Category Archives: i386

MS-DOS Player updates

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Poorly translated from TAKEDA toshiya’s blog..


2014/4/15
I has integrated source of i386 and i286 edition edition. 
In addition, in the i286 version, I added support for int 10h/16h. equivalent to 0.149 MAME, I was replaced with a 0.152 equivalent MAME core i386 i286 core. However, the i386 core, I have omit the TLB around.

Which is very cool, although I wasn’t sure about the MAME source code being open to other projects…?  I tried to contact the i86/i386 author vlinde but he then pulled his contact page.  I wanted to use i386 for something of my own, but the whole “Redistributions may not be sold, nor may they be used in a commercial product or activity.” really puts the damper on it.

I was able to get some simple XMS test program to run, but nothing of any substance.  No DOS4G/W or anything like that.  But if you re-build it specifying MS-DOS version 5.0, some of the MS-DOS utils and even command.com work!

The weird issue I had was running out of conventional RAM, because this program gives you nearly 1MB of conventional RAM… I was surprised, as I wasn’t expecting that much!

Terminator Rampage.

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terminator rampage front

Terminator Rampage

Back in October of 1993, this cool looking game, The Terminator Rampage was released.

But sadly I had a lowly 4MB 386sx-16 with CGA, so things like this game with it’s awesome VGA graphics were an impossibility.

Even more sad at the time was that ‘primitive’ 3d games like wolfenstein 3d also required VGA.

But as we all know a few short months later, DOOM was released, and then Terminator Rampage was quickly swept off the face of the earth.

I recently came across this page,  and I thought I’d give it a shot.  The requirements are pretty ‘minimal’:

  • Minimal 386DX-25 with 4MB of Ram, VGA & 18MB of disk space
  •  Recommended 386DX-33 or 486DX-33

So I was thinking Qemu could easily run this game.  Long story short, it doesn’t work.  Turns out Rampage needs EMS.  And for whatever reasons, running emm386.exe on Qemu (I tried a handful of versions) just crash on Qemu after initialization.  Failing with stock Microsoft EMM386, I tried JEMM, which loaded, and ran it’s built in EMS diagnostics OK, but trying to run Rampage resulted in a nice crash.

Qemu crash

Qemu crash

So giving up on Qemu, I tried it on DOSBox.  It runs but it is incredibly jerky.  So I thought I’d try PCem, and see how it runs there.

So the plus side is that PCem, is able to run MS-DOS & EMM386.EXE without issues.  It only took a few minutes to install MS-DOS 5.0 and Rampage on my ‘virtual’ 486DX2/66 with 8MB, of ram, and load up Rampage to be greeted with it’s jerky motion.

Thinking its something with emulation in general I fire up Norton SI to get some PCem scores how it benches against known good samples.

pcem 8.1 386DX33 Norton SI score

386DX-33Mhz 37.4

pcem 8.1 486DX2-66 Norton SI score

486DX/2-66Mhz 136.8

pcem 8.1 WinChip90 Norton SI score

WinChip-90 186

Then comparing the scores to this handy (if not ancient) Norton Si benchmark spread we see:

Pentium 60mhz
=============
IBM Clone               P5/60              256k              187.2
w/ Premiere MB

486 DX2/66mhz
=============
Elitegroup (ECS)       iDX2/66             256k              147.3
SA486P AIO-II
INTEL CDC,SIO&DPU

386 DX 33mhz
=============
Forex 36C100 iDX/33 128k 35.9

Well now that interesting, so at a ‘raw’ CPU level, PCem is delivering on what would be classical performance.  So for the heck of it, I load up DOOM, and it runs a bit choppy on the 386, but flies on the 486 & Winchip emulation.  Now that is strange.  And just to confirm…

Terminator Rampage Box (back)

Terminator Rampage Box (back)

They really thought this would be playable on a 486 @ 33Mhz.

So how does it choke?  While going straight is ‘ok’ turning around is so utterly sluggish that there is no feeling of immersion.  It feels like you are driving an incredibly slow tank.  At the same time, the more realistic sprites, and textures serve to make it look even more unrealistic.

So what am I talking about?

Well here is a screenshot of Wolfenstein 3d on the 386DX-33 (and more than playable).

Wolfenstein 3d

Wolfenstein 3d

As you can see, there is no ceiling, and no floor textures.  The walls are all uniform height, and the textures were clearly drawn by hand, giving it a very fake and ’16bit’ feeling.  I should also add on a capable 286, this game is playable.

Terminator Rampage

Terminator Rampage

Now at first it looks like it has a lot in common with the soon to be release DOOM, with textured ceilings and floors.

Doom

Doom

Now as you can see the difference in DOOM is the 2.5D effect of there being lower areas so you can go up and down stairs (while you cannot go under them).  Also Doom introduces dynamic lighting, and better sound rendering.

While I do like Rampage’s upfront map, as you can see thought, it is very square. In a small effort to ‘speed’ up Rampage you can turn off the ceilings and floors revealing a very Wolf3d like environment.  Unfortunately the more they tried to give the world  detail, the more it well just looks flat.

No ceilings, No floors.

No ceilings, No floors.

Which kind of kills the whole thing.  Maybe they should have left out things like water fountains.

High detail sprites

High detail sprites

Then you get things like this computer setup (one of the programmers? The accountant’s lamp is a nice touch) but it’s a sprite, so as you rotate around it, you always see the same face.

Ironically it’s these high resolution background sprites that make the environment feel less real, as they make the rooms feel too open, and too sparse.

Too open, and yet too sparse

Too open, and yet too sparse

It is the real paradox that in a good shooter you have lots of room, and things to duck behind, but the rooms feel too large, and look bizarre with the massive open spaces.  But it is more so a limitation of the time, with the engine being more of an improved Wolf3d engine, than taking a larger leap into being something more 2.5d or 3d like Doom (or the distant Quake).

Another thing that really bugged me was the doors.

Doom door

Doom door

In doom, the doors felt more ‘natural’ in that they weren’t super wide.

Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 10.44.09 PM

Generic office door in Rampage

But in rampage they are stretched wide giving the impression of why you can’t turn is you are incredibly wide..

Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 10.43.16 PM

Rampage ‘exit’ door

Even the ‘exit’ door texture still feels too wide.

I could probably get by the empty spaces, but it takes so long to turn around, and the controls feel so unnatural (they don’t even try to be a Wolf3d control-a-like) that it really feels klunky.  No matter what speed you play it at.

It really was an exercise in frustration.

Happy new year!

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I thought I’d go ahead and see if I could get Net/2 to build on my own.

Net/2

Net/2

Well it compiles, and tries to boot….   Sadly there is no adb or gdb support.  How on earth did people debug this stuff then?  I’m not sure where the crash location is, or what to do about it.  But I thought this was really cool.

I’ve also tried to track down 4.4BSD encumbered, which was released around the same time as the 4.4BSD-Lite1 which was after the AT&T vs BSDi/CSRG thing..  Or even the release that parallels the Net/2 release…

Anyways, happy 2014!

Qemu 1.7.0 released!

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The main qemu page hasn’t been updated yet, but the download page has the source to the new version of Qemu.

I’ve gone ahead and built binaries for OS X, both a full version, and  a i386 minimal version.

As always testing is very minimal, all I’ve done is installed MS-DOS 6.22 & Doom 1.1, and tested the SoundBlaster 16 emulation.  And as with the pre-release versions, the adlib code is still broken.  And Ive done the ‘better’ fix in this code regarding that.

I haven’t run anything else, including fun things like the PowerPC & OS X emulation, MIPS with Windows NT, or even trying anything x64 based as I’m sure it is still broken from back in the Qemu 0.90 days.

Virtual Xenix & the internet

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This is probably the most significant Xenix post I’ve made since the old days when I managed to get Xenix running in Qemu all those years ago.

3com network card

3comB network card

What has long been a frustration with the beleaguered Xenix community is that although there was a TCP/IP package for Xenix (and a much required streams package…) it only worked with a handful of ethernet cards.  And all of them were early 3com’s.  While the world was using NE2000’s on just about everything, the most common ethernet board Xenix would talk to was the 3c503, which is getting harder and harder to find as the years go on by.

But right now none of this matters.

I was looking at this article on setting up Apollo Domain UNIX, on MESS.  And apparently it will do networking!  Which is cool, so I poke around MESS, and what do I see? 3c503.c. Could it be true?

Now I ended up having to download the source to mame 0.151 (mame0151s.zip) and building it on OS X.  Of course remembering to alter the makefile to include the ‘USE_NETWORK=1’ statement, and build for Mess.  And just as it looks like something out of SIMH, Mess makes use of libpcap which means that you are *unable* to send/receive on the host computer. (OS X & Win32 binaries).  And of course you’ll need a ROM & Xenix diskettes.

Installing Xenix is pretty straightforward as long as you know your system key, and how to navigate the mess UI without rebooting mess or exiting by mistake (scrolllock on the PC, function/Delete on OS X).

First create a hard disk, and as always it should be ~500MB max.

chdman.exe createhd -o xenix.chd -chs 1015,16,63
chdman – MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) manager 0.149u1 (Aug 10 2013)
Output CHD: xenix.chd
Compression: none
Cylinders: 1015
Heads: 16
Sectors: 63
Bytes/sector: 512
Sectors/hunk: 8
Logical size: 523,837,440

then with the disk in hand, I just setup a 486 like this:

./mess64 at486 -harddisk1 xenix.chd -isa2 3c503 -ramsize 8388608 -floppydisk1 xenix/n1.vfd

Naturally you’ll need to setup the CMOS, for your memory size, and the hard disk.  The BIOS I’m using didn’t autodetect the IDE drive, but it doesn’t matter as I know it’s characteristics as I created it.

From there Xenix was a pretty straight forward deal.  Mess has good floppy drive emulation so it just worked.  Adding TCP-IP was just as involved, and all went well.  When it came time to install TCP & the network driver, remember to use thinnet, as the thicknet transceiver isn’t connected (as it would seem).  The 3c503 is softset, so I went with IRQ 5, port 0x300, and thinnet, and it works fine for me!

mess xenix networking

Xenix TCP/IP in action, inside of MESS!

Remember you will not be able to attach to it from your computer.  Instead you must attach from another computer.

Also MESS tries to emulate true to hardware so it’ll be just as slow on MESS as it was on the real hardware.  I suppose you could go with the at386 driver, but yeah it’ll be slow.  The current at586 driver has issues booting from the hard disk, and I didn’t mess with it too much as Xenix is known to have issues with some Pentium systems.

Although I think the next place for adventure is the emulated Adaptec 1542CF.

Booting from USB in VMware Workstation

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(note this is a guest post from Tenox)

Jason’s note on hybrid bootable ISO reminded me of a recent discovery. I have a bootable USB pen drive that I wanted to boot in VMware Workstation. Normally impossible, but there always is a work around! Turns out the problem is with the VMware built-in BIOS and more specifically lack of USB boot support. All you have to do is get a bootable media, floppy or CDROM with a boot loader that can redirect you to the USB device. I’m using Plop. Important thing to remember is to connect the USB pen drive to the virtual machine in a pass through mode. Also it’s very very slow.

Everyone mentioned this yesterday…

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275,000 transistors of awesomeness!

275,000 transistors of awesomeness!

Kind of interesting is that Linux has finally dropped support for the 80386 microprocessor.

The 386 is perhaps one of the top ten things that has changed our world, along with 4.3BSD .

No, really!

The 386 microprocessor was the first CPU by Intel that was single sourced.  This means that Intel, and only Intel would fabricate the 386 processor.  Before this time, Intel had licensed their processors to other companies (Siemens, AMD, Harris, IBM etc) So that if there was some kind of production issue at Intel other companies could manufacture 8086,80186s and 80286s.  However this all changed with the 386, as Intel stopped renewing these agreements with other companies (IBM had a license that included the 386, although they were slow in making their own), so now Intel was in charge of its destiny.

The 386 brought three major changes onto the then champion processor the 286.  The first being a 32bit processor where it could handle larger data sizes than the 16bit 286 & 8086.  The 386 also included a larger memory model, the so called “flat mode” where it could directly address 4GB of combined code+data, while the 286 could address 1GB it was limited to 64kb segments.  Lastly the 386 introduced hardware virtualization, the “v86” mode where the 386 could emulate multiple 8086 processors, allowing people to have multiple ‘virtual machines’ on the desktop.

At the time the only consumer grade 32bit processor was the hybrid 32/16 68000 from Motorola.  The 68000 could work with 32bit data, but it was restricted to a 16bit data bus, and only could address 24bits of RAM (16 megabytes).  The 68000 however did not include any kind of memory management unit (MMU) making things like porting UNIX improbable (The SUN-1 workstation included a custom MMU).  Because of the open nature of the IBM PC, clone manufacturers were able to leapfrog IBM, and release 386 based machines before IBM got around to releasing the PS/2 model 80.  It was this that effectively brought 32bit computing to the masses with the Compaq Deskpro.

Compaq's 386 Deskpro

Compaq’s 386 Deskpro

The 8086 processor could address 1MB of RAM, with its 20bit address bus.  However to preserve some compatibility with the 8080 processor it was decided that the 8086 (and 8088) CPUs would work with 64kb segments.  This became a massive headache for years as you could not easily contain more than 64kb of data at a time as you would exceed a segment.  Compiler vendors made some workarounds via the large & huge memory models, but porting a program from a 32bit minicomputer (VAX) would prove difficult if it addressed large amounts of memory, and would require a rewrite.  The 286 increased the addressable memory to 16MB, and included a limited MMU, which enabled an address space of 1GB.  However the 286 was flawed in that again the 286 could only work in 64kb segments, and in order to work with large amounts of memory, the processor had to be shifted to protected mode.  However in protected mode, you couldn’t (easily) switch back to real mode.  This needlessly delayed the adoption of protected mode environments, as you would then lose access to the sizable, and growing, library of MS-DOS programs.  Although workarounds were in place for things like OS/2 and DOS Extenders, they were hacks and couldn’t fix the fundamental 64kb issue.  The 386 built upon the 286’s foundation and included a flat memory model where it could address all 4GB of addressable memory in a single segment.  This meant that you could now use massive amounts of data on a consumer grade machine.

For a while the only 32bit environments were Xenix and MS-DOS via DOS Extenders this proved to be a huge liability and effectively stagnated the industry for a long while.  The 286 was a massive determent.  Making things worse was IBMs insistence that the new OS/2 be able to run on the 286, while Microsoft wanted to create OS/2 to run on the 386, and ignore the IBM AT all together. Basically the 286 was created with the assumption that the 8086 wouldn’t be anywhere near as popular as it was.

With the ability to address large amounts of RAM programs only seen on minicomputers and mainframes were finding their way to the microcomputer such as AutoCAD, Oracle, Links 386 Pro, and of course many in house programs where departments now wouldn’t have to pay to run on then ‘big’ minicomputers.  Combined with the 386’s MMU it was also possible to use more memory than was available in the computer, also known as virtual memory.  The 386 made this transparent to the program, only the 32bit environment needed to handle the swapping.

Finally the last big feature of the 386 was v86 mode.  V86 mode in short is a hardware virtualization platform where the 386 can emulate multiple 8086 processors in hardware.  Each virtual machine can get its own isolated memory space, virtual hardware.  Effectively 8086 programs (such as MS-DOS) can run unaltered inside of v86 mode, with the added benefit of being able to run more than one at a time. Windows/386 lead the charge into this new world of virtual machines for the end user.  Before this point, the only wide scale virtual machine environment was the IBM 370 mainframe which could also create virtual mainframes within itself allowing groups to share a single mainframe, but run incompatible software platforms all at the same time.

Thanks to its capabilities the 386 also brought UNIX to the end user.  First with Xenix, then Microport SYSV, and with the removal of AT&T code BSD was able to be released on the 386 via 386 BSD (and later BSDi’s BSD/OS).  During this timeframe the research OS, Minix was extended by Bruce Evans to be able to use some of the 386’s features which then gave rise to Linux.

Thanks to cheap commodity based 32bit computers, and the GNU projects development tools (binutils, gcc, bash) people could then finally realize GNU’s dream of bringing a free and open UNIX like operating system to the masses.

Needless to say, a lot has changed since 1991, and Linux now moving beyond the 386 processor is no surprise.  The rapid adoption of 64bit computing via AMDs extensions, and the new forthcoming 64bit ARM processors do signal the eventuality that one day Linux will even drop support for 32bit processors… Although I wouldn’t expect that for another 20 years.  Even Intel has ceased manufacturing the 386 processor in 2007.

So it is now time to say good bye to the 386 processor.  At the same time thanks to full software emulation, you will never truly be dead. And as always you can check out Linux’s early versions.

Dell UNIX Lives Again!

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(please note that this is a guest post from Antoni Sawicki)

Dell UNIX is so ultra rare among rare Unix species that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. I have been hunting this elusive but important piece of computer history for well over 15 years now. Fortunately thanks to Charles H. Sauer and his excellent blog post I was finally able to lay my hands on disk and tape images and the restoration process begun.

The install tape

The system can be installed from either a tape or network server (presumably NFS). Unfortunately no virtualization software can emulate a tape drive. Hopes for a network install are even slimmer since the required network support floppy disk has been lost and chances of suitable Ethernet driver working in Bochs or Qemu are equal to that of finding the lost floppy disk.

I have decided to try a hard disk image from a readily pre-installed system. The original Dell 486 workstation had a 1GB SCSI hard disk. Unfortunately neither Dell UNIX supports LBA mode nor Qemu/Bochs support the Adaptec 154x controller required by the OS.

As all normal install options have been exhausted, the only option left was to use a second hard disk image as source of cpio archive files. Booting from the two install floppies and attaching two disk images was a snap. The next step was to inject the tape “file” in to a right place on the disk, so it can be read by cpio command. A hard disk in Dell UNIX is pretty much unusable without a valid SysV partition and VTOC. Fortunately dellsetup command does it all for you. Once VTOC was put in place I’ve attached the transfer disk image as a loopback device in my host OS. In couple of iterations I was able to aim the host os dd if=file1 of=/dev/loop0 bs=512 seek=offset at the right place, which you work out using prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/1s0 command. Then cpio -ict < /dev/dsk/1s1 was able to list contents of the emulated tape… with errors…

In my infinite wisdom, for some unknown reason I’ve assumed that LBA addressing is required above 540MB. So to be on a safe side I have made the hard disk images 512 MB. What a mistake it was! I have lost several hours trying to figure out cpio header errors coming from the disk… By pure coincidence, while the tape archive was installing (with errors) I was researching for this very blog article and found that LBA starts at 504 MB… Recreating the hard disk images just few MB smaller took all tape and prior boot problems away!

Once the cpio archive was extracted I have made few final touches taken from the original tape install script. After a reboot Dell UNIX booted perfectly. You can experience this by using the firstboot image file. The final part of installation was injecting the second tape file containing System V PKG file to the transfer disk image and running pkgadd -d /dev/dsk/1s1. This is what’s included on allsoft.img.

Dell Unix at First Boot

Some final notes on running the OS:

  • To enable mouse to work:
    • Qemu just add “-chardev msmouse,id=msmouse -device isa-serial,chardev=msmouse” to the launch arguments.
    • Bochs add to the config file:
      mouse: type=serial, enabled=1 
      com1: enabled=1, mode=mouse
      then you have to kill mousemgr process and prevent from starting by deleting /etc/rc2.d/S25mse
      then edit /usr/lib/X11/Xconfig:
      disable Xqueue
      enable Microsoft Mouse
  • To enable keyboard to work correctly in VirtualBOX start with Num Lock OFF.
  • You can use qemu-img utility to convert the image to VMware vmdk to use in VirtualBox.
  • To run X window type startx

X11 and all its glory

  • To attach it to internet use SLIP as there is no working Ethernet driver.  Contrary to most UNIXen of the time, the command is not slattach, but rather slipattach.  Thankfully it does work the same way.  I have found that running Dell Unix with VirtualBOX, along with Windows NT 4.0 I was able to connect into the Dell Unix VM, and get network access.  Just set the two VM’s up for a named pipe (\\.\pipe\dellunix) and make one of them a server, and start that VM 1st.  The steps to prepare Windows NT have been outlined before.

Telnet via SLIP

Legal disclaimer: Dell UNIX is a commercial software and should not be distributed without manufacturers permission. However as the operating system has been dead for 20 years and with a long tradition from Unix Heritage Society and Bitsavers I’m publishing this in good faith under abandonware category. If Dell or any other copyright holder wishes this software removed, please let me know.

Attached are:

  • firstboot image
  • all (pkg) software installed
  • setup instructions if you wish to install from scratch.

Download:

You may also be interested in my post about a sister System V operating system – Interactive UNIX:

Update: Dell Unix now runs on 86Box with higher resolution and proper networking.

BBS’ing with Windows/386 & Windows 3.0 under Qemu or how I learned to love rlfossil

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A while back I had seen this fantastic site, “Hates the internet” with a great write up on setting up a BBS on Qemu. In retrospect it did inspire me a bit later to get my BBS going with Qemu, but I chose to use OS/2 once I found out about SIO’s vmodem feature.

HTI (Hates the internet) chose this program called rlfossil, which is for MS-DOS..

RLFOSSIL is an implementation of multi-line serial port driver corresponding to the Fido/Opus/Seadog level 5 specification and a simple HAYES-compatible modem emulator. It allows applications usually worked through BBS’s to run on the Internet, or in IP-based local net.er, and rlogin and telnet emulation using IP services numbers 513 & 23. RLFOSSIL allows combined work with other FOSSIL drivers (X00,BNU etc.).

So, I thought between that, and all the Windows/386 excitement I’d try for something even more insane. How about running a multiline BBS on Windows?

In the same effort, I was going to use Qemu 0.14.1, with MS-DOS 4.01 (the first version I could find that came with share.exe), and Windows/386 2.11. The installation of MS-DOS 4.01 worked fine on an 80MB disk image, thankfully it was one of the things that DOS 4 could do better than 3 is large disk images… Yes, I know 3.31 could as well, but it didn’t come with share so it was out.  One strange thing after install was this message…

It is kind of foreboding that DOS is warning me that because of my “large” disk I better run share. Since I plan on having a multi node BBS all in one computer, I need to run share anyways.

The next exciting part was installing Windows/386 2.11. The installation went pretty smooth, and with Qemu the mouse worked fine.  So far, so good.  I couldn’t use himem.sys that comes with Windows/386, nor could I use the himem.sys that comes with MS-DOS as the Windows/386 version complains that that A20 line is already active (?) and the MS-DOS one has Windows complaining that the HMA is already in use. Sadly, then my conventional memory footprint will be unsatisfactory, but I don’t see any way around it.

The next part is configuring rlfossil. rlfossil needs a driver to talk to the network card, and you can find them on crynwr, namely the ‘other‘ packet archive, which contains NE2000 drivers.  Keeping with HTI, I’m going to use the NE2000 and configure Qemu with the PCI NE2000 driver.

Packet drivers are loaded from the command line something like this:

ne2000 0x60 11 0xc100

This loads the driver on software interrupt 0x60, and by default the PCI NE2000 is configured for IRQ 11, port 0xc100.  Qemu 1.6.0 changed the PCI NE2000 to use port 0xc000 for what it is worth..

So keeping with the HTI tradition, I’m going to put my packet driver (ne2000.com) and unpack the rlfossil archive in c:\packet. The next thing to do is configure rlfossile which uses the wattcp configuration file.  Since I’m going to use the usermode NAT and a redirect, I configure my VM like this:

Wattcp.cfg

Address:10.0.2.15
Netmask:255.255.255.0
Gateway:10.0.2.2
DNS: 10.0.2.3

With that all in place now it’s time to configure the config.sys/autoexec.bat.  Some things are going to be different from a normal install because we plan to run a BBS, and multiple instances of it!

So my config.sys looks like:

FILES=96
STACKS=0,0
DEVICE=C:\DOS\ANSI.SYS
SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM /P /E:768

And my autoexec.bat is like this:

PATH C:\WIN386;C:\DOS
PROMPT $P$G
SHARE
SET TEMP=C:\TEMP
CD \PACKET
NE2000 0x60 11 0xC100
RLFOSSIL 0 4 WIN386

And of course launching Qemu I do it like this:

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -net nic,model=ne2k_pci -net user-redir tcp:23::23 -hda telegard.qcow2

This configures the VM for 16MB of ram (which would have cost a FORTUNE back then), the PCI NE2000, and it’ll redirect telnet from my host machine into the VM.

And just like HTI, I went with telegard, because it supports fossil based ports.

Well that sure was a *LOT* of work, and surprisingly testing it with a single node, actually works.  And you can bring up a few other MS-DOS prompts and it’ll work fine. But if you launch the second node…

Disaster struck.  So needless to say, while Windows/386 was pretty slick for the day it just couldn’t measure up.  So I figured for the hell of it, I’d try Windows 3.0 Â I mean I would have imagined that Windows 3.0 most certainly could NOT handle this kind of challenge.

So with some disks shuffled, I fired it up and..

Two node telegard under Windows 3.0

It actually worked!  So with a LOT of chaos going on I managed to get Trade Wars 2002 running, although I couldn’t figure out how to automatically figure out the node.. Hell the whole door configuration thing is.. bizarre. Synchronet really kicks ass in regards to easy of configuration.

Running TW2002, two copies

And using PIF’s to configure each node for some easy of launching, and some reduced memory, I could easily run all four nodes that rlfossil can support.

Four Nodes!

I have to admit, Windows 3.0 really is impressive considering all the UAE’s and how generally crappy we thought it was at the time.  I’m sure even emulated having a multiple Ghz cpu helps quite a bit.

460KB free!

And look at all that memory.. I guess it’s pretty impressive it even works.  Since Windows anything throttles the CPU at 100% I’m not going to put this online…. Although at the same time combined with an CPU idle program (is there a Windows 3.0 idle vxd?) it sits ok, but who wants a single user system in 2011?