Category Archives: gcc

Public Domain Operating System

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So, I came across this project from some random google search on Watcom the other day.  Simply put it is a MS-DOS API that is supported in both a 16bit real mode operating system, and a 32bit operating system.  It is quite sparse but very interesting all the same.  Using the ancient EMX port of GCC you can build 32bit (simple) programs, and run them in the 32bit DOS like Operating System.  What makes this even more interesting is that there is a port to the IBM 370, and 390 based hardware, along with the fictional 380.

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.40.03 PM

PDOS-16 booting in Qemu 1.6

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.39.47 PM

PDOS-32 booting in Qemu 1.6

You can download my diskimages, (VMDK & floppy disk) that I’ve used with Qemu to build & boot PDOS both 16bit and 32bit.

The included libc & system libraries are lacking compared to real MS-DOS, but this is public domain code, and with a bit of TLC it could be made into something much more.

AmiDevCpp

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Antoni sent me a link to this project, AmiDevCpp. It is a nice little wrapped up IDE for cross compiling applications for the following platforms:

  • AmigaOS (m68k)
  • AmigaOS4 (PPC)
  • MorphOS(PPC)
  • AROS (i386, ppc and x86_64).

Naturally it doesn’t work correctly on Wine.. .Oh well, but for you Windows users out there that haven’t installed Cygwin this is an easy way to cross build stuff for the ancient Amiga platform.

Apparently he was able to rebulid the infamous aclock using this cross compiler…

Hack 1.0.3 for Xenix (i386)

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Hack

I figured that since I could build hack for some ancient 4BSD flavors that I should be able to build hack for good old fashioned Xenix.

And it all seems to work as it should!

I used the source from here, and only had to do a few small modifications to get it to compile and run on Xenix via GCC 1.37.1 .

You can download my binary, and source mods.

I’ve managed to keep this instance of Xenix up for 19 hours, I was thinking about doing some kind of public access to this system, but I don’t know if people would even be vaguely interested..

But if you want access, I can set you up.

Although all that is of interest is ‘dungeon’, fortune, hack, robots, and ircII …

 

Good news on the QEMU fronts!

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First I found this blog post about building Qemu with CLANG instead of GCC, and I didn’t  even run it through google translate, but I had a feeling that it must work because there is simply too much text there for something that doesn’t work… Although it is with the TCG interpreter…

Qemu 1.1.0-1 on OS X 10.6.8 via clang!

And sure enough it works! (well so far I’ve only booted the IBM PS/1 MS-DOS 4.00 image I had handy. But that is good news for me as I’m planning on shifting away from running Windows all the time, and it was annoying having this powerful mac pro, but not being able to run / play with Qemu.

The move the clang would make sense as I under stand it Apple is moving away from GCC at any rate.

Also on the road to a non TGC build of Qemu I did find out the compiler included on the 10.6.3 DVD works while the later IOS update one does not…

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/Developer/usr/llvm-gcc-4.2 –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-prefix=llvm- –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –enable-llvm=/private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/dst-llvmCore/Developer/usr/local –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00)

GCC for update for IOS 5 … which doesn’t build a working Qemu exe

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /var/tmp/gcc/gcc-5646~6/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/usr –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/include/c++/4.2.1 –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)

While the one that does come on the 10.6.3 DVD works fine.

Next up for all those of you on Windows or Win32 i386 platforms, rainbow has kindly provided a Win32 build of Qemu, which you can download from his site!  Ive booted MS-DOS on it from within VirtualBOX and it seems to work fine!

One thing I’ve noticed about 1.1.0 is that it cannot read low density 3 1/2″ disks!!!!

DJGPP 1.03 saved thanks to shovelware + cd.textfiles.com

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I can’t stress enough just how awesome cd.textfiles.com is for finding ancient stuff!

I’m not sure why I started on this quest but I was looking for some old finicky DOS extender, and started hunting for Go32, the first DOS extender used by DJGPP.  And for the heck of it, I wanted to find the first version, which I pretty much had assumed was lost to the mists of time.

However the CD-ROM shareware collection called MegaROM-1 actually had a ‘full’ copy of one of the first versions of DJGPP, 1.03.

Installation is pretty straightforward, however you have to use pkunzip for all the various old ‘methods’ of storing data in zip files, I found infozip leaves things out..

Also DJGPP 1.03 uses a LOT of environment space.. which is more so a problem for people running real MS-DOS on real machines.. (there are some!)…

Hello World!

It runs in DOSBox, but there is no doubt some stack corruption as trying to run things like dos edit result in:

Packed file is corrupt

But at least we can run more than one copy, or use a native editor.

GO-32 from this era is *NOT* DPMI compliant, nor is it VCPI compliant.  And its based on GCC 1.39, which was a popular level with things like 386 BSD, although it seems early Linux used GCC 1.40 ..  The tool chain by default outputs the GNU a.out format, but relies on modifying the linker that was separately included in G++.  Later versions of GO32 included VCPI support, and near it’s end of life version 1.10 added support for DPMI which greatly simplified things like hooking IRQ’s and doing DMA.

For those who want to play, without the pkzip fun, I’ve slapped it into a single 7zip file.  It’s not even a megabyte.  But it was 1991, when 4MB of ram seemed like an incredible amount of memory!

25 years of GCC!

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In 1987 the first announcement went out that Stallman had introduced perhaps the most important piece of GNU software ever:  GCC.

I haven’t been able to locate the 1.0 release or even the 0.9 beta (*Edit as an update, yes I’ve found it, and installed it!), as close as I could find was 1.21 from May 1st, 1988. Even at this time, GCC supported the following CPUs:

  • m68k
  • ns23k
  • spur
  • vax
Amazingly GCC at this point is pretty snappy, and very ANSI compliant unlike PCC.  At this point it still relies on native assemblers, linkers, librarians it still was pretty versatile. Back then there was no auto configuration tools you have to link configuration scripts by hand but even on VAX BSD it builds somewhat straightforward (providing you read the documentation)..

GCC 1.21 on 4.2 BSD

I don’t know if it serves any practical value but I went ahead and built a source package for GCC 1.21, along with a 4.2 BSD binary package.. I suspect it’d only be an interest to a select few.. Although if anyone has 1.0 or 0.9 I’d be interested!

By 1991 GCC 1.40 supported not only the i386, but Linux kernel.. And as they say the rest is history.

And finally a video summation of all the changes to GCC…

 

On the way to building Qemu 1.0…

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Well one of the fun things is that Qemu now relies on glib.  But in order to build glib it needs pkg-config. And of course you can believe that pkg-config requires glib in order for it to work.  Good lord, nothing like circular dependencies!!!

So what to do?  First things first libffi will be needed to build glib.  It doesn’t seem to have any crazed dependancies so that built ok.  Also something I’ve been missing in a lot of ‘native’ MinGW builds is to add:

–prefix=/mingw

to the configure strings to get things in a location where the system will find them.  For some reason MinGW doesn’t walk /usr/local .. I guess because its not UNIX. With libffi built then you can configure/build glib like this:

export LIBFFI_CFLAGS='-I /mingw/lib/libffi-3.0.10/include'
export LIBFFI_LIBS=-lffi
export lt_cv_deplibs_check_method="pass_all"
export CFLAGS='-O0 -g -pipe -Wall -march=i486 -mms-bitfields -mthreads'
export CPPFLAGS='-DG_ATOMIC_OP_USE_GCC_BUILTINS=1'
export LDFLAGS=”-Wl,--enable-auto-image-base”
./configure --prefix=/mingw --with-pcre=internal --disable-static --disable-gtk-doc --enable-silent-rules

Then it is a simple matter of building out pkg-config then rebuilding glib in a ‘sane’ fashion.  This all comes form the MinGW wiki which has great information on how to do things like bootstrap glib!

And don’t forget to install python! Even Qemu needs it now!

And add it to /etc/profile so it will be in your path…

  export PATH=”.:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/c/python27:/c/python27/dlls:$PATH”

Solaris 11 came out today

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They blew the 11/11/11 launch date.  I guess Oracle really just doesn’t care about magical numbers or whatever.

I guess for the two or three people who even run this stuff (no doubt to run Oralce and it’s draconian licensing) you can find out all about it here.

It appears they still keep the Fortran stuff around for it…  Oh and this release is x86_64 only.  Sorry 32bit users.

Installing gcc (and I imagine everything else) revolves around the pkg command… In this case ‘pkg install gcc-3’ will download and install gcc 3.  While ‘pkg install gcc-45’ will install GCC 4!.  Don’t forget to install system/header or you won’t have things like stdio.h!!

Another GCC tidbit, is that you can build 64bit binaries with GCC 4.5 by supplying the -m64 flag!

While Solaris 11 installs somewhat quickly in VirtualBox (but wow does it take forever to boot), it is bare minimum…

Also for those who want it, here is lynx & ircII for Solaris Oh and a Quake World Server.  At least wget is in the base, but I don’t see why lynx isn’t.

Quake & QuakeWorld for MS-DOS update

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So after a year+ of inactivity I’ve spent some time with Quake (netquake) and QuakeWorld for MS-DOS.  I had modified it to support the WatTCP stack for MS-DOS, allowing you to play over the internet with any MS-DOS PC with a packet driver.

After a good bit of prodding and playing with DJGPP I’ve updated everything to include some new tweaks for a malloc ‘bug’ (Quake assumes the memory is clean, which under DJGPP it isn’t) some limit increases (zone to 1MB, and increases in max edicts, models & sounds), and forcing the sound to 22050Hz.  The source code is now here.  As much as it pained me, I built it with this DJGPP under MS-DOS (On Qemu) and I’m keeping it here, as gcc 3 & 4 are incapable of building a working WatTCP or Quake.

Another big fix for QuakeWorld is that it now can run in 640×480, 800×600, and even 1024×768 if your video card is VESA 2.0 compatible!!!

Basically you can just replace the default exe’s in a Quake1 install and go from there.  If you do not have quake at all, you can always look for the shareware version.  QuakeWorld will require the commercial version for what it is worth. I’ve found it runs best with 32MB of ram.  I don’t know if that is even an issue in this day & age.  Quake1 will run in 16, but I have a feeling QuakeWorld runs in VM (thanks to CWSDPMI) and it does say it is using 32MB … Because I clear the ‘zone’ before Quake runs there may be a 30 second to 1 minute pause.  This is to be expected, just hold tight.

QuakeWorld at 640x480

QuakeWorld at 800x600

QuakeWorld at 1024x768

You can download either Quake.exe or Qw.exe.

Thanks to [hci]maraakate, for the hints on what to update where, and of course the testing on a ‘real pc’!`