuffit, and expand Duke and away we GO!

Naturally with the speed limits dropped it’s quite FAST! vMac doesn’t have sound yet, so it’s a silent experience but it works quite well.

mini vmac II duke

mini vmac II duke

The sad thing is that Doom requires 32bit mode, which it seems that Mini vMac can’t do just yet.

QuakeWorld client for MS-DOS

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So as leileilol pointed on on VOGONS, QuakeWorld’s networking was a rapid departure from Quake 1, and formed the basis of a lot of modern multiplayer games… Like teamfortress and half-life.

So with a little bit of work, I was able to compile a QuakeWorld client for MS-DOS. Or here for the standalone exe, and don’t forget CWSDPMI. Oh and be sure to get a packet driver, for your NIC. Many vendors have these on their site for newer stuff.

Now I managed to get a new computer between posts, and it’s not working on virtual pc… I may be 500 updates behind though so maybe it’s something else. So in the meantime I’m testing with Qemu.

The other oddity is that compiling QuakeWorld with GCC 2.95.3 with either -O1 or -O2 builds a client that will time out after 2 minutes… -O0 ran for over an hour with me playing and dying a lot on quake.xs4all.nl:27500 …

Oh and what good would this be without pictures?

Yes, I’m really that bad.

You can find quakeworld servers on the site quakeservers.net. And I can verify that you can indeed download levels!

Enjoy!

Some quake 1 links

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Well last night I wanted to test my quake build on a real quake server… So looking around I found this great site, QuakeOne. So I used the full pak files I got from buying Quake (yet again) on steam, and went through and downloaded some mega map download (remember maps go in c:\quake\id1\maps), and combed through the server list and found a few servers to connect to.

The great thing is it worked.

It worked well enough that not only did the DOSBox test worked, but also running it through Qemu and Virtual PC. I configured Qemu & Virtual PC to use their own NAT solution, and they both worked fine. Since the PCAP thing can be a little crazy for DOSBox I’m thinking about trying to merge in the SLiRP code from Qemu into it, to provide ‘user mode networking’… It’s worked well enough for SIMH, so I don’t see why not.

Oh and speaking of quake, Qaddicted has some great information as well.

Quake1 with WATTCP built with DJGPP on DOSBox

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Phew.

As far as I know this was never done, as the world at large moved away from MS-DOS, and of course when Quake 1 on MS-DOS was popular they weren’t exactly giving out the source… Such a shame the DLM thing was lost in the shuffle as DLL’s on DJGPP/MS-DOS could have made quake more modular..

So what I’ve done, is I’ve used an ancient version of cygwin that I was playing around with line, and built a cross compiler for DJGPP. Then using that I’ve built the latest version of Watt-32 tcp/ip with it, then I took my build of Quake 1 on DJGPP, and built quake to use the net_bsd, net_udp, net_dgrm services, and added in the needed hooks for Watt-32 TCP/IP. And to their credit, I just added a single function call to both protocols init functions, and a single function to the general network poll function. All and all I think it’s 3 lines I changed.

Then to test, I used an older copy of DOSBox that included a virtual NE2000 that binds onto a physical interface via libpcap, loaded up the packet ne2000 driver, and ran the client!

For a server, I used the much older, quake dedicated server I had built to run on Windows NT 3.1. Although I never did automatically turn on the ‘-dedicated’ flag for some reason…

On the Windows XP virtual machine, I installed a loopback adapter, then set it up with internet connection sharing so that XP would act as a DHCP server to the Watt-32 TCP/IP stack.

Anyways, as you can see in the picture I connected a simple sniffer, WinDump to watch the packets, and it worked.

I’m still blown away that it worked on the first shot.

It’s really a testament to all the people that make all the moving parts here, when I can just string stuff along and get it to work.

For anyone daring enough, this zip contains all the source, and binaries of all the parts, except for the cygwin install. (I did have to poach a ‘modern’ cygwin1.dll from a modern install).

Enjoy!

Zork on the IBM Mainframe (VM/370 CMS) it lives!

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There we have it, after a LOT of fighting the emulators, missing bits, LOTS of help the hercules-os380 mailing list, and the EXCEPTIONAL of one Paul Edwards, and it’s running.

It seems to be Dungeon version 1.2C

read news
US NEWS & DUNGEON REPORT
01-MAR-81 Late Dungeon Edition
This is a version of Zork on VM/370

The problems with it are:
-Lack of an endgame.
-Simple parser (no compound sentences).
-Numerous bugs and spelling errors.
But so what.

If you encounter problems or find logic, spelling, or usage bugs,
keep them to yourself.

>

It’s a little odd playing zork on a mainframe…