My package from Germany finally arrived…!
And it contains Phar Lap 386 versions 4.1 and 5.0!
But something arrived in the mail. So I spent 2 hours cleaning things up and fighting with Watcom getting a skeleton verison of Doom to build. It’s finally running. Now to do some keyboard/video stuff.
Maybe more later though. But I may have to bench them some how Dos4G/W vs Phar Lap 386…. I donno.
(click to see it in action!)
Well you see, everything you type is stored in binary, right? And what we see depends on how programs interpret the binary stream. So sure it’s got a BMP header, the data payload can easily contain… text! It’s a real simple version of Steganography, mixed in with some c++.
Ok, it’s not emulation but it’s very cool!
Lemmings on Windows Vista
While digging around I came across this demo of Lemmings for WinG/Win32s. And what’s great is that it runs on Windows 7 x86_64! Pretty snazzy!
The game play is still there, but the ‘speed up’ stuff is instant in the world of Ghz CPUs.
Oh well, it’s worth having some fun with. Here is the download.
I just remember this game when it was an Amiga thing…
Sure we’ve seen iD’s Doom in flash, but what about something more intense, say, Quake?
Try it out here, The only requirement is that you have a flash 10 plugin, which supports the Alchemy VM. Source code is available here as well.
Sadly there is no networking play, perhaps it’s a limitation that you need a socket server to allow inbound connections from flash..? Maybe if I can get Alchemy to build anything under x86_64 maybe I’ll play with it… But no promises.
While browsing some old NT pre-release I was trying to find something to convert the documentation from Postscript into PDF or something usable in the 21st century.
I guess I should be somewhat thankful that Microsoft didn’t leave everything in Word 2.0 format, but anyways I found this great site, ps2pdf.com!
So dig up some old postscript stuff, and update!
I’m pretty sure the old BSD stuff also can output to Postscript….
I thought I’d throw out a link for someone that not only follows me, but has a blog of their own!
Right now he’s fighting a CoCo…. which is certainly out of my experience, but they did have OS-9… And from what I understand they still have an active community…
In case you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ll know that Oracle has bought out just about all the real competition to their flagship product and basically driven the developers out.. Just as they have strangled SUN’s products in some vain attempt at a lawsuit against Google, they basically have killed mysql.
Well enter, drizzle.
I haven’t loaded it yet, but it’ll certainly be something worth investigating going forward since MySQL is effectively dead.
Well today Internet Explorer 9 has been released… I guess they timed it for the pi day thing yesterday (3/14!).
You can find all the languages & versions here.
So how does it perform? Well the CP/M Javascript page doesn’t work at all in IE9 mode. In compatability mode, it can’t execute commands with an argument so booting or loading disks seems not to work. It’s such a shame.
The javascript NES emulator not only works, but seems to perform pretty well I get just under 60fps. Oddly performance is just slightly slower then Chrome, yet the sound in IE is far smoother. That was really unexpected, but still interesting.
Outside of that, I’ve only used it for 10 minutes now so I really can’t say. But we all know that for better or worse, IE always holds the largest ‘surface area’ so it will remain the most targeted. But for now it’l be fun to play with, but I’ll be lery of remaining on it.
So while browsing around k7tty, I came across this file, internet.zip, that pretty much has everything you need for a windows 3.1 machine to get into the internet using Trumpet Winsock.
I used a packet driver, along with Qemu’s built in ne2000 and it works pretty well!
While I never used Trumpet back in the day, setting it up for LAN access was pretty easy, and while Trumpet 1.0 loads on Windows 3.0 I never could find any applications that actually work with it. Trumpet 2.0 seems more along the line of the finalized Winsock 1.1 stacks, with applications abound to run with it and Windows 3.1
The things I see go through my blog… Well someone googled that (blogger.com shows me top hits, on what people search, and how they got here).. and I have to admit it made me laugh.
But my exposure to Watcom really didn’t start until I was in college, and I found some $99 offer to buy Watcom 10.0 CD only package. At the time I thought it was super exciting, because it not only included 32bit tools, but also the 16bit stuff. At the time, I still had a 286 running OS/2 so for me this was awesome!
So for my $99 I got a 32bit MS-DOS,OS/2,Windows NT & Novell Netware compiler, along with a 16bit MS-DOS, Windows & OS/2 compiler.
Ok, so that’s the ‘good’. All the documentation was online, which was ok, but it was in like 30 different files…. The UI was weird, but really in the early 1990s everyones UI was odd. Heh even Microsoft ended up taking over the UI from QuickC for Windows as their ‘professional UI’.
Now what of the Watcom Legacy? Well sure we all know that the iD software guys, used Watcom as their 32bit compile to ship DOOM to the MS-DOS world. Just as 3D Realms used it for Duke Nukem 3d!. But I’d suspect this was mostly because of the DOS4G/W DOS Extender, and it’s royalty free redistribution with Watcom C++. From what I understand Pharlap TNT was *VERY* expensive to license, with regards to it’s royalty price.
Also at the time, Watcom C++ was the fastest compiler available.
But time and competition wasn’t kind to Watcom. Eventually the language company slipped, was purchased for a side product sold off and killed. It’s kind of funny that a language company that produced a SQL server as a necessity ended up being the only product that people sought, and didn’t want to let discontinue.
So sure Watcom C/C++ was a great compiler for it’s time, but the time has passed. In the meantime we are lucky that it’s been open sourced so it hasn’t faded off to oblivion.
Although the C/C++ is what people know them for most, Watcom had a lot more, as seen in their source, they did have support for the Dec Alpha. also did have a Fortran compiler. Back a long long time ago, this Waterloo Ontario based company used to supply computer languages to all kinds of Canadian endeavors. It’s a shame that us kids never got to really see them, but rather it was more so for research as I’m lead to understand.
So really what separated Watcom from say Microsoft? Maybe it was their proximity to research? Maybe government contracts? Perhaps reluctance to enter the operating system business? I don’t know it’s really hard to say, I’m sure it’d make an interesting documentary but I’m afraid the audience would be pretty small.
But then again the Canadian government does like to green light this kind of thing, so maybe someone out there will take it up.
At any rate, I’m sure others may want to chip in on how they feel about Watcom.
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edit
I see now that the phrase actually comes from doom
‘!’, // shift-backslash – OH MY GOD DOES WATCOM SUCK
This is in the heads up code, hu_stuff.c
So I guess that ends that eppisode.