This is a bit cheating, but I broke down and did some dump/exports of a building system to get the file layout. Since the MiG phase was totally done native, I didn’t bother with that, or trying to ‘fix’ the nested Makefiles, rather I just dumped the output and worked with that. I guess I could make my own Makefile but for now it’s a stupid script. I used the a.out build tools for Linux as the objects are all the same anyways.
cd mach25-X113\obj\STD+WS-afs-nfs
build-gcc258.cmd
Since there is no Makefile it won’t run in parallel. About 20 seconds or so later you’ll get a linked ‘a.out’ but it won’t run. The script xport.cmd is rigged for me and Qemu 0.10.5 to create a tar file to extract inside of mach and perform the native link.
Obviously this means you can us modern UI’s tools and everything else as you are now on the outside! If you can force your build to use my ancient tools you can even do the build. Nice!
Doing a rebuild of the kernel in Qemu the 2.5.8 -O2 build shaved a whole second off the build, so yes it actually did something.
Things to do would be cross linking, fixing the drivers that don’t build, and probably improving stuff like bigger disks, filesystems and memory… or networking!.. .but that’s all too complicated for me!
A long long time ago, in a distant continent I once interviewed at this small company called Citrix. It was some QA position, they didn’t need programmers. I’d passed the interviews easily as I’d been programming serial TSR’s so I was hip to the 8250/16450. Citrix was an interesting but troubled company. They had incredible contacts and more importantly a deal from Microsoft that gave them access to OS/2. Sadly OS/2 1.0 had been a dud, and by the time OS/2 2.00 saw even a limited release, Microsoft had pulled out of OS/2. Citrix was a company that had lost twice in what should be a big market. -Multi user commodity systems.
Citrix Multiuser 1.0 was based on OS/2 1.21, and was limited to 16bit protected mode apps. Citrix Multiuser 2.0 was based on the Limited Availability version which means that it cannot run “GA” or General Availability programs. So no 32bit programs here. Instead it can run the same 16bit protected mode applications, however it can also run MS-DOS based programs. DOS4/GW programs run so oddly enough the only real commercial stuff that can be run is MS-DOS.
So here we were 1994. Citrix had struck out twice, but this time it was going to be different, but the deal had to be re-struck again. I have no idea how they managed to secure this lucrative deal again, but Citrix was able to get access to the source access Windows NT, after the 3.1 release to 3rd parties (when they got DEC involved). By now the world had gone Windows, Office 4.2 was a thing, and on the high end side, NT had SQL & SNA, and there was most defiantly a market for multiuser systems as there had been from the old days of Unix, with the old mix of ASCII and network graphical terminals.
The CD looks like a normal-ish NT 3.5 Server CD although there is no MIPS or Alpha builds, as expected everyone at Citrix would be working and targeting the larger established i386 market.
As you can see this is Beta build 101.
In the text mode setup it looks like a normal setup program. No doubt they had better things to do than skins, wallpapers and themes. HOWEVER there is a silent IDE bug that many people will no doubt run into:
Although it works okay in short bursts, the IDE driver will send a command 28 zero byte and then shut down the controller. From this point it hangs. So that means we either need to generate all the floppy disk images (not going to happen!) or do the MS-DOS cross install. Yeah I’m doing that instead.
When setting up under Qemu, use the AMD PCNET card. It’s much easier. I set it to Twisted Pair, and PCI bus. I’m not sure if those matter all that much, but it works for me!
If you are going to use Hyper-V, you’ll need the GF100 NIC driver, but use the Windows NT 3.1 driver, as this is technically a beta of NT 3.5 and the production 3.5 driver will blue screen.
I set the driver to autosense.
I also had both Qemu and Hyper-V bluescreen when doing DHCP. I don’t know what the issue is, and I’m too old to care as I don’t have source code to South Beach, and even if I did I’d probably regret posting fixes. So static IP address it is!
Ready to login
Honestly again the air in the office when I was there is that everyone was running around like crazy to QA the product, and get ready to expand client support. While I was too much of an OS/2 fan boy, they certainly knew that from now on everything was going to be about Windows NT.
Logging into the Citrix the first fun thing to do is to define some remote terminals, using the WinStation app.
The first interesting thing is that async terminals are supported. Along with using either NetBIOS or Winsock protocols for connecting clients. Isn’t that great! TCP/IP built in!
Now for the crazy part. The only client that works is MS-DOS based. Yes there is no Win16, no Win32, no Java, no protected mode DOS, no Linux, SunOS, Solaris, DG/UX, AIX, HPUX, Xenix, UnixWare or SYSV i386ABI. ONLY Real Mode MS-DOS. Despite the connections being able to be ICA version 2 or 3, they are incompatible with newer Windows based clients from Win Frame.
This it the following list of supported protocols. Although I had Novell Lan WorkPlace and used it before for Desqview X, I can’t find it at the moment. good luck finding FTP TCP/IP, in retrospect it’s a terrible name, and for all intents and purposes it’s disappeared from the earth. So that leaves Microsoft TCP/IP. Now all the LANMAN clients have it, although this isn’t what it wants. It wants the MSCLIENT found in the “\CLIENTS\MSCLIENT\NETSETUP” path from a retail version of NT Server 3.5
The DOS client is.. very touchy. Deleting profiles can lead to a corrupted profile. Altering existing profiles well yeah can lead to a corrupted profile. I thought it was EMM386 causing issues but it locks up on it’s own.
Revenge of text mode UI
One interesting thing I found is that the text mode UI didn’t die. It’s still very much alive. As mentioned above you can connect async terminals, or even connect over the network!
Text mode does bring up a Program Manage analogue, but all my programs are graphical so it’s kind of moot. But rest assured text mode stuff works great.
PowerStation Oregon Trail
So 32bit Fortran stuff works great, what about MS-DOS?
Here is MS-DOS / Qbasic editor. Running on Citrix South Beach! Great, what about OS/2?
OS/2 F2C Dungeon
And here we go running the f2c translator through Dungeon to get an OS/2 text mode app. As you can see forcedos reveals that this isn’t a bound executable, instead it only runs on the OS/2 subsystem.
As you can see the os2.exe/os2srv components of the OS/2 subsystem
And of course it looks better on the graphical client to mix and match them all.
Obviously somewhere post South Beach the text mode stuff dropped off. I’ll have have to dig for more, but it’s kind of neat the idea of a real text mode NT. Sadly South Beach doesn’t seem to like VMware. I haven’t dug too far, as I like WSLv2 so I’m stuck with Hyper-V. It may work fine on ESX I haven’t tested. Obviously you need the appropriate drivers, ill try to update links later, if anyone cares.
No doubt that finally Citrix was no positioned to realize the dream of multiuser commodity based hardware along with commodity applications. Of course it wouldn’t be all sunshine and rainbows, and no doubt there was a toll needing to be paid between Windows NT 4.0 and on the way to Windows 2000. But back in 1994, things were looking good!
640K ought to be enough foranyone. Well I’ve been poking around with an old beta that I had a long long time ago, lost, found, lost again, recovered, lost and found while looking for something entirely different again. I’ll spoil it later but anyways while messing around I needed a MS-DOS client, and it needs the MSNET TCP/IP stack, not to be confused with the LANMAN TCP/IP stack, and it doesn’t work with the Windows for Workgroups stack either. So yes I setup all 3, and of course found out that it really was the worst of the 3, the MSNET one.
Anyways convential memory is below 1MB. Back when the PC was new, it seemed that going from an Intel 8080 processor that could addresses a mere 64kb of RAM to the IBM PC that could address a whopping 1MB it seemed unlimited. A decision was made to segment the machine into 640kb for user programs reserving 384kb of RAM for hardware.
MSD memory map
And then something happened where drivers became user programs, and suddenly loading a mouse driver, CD-ROM driver, audio driver, networking stack and you have not enough memory available. Welcome to the living hell that was 1988-1995. In this virtual machine although it has 64MB of RAM in MS-DOS the largest free space with everything loaded is 366KB.
Microsoft Windows and DOS (among other products) started to include this fun tool MSD, Microsoft Diagnostics that would let you explore your memory, to see what was actually in use.
Imagine the absolute frustration here. 64MB of RAM, and yet there isn’t enough free to run a simple program. HOW ANNOYING!!!
Looking back at the MSD memory map, you may noticed from the map there is memory available, and possibly available. What does that mean? It means that there is no ROMS, or device RAM in use currently using that hardware reserved memory. Sadly for the 8088/80286 users they either don’t have a MMU, or one that only really works for protected mode segmentation. The 80386 however had a MMU sophisticated enough to let you map whatever you wanted where by booting MS-DOS into a protected mode environment and using v86 mode to map whatever you wanted where, by using the included program emm386.exe I’m sure plenty of others have touched on this program, and I’m going to just make a quick glance at it.
Typical PC memory map
If you look at a typical PC memory map you’ll find that location A000-AFFF is actually reserved for graphics memory. Since we are using VGA that also means B000-B7FF is also available. that means for text mode programs we can open up all this RAM for smaller program & driver use, along with the memory after the VGA BIOS, until the ROM BIOS of the computer that’s CC00-CFFF in my case, with D000-DFFF and E000-EFFF also being open. Obviously the fun comes in that not every PC has the same peripherals ROMS installed so this isn’t guaranteed to work in every instance.
In my case I don’t need EMS emulation at all I want to map it all to UMB or upper memory blocks for drivers and TSR’s. So I load emm386.exe into the config.sys like this:
I didn’t put in any exclusionary ranges as EMM386 figured it out all on it’s own in MSD, but you may need to specify ranges to leave alone.
This gives me 519KB of free conventional RAM. Oddly enough a lot of the networking stack moved itself into UMB without me having to do anything. It’s probably more so a function of the MSNET I used from a Windows NT 3.5 Server CD-ROM being dated 1994, so I didn’t have to play with the load high command.
Back when the PCem forum was up I had this config, although keeping in mind that although it was far more aggressive!
@ECHO OFF
PROMPT $p$g
PATH C:\DOS;c:\windows
SET TEMP=C:\TEMP
LH MSCDEX /D:CDROM01
LH SMARTDRV
LH IDLE
LH DOSKEY
LH SHARE
This got me a whopping 619Kb free in MS-DOS, along with 4MB of EMS, and 12MB XMS (on a 16MB config).
In the spirit of the old ‘Linking the linker‘ (I’m not certain that this is the actual article but it does certainly read the same way, didn’t Tim have 2 blogs?), I went ahead and claimed the video memory for the heck of it.
Using range A000-AFFF (64KB EGA/VGA Graphics RAM)
Obviously you cannot run graphical programs, but 605kb of conventional RAM, wish some 206Kb worth of network drivers! Not bad. I could probably squeeze a 32kb EMS frame in there, and get what would be an incredible 1-2-3 machine for the era. But I’m not such a big Lotus 1-2-3 fan anymore.
As always it’s 2021, and normal people will glance and WTF, you have 64MB of ram how can you be fighting for kilobytes. Anyone that used MS-DOS based networking will cringe and look the other way. These were not happy times.
In other news the client ran, sadly it’s too new for the server.
Hello everyone,
So it took me a bit longer than I planned, but below is the
information needed to reproduce and links to sources. (Be kind, I
know that the code needs more work.)
To see it in action, from installing FreeDOS & Windows to running I
posted an updated the video (about 4 minutes, sped up some stuff and
cut some scenes down but its originally a single recording from first
boot until the end)
Steps:
download boot disk - http://server2.fdos.org/tests/fdos2043w.img
contains:
kernel *** requires patches, see below for source
command.com (FreeCOM)
fdisk
format
sys
share
edit
have available Windows 3.1 install media (*** not provided ***)
create a virtual machine (or have a compatible real computer)
example has a 200MB hard drive with 32MB of memory and otherwise
virtual box's Win 3.1 default settings.
boot FreeDOS floppy
fdisk
create a primary partition, don't use FAT32, use all available
space, ensure active
reboot so kernel see new partition
format
format the C: drive and set label as desired
fdisk /MBR
install master boot record so hard drive is bootable
sys C:
install system boot record and files to C: partition
copies kernel.sys and command.com to C:
copy share.com c:
copy EDIT.* C:
so have available after install Windows
Optional: take out (disconnect virtual) floppy from drive and reboot,
ensure hard drive boots
Optional: create a CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT so not prompted with
date and time
Install Windows
put in first Windows floppy and run SETUP
follow prompts until complete, allow it to modify CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT
Optional: edit AUTOEXEC.BAT to load SHARE.COM
(if you do not do this step, you must remember to do so before
starting Windows)
Edit C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI (adjust based on actual installation and
editor of choice)
find [386Enh] section, at bottom add line:
InDOSPolling=TRUE
save file
win
start Windows, will be in Enhanced mode if supported
And sure enough I was able to reproduce Windows 3.1 from the binary. I haven’t looked at patching/building yet.
Turning off virtual memory let’s FreeDos run in a Window!
Even more amazing to me BattleTech 3025 can run CGA mode in a Window too!
I should add that VMWare player didn’t work, nor did later versions of Qemu either. I had much better luck with my mutated Qemu 0.90 fork thing. ISA Cirrus card for sure!
Being able to run Windows 3.1 in 386 Enhanced mode has been one of those holy grails of compatibility. It’s great to see this in action!
I should add that Windows/386 and Windows 3.0 don’t work. 386 needs some versioning set, and 3.0 is convinced that the memory is too fragmented or that C: is really A:. Also Win32s doesn’t work either, but still Sim City, Excel and Word run fine!
As a follow up, 3.11 for workgroups or not doesn’t work either.
In the previous post we saw how to install SCO Unix 4.2 and SCO ODT on a virtual machine. Sadly, both distributions lack the development system, making them a very limited toy.
At some point I noticed that the filesize of the ISO of SCO ODT 3.0 branded by Compaq (found again on the Internet Archive or WinWorld) is way larger than the other available distributions: could it be that it includes the Development System as well? I decided to find out.
Inside the ISO we can find a N1.IMG file, and we can start the installation by booting from that.
At the serial request I discovered that this version is not the same as regular ODT, and thus the serials I had did not work. I tried extracting a to-be-serialized file from inside the CD.IMG file found on the ISO by opening it with a hex editor (the file is not in ISO9660 format; it’s specific to SCO and somewhat emulates a tape drive, with multiple tar files in it. Opening it with a hex editor, it’s easy to see where one of these tar files starts and ends), extracting it with tar, and running it through brandy to generate a new serial.
Brandy, however, generated the same serials/activation I had already, indicating that the validation mechanism used by the installer in this release is different. I was afraid it would be a Compaq-specific addition, thus almost unrecoverable, but after searching Usenet I found this post (mirror) which suggests that different versions of ODT have different generation mechanisms; in any case, the keys provided in the “OSE” (Open Server Enterprise) column work.
Anyway, after inserting the serial the installation proceeds smoothly, and we can even select to install the Development System:
The DevSys also requires a serial, and for that I used one found on the archive of Tenox. The installation started with the incredibly slow process of badtracking the hard disk (and I had selected the “quick” check!) and proceeded smoothly, until it tried to install the “Compaq EFS for SCO Unix”:
The error interrupts the installation scripts and leaves the system in a half-baked state: we can reboot from the HD and load the kernel, but instead of getting to a terminal or login prompt we are dropped in a broken installation script that won’t proceed.
To fix the issue, I opened up again the ISO with a hex editor and looked at the install script (/inst5/customize). The fix is easy: search for the string “cleanup $FAIL” inside the CD (line 238 of the customize script), and replace the initial “c” with a “#” to comment out the line entirely (a neater solution would be to change the script so that it won’t install the Compaq EFS in the first place; I tried to do that as well, but it didn’t work). Since we are at it, we can also modify the params.stz file in the ISO and disable badtracking completely (search for badtrk_none) and speed up the next installation considerably.
Restarting the installation once again with the same settings will still give the error, but this time it won’t kill the installation script and it should now complete successfully (with some warning messages since it’s not an EISA machine).
After the reboot, we should be finally welcomed into “SCO Open Server (From Compaq) Enterprise System Release 3.0”.
We can now remove the whole Compaq EFS using custom, or just the UPS drivers /etc/rc.0d/*ups and /etc/rc2.d/*ups, in addition to /usr/bin/compaq. We can also apply the patch to the disk driver to run on faster machines, as mentioned in the previous post. Finally, we can install SCO supplements from SCO’s FTP, and in particular:
uod374a – better CD support (you can run programs from ISO-9660 CDs, for example from early SCO Skunkware releases; you can also mount CDs forcing each name to lowercase, instead of the annoying default where everything is in uppercase);
Now we have a working SCO Unix 4.2 system with the development system! The good thing about SCO Unix is that the C compiler is more modern than the one provided by SCO Xenix, but can still target Xenix (with the -l2.3 directive). This means we can compile slightly more recent software for both systems, for example bash 1.13.5 and bzip2 0.1pl2.
I’ve been messing around with SCO Xenix for about 10 years now, and in the process I have been playing with OpenServer 5/6 as well (mostly as a mean to copying big/many files to a Xenix VM: I’d just create an ISO file, mount that in OpenServer, then share the Xenix HD with OSR5 and copy the files over); however, I never got around to use SCO Unix.
A while ago I decided to change this, but it took many tries to get to install everything, especially the Development System; so, when I eventually managed, I decided to do a writeup of what I did (and part of what stumbling blocks I encountered along the way).This is the “first episode”, which should give you enough info to install SCO OpenDesktop 3.0 as found on WinWorld or on archive.org, and the ODT Server 3.0 version from BetaArchive. ODT is nothing else than SCO Unix 4.2 bundled with X11 and TCP/IP (while on Xenix these are separate products).
Installing SCO ODT, floppy version
The secret to installing the 4.2 floppy version was to use the updated N1 boot diskette (SLS uod429a from SCO). Once you have it, the installation process is quite straightforward and self-documenting, especially if you are used to the slightly more convoluted Xenix install. This version can even be installed in VMWare.
The serial/activation is included in the release files; create a VM with an hard drive <2gb, during the setup process select “Floppy” as the install media, a “quick” bad track scan type and then simply confirm every step. You will be asked to insert all the disks in order, and the only challenge should be surviving the mind-numbing boredom of handling more than 40 floppies. Unfortunately, the network and graphics card are not supported on VMWare (I suggest to boot the first time in single-user mode and disable the GUI from starting automatically with “scologin disable”), so it’s a good idea to install on 86box instead.
While we are at it, we can even spare ourselves some of the boredom by using the CD version instead.
Installing SCO ODT, CD version
For the ODT CD version, I looked up at what SCSI devices are supported (mostly by running ‘strings’ on the kernel inside the boot floppy image, looking at the device driver names and comparing them with those of OpenServer 6), and created a machine on the latest unstable 86box build (3.0.0.2983) like this:
i486-socket 2 and 3: [i420EX] ASUS-PVI-486AP4 (many other boards work as well, but faster CPUs/machines would give me issues… more on this later)
Intel i486SX 33mhz + 487SX
32 Mb RAM
Serial Logitech mouse, 3buttons
Video: ISA16 Orchid Farenheit 1280 [note for the setup: the emulated bios is 2.0 – supports 1024×[email protected] colors]
IDE hard drive, <2Gb, non-LBA (check the BIOS settings)
If you want Ethernet, use WD8013EBT (drivers are included) IRQ3 address 240
The OpenServer release I found on BetaArchive was missing the N2 disk, but the one from the floppy release works fine. The process is simple: boot from N1, the SCSI adapter should be recognized by the kernel (a line that starts with “%adapter” and then the IRQ settings etc.), and so should be the disk drive (%disk):
You can use the same serial as for the floppy release, but this time indicate “SCSI CD-ROM” as the install media, and it should install fine. You should however deselect the DOS Services, as Unix will crash after the first reboot while trying to install them.
Once the installation is complete and the system restarted, it will greet you with this very dramatic login screen (and ironic too: SCO and Open Systems in the same logo) and its pastel-colored UI:
Running on faster machines
The 33 mhz CPU is surely not a beast by today’s standards, and the emulated system feels sluggish enough also under ODT; however, switching to a faster CPU would crash the system. Luckily, SCO’s former support website (I created a mirror of the tech articles on archive.org) has a solution for this: we can modify a driver to avoid kernel panics on quick systems. After booting into single-user mode, we can run
Finally we can safely reboot, this time with a better CPU. The fastest machine I could test is a Socket 5 (i430NX Gigabyte GA-586IP) Pentium MMX Overdrive 200Mhz. When a faster system is selected (e.g. those based on Socket 7), the mouse stops registering the vertical axis.
In the next post, we’ll see how to install ODT with the development system.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
This is a continuation of the vintage DOS/Windows hypervisors and emulators for Unix series. So far I have covered things like Merge, MergePro and Wabi. This time I’m taking a closer look at VP/ix. This early DOS hypervisor was developed by Interactive Systems Incorporated (ISC). Initially released and included with their INTERACTIVE UNIX System V/386 operating system it was also available for SCO Xenix 386, Sun 386i, AT&T WGS as Simul-Task 386. The last two versions were significantly enhanced to allow DOS/Windows graphical apps run in windowed mode, which unfortunately is not the case with IX and Xenix, where graphical apps can only run on the console. VP/ix was released around the same time as Merge in 1987 and it was its main competitor. Both products are early hypervisors, they use Virtual 8086 mode and require 386+ to run on. This is in contrast to SoftPC which is a full x86 emulator that can run on different CPU/architecture hosts.
VP/ix comes with ISC INTERACTIVE UNIX that is covered in my previous article. The product was installed as part of the 50 floppy disk set. You run it with an icon in Looking Glass environment or invoke from terminal or console via “vpix” command.
VP/ix comes with it’s own custom version of MS-DOS 3.30. It allows a variety of cross unix/dos enhancements such as shared disks, automatic dos/unix file format conversion, listing unix attributes from dos as well as running unix commands from dos and vice versa. One of super cool features is that you can pipe output of DOS commands to Unix command, for example:
C:\> dir | wc -l
…will do a DOS dir and pipe it to Unix wc command. You can map Unix paths to DOS drives:
VP/ix has an interactive Menu invoked by SYSRQ + ‘m’ key:
You can load floppy disks, turn sound on/off, restart/quit or run unix shell.
As for running normal text mode apps it’s business as usual:
Multiple instances of DOS can be launched and files shared between them. Also if you are a different user on different terminal or connected remotely. Remote terminal also supports mapping dos line characters to ASCII.
The same however cannot be said about graphical DOS or Windows apps. Under INTERACTIVE UNIX and Xenix you need to run them from the text mode console:
One day I will probably want to look at VP/ix on Sun 386i or AT&T WGS as they solved this problem. Newer versions of Interactive Unix (4.x) and VP/IX also need to be investigated.
According to the documentation, you can run Windows 3.x in real mode using win /r however I did not have patience to install this.
INTERACTIVE UNIX 3.0 with VP/ix preinstalled can be downloaded here for 86Box or VBox OVA, however the later does not have networking and resolution is only 800×600. Login as root/root. When importing OVA in Vbox you may need to disable import as VDI. For 86Box version please read readme on how to circumvent licensing error.
In the previous post about SCO Merge I briefly mentioned WABI, which is a Windows ABI emulator for Unix. Initially released by Sun Microsystems, it’s believed that it came with acquisition of Interactive Systems Corp (ISC) and Interactive UNIX. It was available for SPARC, x86 and PowerPC Solaris as well as IBM AIX. Around 1997 it was released for x86 Linux by Caldera. This article will focus on Caldera’s version specifically.
Although entirely possible to install WABI on another RPM based distribution such as Red Hat, I’m a purist and wanted to try it on Caldera Open Linux. The install is pretty straightforward you mount the iso file and run install script. In a next step you need to install an update to version 2.2D. This is done by replacing /opt/wabi/bin/wabiprog with extracted version of this file. Thanks to readers of this blog post for sharing these.
When launched for the first time, you will be prompted to provide copy of Windows 3.1. This the main difference with WINE which specifically does not require copy of windows to run apps. I have noticed that WABI is rather picky about lower vs uppercase when installing software. There is an utility called wabimakelower to help there. You can also add an icon to one of Caldera Linux / Looking Glass program groups.
Once you run it, it’s Windows 3.1 as usual:
WABI was designed for running productivity apps such as Office:
You can even run Visual Studio:
Curiously WABI is not a MS-DOS emulator. In order to run DOS apps you need to install such and configure it in WABI Control Panel:
For the lazy, a readily preinstalled version is available as OVA and 86box. Root password is “caldera”.
Way back in the late 90’s from the University of Utah there was this fantastic project that promised to bring Operating System construction to mere mortals but taking existing PC operating systems, Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD and break them down to their best components, and then interlink them using COM allowing you to glue the best parts together like lego.
And the project was called OSKit.
It was fantastic for something unknown at the time for creating so called ‘bare metal programs’ that didn’t have a real operating system, but rather could use operating features like LIBC, or the EXT2 filesystem. It was almost that level of ‘MS-DOS’ like feeling from protected mode, but being able to take more stuff with you.
And of course transforming the ELF into a multiboot executable that GRUB can load:
/oskit/bin/mkmbimage hello
And now you are ready to boot, on say Qemu?
I was kind of surprised it never really took off, maybe it was too far ahead of it’s time. The most notable project I’ve seen that used it was OSKit-Mach, although they later on abandoned OSKit.. I’m not sure why but I would suspect the lack of updates post 2002 would have something to do with it.
Building this was… Interesting as I recall this being somewhat difficult, and I know I’ve probably made it more difficult, but I thought it would be ‘fun’ using the tools of the time. And 1999 has us at Debian 2.2r0. Which thankfully is on archive.org and is a mere 3 CD-ROMS for the i386 binaries. Installing that into VMWare wasn’t so difficult, and swapping CD images around I was able to get enough installed to start building things. For those of you who don’t want to install Debian, here is my pre-compiled Linux on Linux toolchain: i586-linux2.tar.gz. It’s i386 on i386, so you will need to be able to run i386 ELF exe’s. For OS X users that haven’t installed Catalina, you can try OSX-Linux-2.00-i586-gcc2723.tar.gz
I should point out, that although things have to be patched around for older versions of OSKit, 20020317 does build fine using GCC 2.95.2 (20000220) from Debian 2.2r0. So if you want to build in a VM, then you really don’t need any of this. But I’m strange, and I have my WSL2 Debian 10 to think about. So the easiest way to build GCC 2.x is with GCC 2.x so why not start in Debian?
First let’s prep our destination directory, and populate it like a good little cross compiler:
With that out of the way, we can build the ‘patched’ binutils that was on the old OSKit archive, I used this binutils-990818-patched.tar.gz
./configure --target=i586-linux --prefix=/usr/local/i586-linux2
make install
Next I’m going to build GCC 2.7.2.3 as OSKit mentions to use 2.7 and I figured why not the last of the line? It seemed like a good idea to me.
./configure --target=i586-linux --prefix=/usr/local/i586-linux2
make LANGUAGES=c libgcc1.a
make LANGUAGES=c
make LANGUAGES=c install
Building is a little weird, as I build the libgcc1.a first, then ONLY the C language, then install that. OSKit is written in C, and I didn’t feel like even looking at dependencies for C++/ObjectiveC
Unix person, I’m not a great one, so a quick hack to get the new GCC onto the path:
And now I can build stuff!… I then tar’d if up and copied it to my WSL instance, and now I can cross compile fine (a big plus of WSL2 is that you can install the 32bit support, and run old EXE’s! Take that Apple!)
Now it’s worth noting that a few things need to be edited, the ‘OSKit on UNIX’ thing won’t build cleanly and I didn’t investigate as Qemu is a thing now. So disable it in the modules.x86.pc file. Then run configure like this:
sh configure --host=i586-linux --prefix=/oskit --build=i586-linux --enable-modulefile=modules.x86.pc
Despite using the host, build or target setting it doesn’t pick up prefix of our cross compiler, so you have to manually edit Makeconf
Be sure to change the tool exports to look like this:
And finally remove -fno-strict-aliasing from OSKIT_FFLAGS, and now you can build!
The bonus is that it’ll build well under a minute on a modern machine.
As mentioned above you should now be able to take the hello world example kernel, and transform it to a multiboot, and boot it via grub.
Again this was such an exciting project I’d hate for it to just suddenly die in absolute obscurity. Maybe it’ll inspire others to try “assisted bare metal” programs, there was a DooM OS, among others in the era.
From the futon, I thought i’d publish the “Free386” of dos-extender that I had made before to GitHub.
If you want to publish it anyway, NASM and alink also included together and if there is a DOS environment, i thought that anyone can assemble it is out of luck. I found a bug in alink when generating flat mode.exe/.com file. It’s around here that i started to go crazy in a lot of ways(laughs)
Patching alink was done on Linux. I then used TOWNS-gcc to generate alink.exp, but i used the MP header format that TOWNS-gcc generates. We found a bug that the EXP file cannot run on its own. If this is not corrected, it is not possible to distribute including the development environment because it does not usually have the EXP execution environment. When I checked, there was a bug in how to allocate memory, and when the memory capacity started to exceed 8MB, i was allocating memory space that does not exist in the back.
In fact, Free386 at the time was a lot of files that didn’t work properly, and i was worried because it became unstable, it was a mistake in the allocation of memory that is not. However, to examine this, i created a tool to dump memory maps and paging (i.e., it’s included), it was quite a bit of a hassle.
Now, when the memory allocation bug is fixed, almost all DOS generic EXP files and many TOWNS software now work. However, towns-OS’s biggest mystery system is the CoCo/NSD driver around the moss, and the software written in F-BASIC386 does not start. When you come this far, you want to move it.
So we start editing the CoCo/NSD driver. After a little research, I immediately found out the following.
CoCo.EXE resides in DOS memory (real memory).
NSDD resides in extended memory.
This means that CoCo is presumed to load nsd files into extended memory and manage that information. Now the question is how to get that management information. Is there information in coco memory that resides like SYSINIT? I thought.
For now, to check the area, Free386, i attached the ability to dump the register status before and after the int service was executed by hooking up the interrupt. We analyzed \hcopy\deldrv.exp, which has the ability to remove the specified NSD driver, as “we need to find the NSD driver and the structure seems simpler” in the mechanism.
Information like this comes out a lot in turn. If you look at the changes in coco’s residency and other changes in behavior, you can see that int 8eh/AX=Cx0x is a CoCo service. At the same time, log int 8eh and make a resident.com file (included) run386. I also looked at the behavior of the EXE and explored the commonalities of both of them, and i thought, “How would I design the mechanism if I were you?” We looked up coco services from the perspective of “**.
Then we traced to a service that provides driver resident information called int 8eh/AX=C103h. Using this information, the NSD driver in extended memory could be correctly pasted into memory and implemented on the selector. To verify, I ran deldrv.exp using Free386 and was able to uninstall the NSD driver correctly.
Great. End.
…… I wish I had solved it in that way.
TOWNS-OS is an OS of a mysterious structure, and even though there is a BIOS (TBIOS) of 32bit Native mode for graphicprocessing, some services such as timers use the BIOS of FM-R compatible 16-bit operation as it is. It has an incomprehensible structure to use it from the 32bit program side while managing resources, such as a 16-bit timer BIOS.
In terrible cases, each time the processing and interrupt of real-mode resources such as timers and keyboards, switch the CPU to real mode, if during those real-mode BIOS processing, interrupt the PROCESSING of the BIOS, such as FM sound source or VSYNC occurs, it seems to return to protected mode once.
NSD driver called forRBIOS (for Real BIOS) is the intermediary for this incomprehensible structure. Just as DOS-Extender acts as an intermediary for 32-bit programs and MS-DOS, it acts as a real-mode BIOS and a 32bit program intermediary.
In a RUN386 environment, when forRBIOS.NSD is built in, interrupt vectors such as int 8eh are rewritten so that the NSD driver gets the interrupt. **Where is this information? ** That was a mystery that was left behind. However, RUN386 is a . No matter how much the INT log is done until you run EXP, it doesn’t look like it. If you look at the memory of the coco that is resident, there is no information that seems to be it.
If you’re not going to initialize the resident NSD itself. I thought, i patched the entry of the resident forRBIOS, and when the service routine was called, i tried to use the rough business of falling into an infinite loop was bingo.
Finally, you can now run exp files generated by F-BASIC386 and so on. The analysis results are recorded in the doc. By the way, when you run a program that does not require forRBIOS (written in High-C, etc.), the whole process is slower than when you initialize forRBIOS. I really think this is the specs of TOWNS-OS (laughs)
This is the first time in more than a decade since the development was suspended in 2001, and the DOS-Extender, which is compatible with RUN386, was made.
