Good news! Â The source code to Keen Dreams has been located, purchased and open sourced!
You can find more information at their github site.
Its very cool that all the old iD stuff is being released one way or another.
Great news! Â The excellent A/UX capable emulator Shoebill, now has working Ethernet support! Â The sad news is that it only supports the TUN/TAP interface. Â So Windows users are kind of left out in the fun.
Shoebill + Ethernet
Except, I’ve been here before with SIMH ages ago. Â So I dusted off my source code, and injected it into Shoebill. Â The first issue I had was that SLiRP was rejecting all the inputted frames, because of invalid frame length. Â Even more weird is that ARP worked, and I could see the 10.0.2.2 and 10.0.2.3 virtual IP’s but TCP and UDP outbound wouldn’t work at all.
It took me longer than it should have but although this code worked great with GCC 2.7 and 3.0, 4.x breaks it. Â And it’s the same reason why Shoebill originally didn’t work on Win32, the blasted packed structures! Â So adding the ‘-mno-ms-bitfields’ flag to GCC is all it took, and now I could ping 10.0.2.2 for about 5-7 pings until SLiRP would crash. Â I tried all kinds of stuff trying to see if there was an issue with SLiRP, but I should have payed closer attention to the debugger, with all those threads flying around. Â It turns out Shoebill was trying to read & write a the same time, which caused SLiRP to crash as it is not re-entrant. Â I tried to place mutex’s on every SLiRP call but that ended up having SLiRP not process any packets. Â Very strange. Â I then reduced it to where I read the frame out of SLiRP and pass it to Shoebill, and where Shoebill write’s a frame out the SLiRP. Â And much to my amazement I can run ‘worms’ just fine!
So after a minute of worming and pinging I called it ‘good enough’ and rebuilt a production binary, and packaged up my source code.
For anyone who want’s to play, my Win32 EXE is here, and the source code I am using is here.
I thought I’d go mining for old versions, and put them up on CVS web. Â Turns out some old versions are missing, but oddly enough not the 1.0 stuff.
So here is the src2html version, and the raw tree view.
And for the really crazy, I dumped all versions into CVS.
I only briefly looked at it, and noticed the block driver has the ability to look at memory.. I don’t know why, but I don’t think I would want my block drivers being able to do that. Â maybe it’s a good thing, I don’t know. Â I haven’t tried to build it, and I’ve never used TrueCrypt so I really can’t comment on it.
Also pulling through archvie.org I found some old versions of scramdisk. But I never used that either.
I couldn’t believe it! Â You can find the official announcement here.
So this is MS-DOS 1.1 & 2.0 source code. Â Pitty it’s not 3.x but heck, it’s a start!
Also the Word in question is 1.1a however it does seem to include the OS/2 bits which was a big surprise.
I haven’t tried to build any of it, as I just got up but I know what I’ll be doing today!
Blake Stone!
Honestly I never played Blake Stone, because as the wikipedia entry says DOOM came out a week later. Â Blake is a Wolf3d variant, so I would imagine that the same build environment that can build Wolf3d can build Blake (Borland C 3.1 & TASM 3.1).
For those of you interested in this 20+ year old artifact, you can download the source code here. Â And as mentioned Blake can be purchased through steam as part of the Apogee Throwback Pack.
An update to the whole thing, Marakaate has fixed the source well enough to compile!  You can read about his adventure here, and download his updated source here.  He’s also asked me to plug his BBS, marabbs.no-ip.org .. You can just telnet to the IP address.  There is some palette issues as they are compiled into the game, not read from the data files (wtf?) and have been extracted from an exe, however the starting logo is all wrong.. But the game works.
So, enjoy!
Building Neko
It came to my attention that the site in.sert.co.in no longer exists! And worse, that the files on the page are long gone. Thankfully the internet archive did snag A page from there, but the downloads are all gone!
Thankfully I have a 1TB disk (lol so small now!) and I downloaded the source code, so all is not lost. I don’t know why I didn’t mirror it before but there you go. For all the diehard neko fans download the source, and keep hold of it….!
And of course, an upload to a project page on github.com.
So that being said, I fired up Visual Studio 97 (I knew buying that was a good idea!) and built an i386 Win32 version… I also rescued the cat sounds, but no luck on the rest of the files.
So once more again, neko has been saved!
I got bored, and imported the Jaguar Doom, Linux Doom, the DJGPP Doom, Hexen & Heretic into that cvs web thing.
According to the doom wiki, the Jaguar Doom port is based on the 1.2 source, And it seems that Heretic is based on 1.3 While the Linux GPL’d port is based on 1.10 …
Well I was looking for a good way to see what changed between Net/2, 386BSD 0.0 and 386BSD 0.1 and it appears that nobody has a cvsweb of these early versions….
What is strange, is that cvsweb package for debian is lacking the actual cgi file.. So after going insane with cvsweb, I set one up.
http://unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/#dirlist
I’ve never really setup a CVS repository before so this was my first shot…
rm -rf /var/lib/cvs
mkdir -p /var/lib/cvs
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs init
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/Net2
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “Net/2” Net2 CSRG Net2
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/386BSD-0.0
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “386BSD 0.0” Net2 BJolitz Jolix00
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/386BSD-0.1
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “386BSD 0.1” Net2 BJolitz Jolix01
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/NetBSD-0.8
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “NetBSD 0.8” Net2 NetBSD NetBSD08
cd /var/www/unix.superglobalmegacorp.com/source/NetBSD-0.9
cvs -d /var/lib/cvs import -m “NetBSD 0.9” Net2 NetBSD NetBSD09
From what I saw the more the directories align, the better, so I moved all the i386 and other platform stuff into arch directories to better match NetBSD 0.9 …
I also setup src2html to browse various levels, it’s great for quickly finding things that may have moved… It’s here.
Now I just have to see about doing ‘forks’ in CVS and adding in the 4.4 lite stuff.
This weekend has been kind of crappy as we had some cisco switches flake out, but nobody knew anything happened… I’d been pulled away on so many things over the last few years that monitoring them kind of fell by the waaaayside.
Well in this economic environment nobody is going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for some simple syslog/polling system that pages people. I needed one for free.
And years ago, I wrote a simple one that revolved around SQL Server 7/MSDE 1.0
Anyways I’ve made it as 2 CD images, and if you are bored, or in the need to poll devices with a basic TCP connect you can download it here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/simplemssqlnetw/
What may be useful for people is that I’ve put some impossible to find software on the prerequisite CD…
Namely:
NT 4.0 sp6a
MSDE 1.0
Option Pack (IIS4)
SQL 7 sp4
For some reason all the above stuff is getting dammed near impossible to find on Microsoft’s site. I guess it is end of the road for the NT 4.0 heyday. So at the least, this is my way to keep a location to download this software, as I’m sure someone will need it someday.
MSDE 1.0 for those who don’t know was a redistributable version of SQL Server 7.0 that had a 10 user limit, and a 2GB database size limit. Also there was no GUI management but it was great to use, because unlike SQL Express, it included the SQL Agent. The agent can run tasks at certain times, say like run a TSQL script that dumps a list of machines from a table into the hosts file, then tries to connect to each machine and record the state into a database…..
It was VERY useful stuff for the time.
There is no exciting screnshot, as I never did make an interface to the thing, instead I opted to configure everything through Access.
Other then that, I’ve been playing with a BackOffice 1.5 CD set I got on ebay… NT 3.51, MS Mail 3.5 & SQL 6.0!! It’s been so long, but MSSQL 6.0 was the first SQL server that I ever was payed to manage… It’s amazing how far we’ve come as an industry, and at the same point how things stay the same, although the installation of NT 3.51 is SO FAST!!!
more etc…
Some of the stuff is getting ironed out, it plays better for sure.
I had to start separating things out to make some older C compilers happy…
I still do not understand how ‘float’ types keep changing sizes between 16bit/32bit compilers…. Was there ever ANY consistent floating point types in C between 16/32bit? It really sucks to have binary data and find out you cannot ‘read’ it…..
Did people just force people to dump their data into ASCII, and reload it into 32bit formats, and tell everyone to ONLY use 32bit?
I know I’m like 15 years late to this party, as everyone is going through the win32 to win64 thing… Although I’m surprised Tradewars C’s win64 version runs happily with a win32 generated data file…….
Oh and ports in this version:
MS-DOS (realmode)
Win16 (QuickC for Windows’s QuickWin)
Win32 (Visual C++ 1.0’s CLI libc.lib exe… )
Win64 (Visual Studio 2008 cli)
Linux (x86 built with debian -static…..)
OS/2 (16 bit built with Microsoft C 6)
Although it supports multiple users, it’s still a single player game… I suppose it shouldn’t be too hard to constantly check the user record & sector record of where they are with stuff changing…..?
Anyways my work is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/tradewarsc/