With the collapse of my vpsland archive, Neko has become lost once more again. Thankfully I had some fragment backups so I have been able to bring Neko back from the grave. again.

First I dumped everything I had over on sourceforge. With a bit more digging I found the old RISC versions as well. I even found the Itanium version, although I lost the ARM version. Im not sure I have an 8gb pi4 anymore, but I’d like to get one when/if prices stop being insane. Anyways I also uploaded the source to github, since it’s more hip and acceptable for zoomers. I do have to say the git mirror command was everything I’d hoped it’d be.

git push --mirror https://github.com/neozeed/neko98.git

It literally was that easy.

I put a binary built with Visual C++ 2010 SP1 over there too. Although if you need Visual C++ 2010 runtimes, I put them on sourceforge.

Also I should add in the settings make sure you click “Always On Top”, otherwise Neko will be hidden to the desktop surface and you won’t see him.

I hope you enjoy!

Congratulations! Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows has just been recognized with the following awards by SourceForge:

Community Choice
SourceForge Favorite

These honors are awarded only to select projects that have reached significant milestones in terms of downloads and user engagement from the SourceForge community.

This is a big achievement, as your project has qualified for these awards out of over 500,000 open source projects on SourceForge. SourceForge sees nearly 30 million users per month looking for, and developing, open source software. These award badges will now appear on your project page, and the award assets can be found in your project admin section.

-sourceforge email

So yeah, and here we are:

Nothing like standing on the backs of giants!

Naturally ready to run favorites include:

• 386 BSD 0.1
• 4.3BSD UWISC
• Mach ‘1986 (VAX)

And of course for the DIY enthusiasts:

• Unix v7 Research Unix Bostic tape
• UTX 32.2 1B tape
• 4.3BSD Quasijarus 0.c

Honorable mention goes to the 4.3BSD UWISC enthusiast that downloaded Apache, AberMUD, and lynx!.

A while ago I had chased FrontVM to moretom.net and found 2 links. One from 2003 which is a dead link, and the 2004 version which was archived by the wayback machine!

It was an interesting build, as it still used 68000 emulation from Hatari/UAE this pre-dates the 68000 to C or i386 ASM. However since it ran (mostly) the original code, it was more ‘feature complete’, although loading save games is broken for some reason (I think the decryption was not disassembled correctly). It was actually a stupid file mode setting. I just updated the source & put out a new binary, testing save games between Linux &Windows.

Anyways, it originally built on Cygwin, so I filled in the missing bits, and have it building on both MinGW & Visual C++

So yeah, it’s Frontier, for the AtariST with the OS & Hardware calls abstracted, still running the 68000 code under emulation. I think it’s an interesting thing, but that’s me.

I put it and the other original versions I found over on sourceforge.net

Oddly enough it’s already been downloaded, so go figure.

Kind of annoying when I wanted to expand something with mingw, and all their download mirrors are… sourceforge.  And since I finally got around to putting Cockatrice on git but where did I put it? sourceforge.

Seems everyone has a good outage from time to time.  What to do?  Trust more of the cloud?

On Saturday 11AM BST the pages and downloads are back online!

Project pages and downloads back online!

Just gotta do the mouse…

I just noticed that sourceforge is making changes to their downloads, so it’ll probably break a tonne of my stuff on this blog (and other places)… but look at the nice picture!

1. United States 913
2. China 321
3. Hungary 152
4. United Kingdom 111
5. Germany 73
6. Canada 36
7. Russia 36
8. Argentina 26
9. Japan 22
10. Greece 16

Which is interesting… well to me anyways. I wonder if it’s more representative of internet penetration, or language barrier?

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!!!

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/

Again not to gripe but I do wish sourceforge would allow you to use the old UI while they are building this new one…

Anyways Iâ€ve managed to upload binutils/bison/flex/gmake & a few versions of GCC.  I havenâ€t built the c++ compiler as of yet… I just built nethack but I canâ€t finalize the upload though..

Well they are changing the UI to something not quite as krusty, but in the meantime expect a WHOLE LOT OF 500 errors.

I’m trying to download a MinGW enviroment to test up some Qemu builds but that seems to be going nowhere quick…

Anyways for anyone who stumbles on this looking for my ancient BSD stuff, here is a link to my server with a newer build… I’d love to crank out all that stuff as well, but I’ve had MAJOR stability issues with SIMH 3.8-1 & Visual C++ 2008.. I’m in the middle of getting a copy from work of the ‘standard’ version which should be here soon enough… Maybe it’s just the express tools freaking out on me.

Oh well not to throw sourceforge under the bus, they have saved me a fortune in bandwidth bills in getting my stuff out to other people, and in all fairness a ‘holiday’ is a great time to do an upgrade… Well usually if you are a bank, but I think for geeks today is the day to hack.