So I’ve always heard about the incompatibility, and I thought I’d give it a try in PCem. Â I know I used to run DR-DOS 5.00 and Windows 3.0 (because of the CGA driver) and it worked fine.
So just to prove it works, here I am installing Windows 3.0 on DR-DOS 5
Installing Windows 3.0
And even better, running Word 2.0! Although I did install a whopping 4MB of ram on this virtual 286.
MS Word 2.0
And to make it all the better, I changed to a 386, and re-installed Windows 3.0 and yes it runs in enhanced mode. Â And I can run DR-DOS in a windows.
386 enhanced mode
Of course there was the AARD code, in the Windows 3.1 betas, but as far as I know that didn’t make it to release. Â I was able to upgrade to a virtual VGA adapter, and update to Windows 3.1 in standard mode on a 286, just fine
Windows 3.1 standard mode on a 286
And DR-DOS worked through the standard mode task swapper
DR-DOS in standard mode
But Windows 3.1 in enhanced mode always locked up during setup. Â Maybe a PCem bug? Â I’m not sure. Â But Windows 3.0 works great.
A few days ago I wrote a basic packet sniffer / analyzer for Windows for fun. I was working with raw sockets for another application and out of curiosity winged a small packet sniffer in just 200 lines of code. I actually used it already several times to resolve some firewall port blocking issues, instead of spinning up Wireshark, so I decided to release it to public.
The good:
Portable, a single, tiny exe
Easy to use
Doesn’t install any driver like libpcap
Extensible, just 200 lines of simple code
The bad:
It’s very basic and doesn’t allow anything outside of simple unicast TCP, UDP and ICMP, most importantly layer 2, broadcasts, multicasts, etc are out of question
Currently it doesn’t directly support filtering, however you can just pipe it to findstr to filter for anything you want
Raw socket limitations are possibly the biggest issue, but if you just want to find out simple stuff like traffic going to a given port or ip address it’s a perfect little handy dandy tool to carry around.
To use snoopy you specific IP address of the interface on which you want to listen:
There also is a verbose mode which shows some more detailed protocol information:
Today I decode ICMP message types, TCP flags, sequence, ack and window numbers and DSCP, ECN, TTL and Dont Fragment flags for IP. I’m thinking of embedding /etc/protocols and /etc/services in a .h file to resolve them on the fly.
Just stumbled across this: someone has forked Windows NT 4.0 and created an open source version of it. But wait, forked what? Windows source code doesn’t live on Github. Is it ReactOS? No! Upon some digging, it was apparently born from the leaked source code of NT4.0, some W2K bits and 2003 WRK…
Looking at activity the project seems to be alive and well. There is some background information and discussion going on BetaArchive for those interested.
I wonder what Microsoft has to say about this 🙂
EDIT* for those from the future, you may be interested in this followup – OpenNT 4.5 revisited, where it’s compiled and run!
So while debugging Dynamips I got this fun message under GDB. Â Of course it doesn’t tell you WHAT function did it, or HOW it was trying to do it. Â Fantastic.
Thankfully Dennis Yurichev’s blog gave me the hint to put a breakpoint on ‘OutputDebugStringA’ and sure enough I could see Dynamips trying to treat a socket like a stdio file handle.  Something you can’t do in Win32 world.
On the plus side, I just had to do a small re-write of some functions and I can talk to the Dynamips hypervisor! Â Idle and JIT are working too! Â Along with WinPcap and UDP transports.
It’s been a bad hardware day for me, my MacBook Air that I bought in 2012 stopped working. Â And it’ll cost at least half the price of a new one to fix it. Â So instead of that I don’t want to spend that much right now so I picked up a cheap used Fujitsu laptop. Â It had Windows 7 on it, which qualifies for Windows 10, so I figured I’d just use that free upgrade!
Wow that was a whole day shot by. Â Although now that I’m posting this from Windows 10, it is much more faster and responsive than Windows 7.
The first big problem I had was that this laptop didn’t have *ANY* updates installed.  Service pack 1 for Windows 7 is required for the upgrade, and that is a 1GB download on it’s own!  Then after that, it demanded KB2952664 which wanted forever to install, so I said screw it and run the Windows update, which was 199 updates to go. So after all those hours, I’m finally ready to install Windows 10!
I wanted an upgrade!
So during the install, about 25% of the way in, 83% copying files it suddenly reboots, and then starts to restore my prior copy of Windows. Â Great, something failed. Â Once back in Windows 7 I get this wonderful message:
I love these cryptic errors!
0xc1900101 – 0x20004 The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during the INSTALL_RECOVERY_ENVIRONMENT operation.
After trying more updates, defraging, it failed to upgrade another two times. Â So I googled some more, and it turns out that a lot of people had laptops like this Fujitsu that were partitioned 50/50 and people would convert their disk from a basic MBR to a dynamic disk, so they could destroy the un-needed and wasteful D drive, and merge it into a nice C drive. Â So what is the fix? UGH you have to convert the disk back to a basic disk with a normal MBR. Â Except You can’t easily revert as you can convert. Â So a bunch of more time wasted with a Windows Vista DVD that can read the disk, and an external drive let me copy windows off, redo the disk as MBR and restore Windows.
After all that drama the Windows 10 upgrade went without a hitch!
Bottom line, is that it’s probably easier to just buy a copy of Windows 10. Â There is a utility to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk, Partition Wizard Pro which costs $39. Â Which is better towards a copy of 10.
It’s hard to believe that it has been 20 years since the release of Windows 95. Â But here we are.
Windows 95 started it’s life as a 32bit upgrade from Windows 3.1 code named ‘Chicago’ to compete with the 32bit version of OS/2 for the desktop. Â Chicago is more famous for it’s incredible delays as the project suffered from feature creep, along with a complete UI redesign. Â It’s also worth noting that even back as far as October of 1992, just after the release of Windows 3.1 Microsoft was already hard at work on Win32s, the Win32 subset and compatibility layer for Windows 3.1 to run Windows NT Win32 applications.
In my opinion, Windows 3.0 was the most significant piece of software that Microsoft has ever shipped. Â This was the point where they broke away from IBM, and went their own way. Â And it showed that they were capable of launching a major environment without the support of their biggest partner. Â Although sadly, OS/2 paid the price.
95 launch
Windows 95 would be a close second as to what would be Microsoft’s most significant software, as it brought 32bit computing to the masses, along with a completely different user interface, one that remains popular to this day with the start button. Â Even the marketing used to Rolling Stones song ‘Start me up’. Â Windows 95 is also the first time (and last) that I can ever recall there being a Microsoft release party where actual users showed up, but were enthused. Â Back when OS X shipped on physical media, you would see Apple fans camping out for the latest release, but for Microsoft this was the one time where the next release was going to be so significant with a whole new generation of applications like Office 95, and a much more easier to use interface people really were excited about it. Â As much as Windows 10 is a great improvement on Windows 8, I don’t see anywhere near this kind of enthusiasm compared to Windows 95.
Program Manager
Before Windows 95 people had to fight the Program Manager, which was a MDI application which means it has windows inside of windows. Â And it’s easy to obscure and lose place of programs. Â I’ve seen users re-install applications because ‘they lost them’ not realizing the program group was hiding behind another window. Â To many average users Program Manager was a nightmare to work with on a daily basis.
File Manager
And to say that it’s complimentary program, File manager was also a MDI nightmare to work with was an understatement. Â Again windows get hidden behind windows, it is all inside of another window so it can be confusing moving things around, and trying to get a good view. Â To an average user, it’s tedious to work with and to get two full screen views of files, requires two copies of the application to run, which in the days of 4MB of ram or less was a luxury when you figure they were running an application as well. Â Not to mention since there is no task bar, it was also common for people to launch multiple copies of an application since it would be hiding behind a window they didn’t know about.
Windows 95 Desktop
The Windows 95 UI solved all of these problems by showing us what is running, and by unifying Program Manager, and File Manager into one. Â Now we can see what is running, we have a desktop to move things around, and we can open up multiple file windows and move them around at will. Â Even in this simple screen shot with multiple applications running, it’s trivial to see what is going on, and how to navigate it. Â We take it for granted today, but compared to the old Program Manager, File Manager paradigm this was simply an upgrade to get enthusiastic about!
Mikol Furneaux proudly shows off his Windows 95
And just look at this picture, isn’t this the look of excitement? Â Over a piece of software? Â From Microsoft? Â The transition from 16bit to 32bit was so great, I really wonder if they ever again will have this kind of appeal. Â Going from 32bit to 64bit has been so seamless I suspect many 64bit users don’t even know they are.
32bit applications promised (and delivered) on greater stability, and of course being able to actually use RAM that people had bought. Â It was the end of segmented 64kb segments, and the use of 32bit flat memory models, that even in the game industry everyone had been flocking to 32bit MS-DOS extenders. Â Now 32bit was going mainstream on the desktop. Â Even though Borland had captured so much of the developer mindshare on MS-DOS, they just couldn’t achieve the same success level on Windows, and especially with Windows 95, it started the rise of Visual C++ and Visual Basic everywhere.
Networking was another strong point of Windows 95, as it included not only LAN support for TCP/IP, IPX and NetBEUI out of the box, but it also included dialup PPP support for all three protocols. Â This is basically where other consumer OS really blew it, and why Microsoft not only ended up owning the desktop, but also the server space in corporations. Â It was a common practise to sell the networking stack, and applications separately making a networked machine quite expensive. Â SCO Xenix charged for the OS, Streams, and TCP/IP. Â IBM charged separately for their TCP/IP as well. Â By 1994 IBM started to see this as a mistake, and included DIALUP ONLY networking for Warp. Â This stop gap measure was barely acceptable for 1994, but as the PC world got more and more connected this meant LAN connections along with wide area which IBM dropped the ball by charging yet even more for Warp Connect. Â Where Windows for workgroups, Windows 95, and Windows NT included all of this, and multi-protocol support.
Microsoft also was busy creating their own online service, MSN, a competitor to AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy et al. Â There is a better writeup on winsupersite than I could do, since I never did use it. Â But the upshoot is that Microsoft was late to the internet party, and did not include any browser with the first retail version of Windows 95. Â Later versions of course did include Internet Explorer.
The most significant early version of Internet Explorer has to be version 3, which is when Microsoft finally started to take it serious, and included things like SMTP/POP3 and USENET clients. Â Back then, USENET was actually big. Â This is before the rise of every website being a forum, instead we had a global distributed database that everyone could post onto. Â It wasn’t instant though, so it could take days for a reply. Â The kind of thing we take for granted now with many AJAX enabled websites able to alert you right away, or you can check the status with a simple refresh.
A worker packs the shelves of PC World, Croydon, with copies of the Microsoft Windows 95 upgrade computer package. The package will go on sale at midnight across the country.
I may have to touch on the rise and fall of Internet explorer at a later date, but check out the exciting back of the Windows 95 box that included Internet Explorer:
Windows 95 box SE, back
For those who want to remember, the Windows 95 start sound!
And speaking of which next year will be 20 years of Windows NT 4.0, and how it utterly changed the server market forever.
So I was hammering out something with SheepShaver (more on that later!) and I thought a quick test of just how fast SheepShaver is vs a real PowerMAC would be interesting. Â So I was playing with my old copy of SoftPC, which is 68000 based, but There were PowerPC versions, years ago when I bought a G4 to run OS X to only find out that it wasn’t supported (the dark days of OS X Server 1.0, before the 10.0 public beta) I used to run Windows NT 4.0 on SoftPC on MacOS 8.6. Â Ugh, dark times indeed!
So with some luck, I got SoftPC 3.0 up and running on MacOS 7.5.3 using SheepShaver for Windows. Then I noticed that unlike SoftPC for the 68000, SoftPC for the PowerPC emulates a 486! Â So how does DooM run? Â A little slow, it’s kind of dream like.
And much to my amazement it runs! Â And I was further impressed that there is a shim sound driver, and it works!
So I made a quick video to compare DooM for Windows vs DooM for MS-DOS on this setup.
Yes it’s pointless, but I kinda think it’s really cool.
As a bonus, here is E1M1 under MacOS 8.0. Â The MIDI support in 8.0 is MUCH more stronger than 7.5.3! Â And I should add, it actually feels faster on 8.0 than 7.5.3
I know I’m crazy, but for some reason the update didn’t kick off automagically on my 7 box, so I fished around and found the direct download here.
From what I’ve read VMware Player 7 updates should work with 10.
Time to see what breaks, and what works!
The first issue I had is that after the upgrade, VMware Player couldn’t connect to the bridge adapters. Luckily the fix is really easy.
Bring up your network connections, go to your physical Ethernet adapter, bring up it’s properties, and add in a ‘service’.
Restoring the VMware Bridge service
Then select the VMware Inc, vendor and the VMware Bridge Protocol. Now with that done, all I had to do is then bind the bridge to the Ethernet adapter.
Configuring the Bridged virtual interface
And now my VM’s can talk to my network without any of that NAT nonsense. And I didn’t have to re-install VMware Player to fix this either!
Some real fun came from upgrading my wife to 2015. She uses Outlook 2013 to talk to an IMAP server. No big deal right? Well after upgrading when she tried to send an email she would get the ever so helpful error 0x800CCC13 . So her server is setup to use SSL to talk to the outbound SMTP server. It even has a valid certificate! The best part is that verifying her account and IT WILL SEND THE TEST EMAIL. Yes, that is right, Outlook 2013 cannot send to SMTP servers, but the test and diagnostics work. And in the age of multigigabyte installations all the user is left with is a hexadecimal error code of 0x800CCC13. Frankly this is totally inexcusable in 2015, let alone in the 1990s. Hell even OS/2 had a system to look up cryptic error messages. I guess that was an IBM thing.
So anyways, the best part is the ‘fix’. Apparently according to here, the upgrade to Windows 10 corrupts some DLL’s that are a part of Outlook 2013, and they need to be repaired. Simply run the following command as administrator:
sfc /scannow
It can take upwards of 10 minutes to complete. After we ran this, we re-ran Outlook 2013, and all of our dozens of attempted test messages sent.
Another possible problem is that the Exchange server plugin is interfering with the IMAP/SMTP plugins, and it needs to be disabled/deleted. I haven’t had to go there since she can send emails now.
Well from popular request I finally got around to loading this up. I went ahead with my favourite retro emulator, PCem for this, as it can nicely emulate an EGA display, unlike most emulators which do VGA, however when it comes to older versions of Microsoft products they really can detect the difference between EGA and VGA.
So, to start off, I downloaded from the project page, this version of PCem, compiled it, and installed MS-DOS 4.01 , from April of 1989. The Windows 3.0 Debug Release 1.14 itself is dated from February 22nd, 1989. Which I figured is close enough to the time period. I’m using the 486SX2/50 because I’m too impatient for the 386 speeds, but it does work fine on 386 or higher emulators. It does NOT work with any 286 emulation. I’m also using the HIMEM.SYS from MS-DOS 4.01 vs the one with the Windows 3.0 (Alpha? Beta? Technical Preview?) since it is slightly newer.
There is no setup program per say, rather it just xcopies all the files to a directory, and from there you run ‘d.bat’ and away you go. This version is hard coded to an EGA display, which again is the reason I went with PCem. Once you start it up, you are greeted with:
Windows v3.0 Debug Release 1.14
And it identifies itself as Windows Version 2.1
Look at all the memory!
And first thing to notice is that on my setup with 8MB of ram, I have over 6MB of RAM free. Compare this to regular Windows 2.1 which gives me 399Kb of ram in my current setup.
Windows 2.1 running in real mode
And with Windows/386 Version 2.1 it provides 383Kb of real memory, along with 6.7MB of EMS memory, as the Windows/386 Hypervisor includes EMS emulation.
Windows/386 memory
Of course the major limitation of Windows 2 is that it runs in real mode, or in the case of Windows/386 an 8086VM. As I mentioned a while back in a post about Windows 3.0, This was game changing.
As now with Windows running in protected mode, all the memory in my PC is available to Windows, and I am using MS-DOS, with nothing special.
Besides the limitation of being EGA only, the Debug version of 3.0 is that there is no support for MS-DOS applications, as WINOLDAP.MOD is missing.
NO MS-DOS for you!
This is clearly an interim build of Windows 3.0 as mentioned in Murray Sargent’s MSDN blog Saving Windows from the OS/2 Bulldozer. As mentioned from the article they began their work in the summer of 1988, so considering this is early 1989 it shows just how much progress they had made in getting Windows 2 to run in protected mode. Along with Larry Osterman’s MSDN blog post Farewell to one of the great ones, which details how the Windows 3.0 skunkworks project was writing the new improved 386 hypervisor, and how Windows 3.0 got the green light, and changed the direction of not only Microsoft but the entire software industry.
I’ve been able to run most of the Windows 2.1 applets, however I’ve not been able to run Excel 2, or Word 1. I suspect at this point that only small memory model stuff from Windows 1 or 2 is capable of running. Although at the same time, when 3.0 did ship, you really needed updated versions of Word 2 and Excel 3 to operate correctly.
Windows 3.0 Debug Release 1.14 on a 12MB system
The applets from Windows 2.1 seem to work a LOT better than the one from Windows/386 2.1 if that helps any.
This is an interesting peek at an exceptionally early build of Microsoft Windows.
I could also call this ‘going with the flow’… So instead of fighting the system, like I usually do today we are going to do things the way everyone else enjoys doing things, and that is building stuff with tun/tap and bridges.
YUCK.
Ok, so I’m using Windows, and that is what I’m assuming you are as well for this ‘guide’.
The first thing you’ll need is the tun/tap driver for Windows, and the easiest way to get that is via OpenVPN. Â The next thing you’ll need is Qemu, again I’m just using the pre-compiled stuff right here.
Go ahead, and install them both. Â With OpenVPN installed, when you open your control panel, and check out your network interfaces you’ll see something like this:
One NIC, One Tap
Good.
Now for my example, I’m going to add another TAP interface. Â TAP’s are only good for a 1:1 relationship with the VMs. Â Yes, that is why I prefer something else, but again we are going to do things today the way everyone else does them.
Now for me, I run the ‘addtap’ batch file located in the C:\Program Files\TAP-Windows\bin folder as Administrator, and this now gives me two TAP adapters.  I highly recommend disabling TCP/IP v4 and v6 on the TAP adapters, along with the MS client/server stuff.  We are only using these for bridging the VMs so we dont’ need the host computer to participate in this network.
Now for the fun part. Â I’m assuming you have your NetWare server and client images all ready to go (I guess I can go over installation again some other day), and now we get to bind each one to a SINGLE TAP instance. Â Also don’t forget that each machine needs a UNIQUE MAC address. Â One of them can use the default settings, but the other one cannot.
As you can see, this gives me a NE2000 on port 0x300, IRQ 10 and sets the MAC address to 52:43:aa:00:00:11 .  And this sets it on the first TAP adapter, lovingly called “Local Area Connection 2″ because the primary adapter is called “Local Area Connection“.  Also take note of the quotes in this command line, as it’ll encapsulate the full default name of the TAP adapter.  The other alternative is to just rename the adapters, but where is the fun in that?
As you can see the primary difference here is that it’s connected to “Local Area Connection 3” which is my second TAP interface.
Now with both virtual machines running the interfaces will turn on!
But as you’ll quickly discover, neither machine can talk to each-other, as they are islands so to speak.
Two virtual machines on islands.
Now for the fun part, we highlight the two TAP interfaces, right click, and turn on the built in bridge function of Windows!
highlight and select
And once that is done, a new Network Bridge interface will show up, transfer what layer 3 settings there are, and then setup the layer 2 bridge between the TAP interfaces.
Bridge activating…
And once the bridge interface has gone live, give spanning tree 15 seconds to do it’s thing, and YES you can now login to the NetWare server!
Logging in from the MS-DOS VM to the NetWare 3.12 VM
And there you go! Â This is the ‘approved’ way to do virtual networking with Qemu.
Now I know what you are thinking, this is great for VM’s and all that jazz, but what if I say have an office FULL of old PC’s and I want them onto my new fangled ancient server?
No problem, right click on the bridge, and select delete. Â This will put everything back the way it was, sending the VMs back to their own TAP interfaces. Â Now select all the interfaces, and then setup a bridge (I suppose you could edit the existing one to include the physical interface…) and now once the bridge has been setup, it’ll now be talking out the local Ethernet interface.
One quick note, bridging and WiFi tend to not go hand in hand. Â Some interfaces will work, but the rule seems to be the vast majority of setups will not. Â So don’t complain if yours didn’t work, you are just part of the 99.99999%. Â And if you did get yours to work, well good for you.
