Category Archives: Uncategorized

VNCFOX – Better way of browsing modern web on vintage machines

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(this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka tenox)

TL;DR
Firefox with TightVNC server in a Docker container.
https://github.com/tenox7/vncfox

I often work on vintage Unix Workstations and other obsolete systems. I have a need to browse modern web on old computers somehow. In the past I developed Web Rendering Proxy to help with this. While WRP is awesome as a showcase, and some light browsing, unfortunately it falls little short of being practical for a daily driver.

Like many others I have been cheating and using a VM with a web browser and remotely connecting to it via VNC or RDP. This is rather obvious and mostly works, but a VM is hard to run and upkeep. Takes time to boot and eats resources. You need to customize it, install updates and other nonsense. I wanted something much simpler, leaner and not requiring any maintenance. I also need to run it on ARM based hosts like a Mac or Raspberry PI.

Enter VNCFOX – a Firefox browser with TightVNC server packaged as a Docker container. It’s small, lean, easy to run and there is no boot time and lengthy updates. You can mount Firefox .mozilla profile in a Docker volume to preserve your settings, plugins like uBlock, history, cookies and cache, across container restarts! I also typically bind mount a folder exported over NFS in to /home/vncfox/Downloads.

VNCFOX on HP-UX 9

TightVNC version of VNC is rather crucial, especially for older computers. Without the “Tight” protocol, VNC screen refresh consumes a lot of CPU on the client side and the session is laggy. TightVNC works incredibly smooth. For ease of use I have compiled clients for some older operating systems.

Overall this approach works really well, including stuff like Perplexity/ChatGPT/Claude, Google Docs, Email, even Discord and other web based chat clients. I regularly now post and edit this very blog from a HP-UX workstation!

VNCFOX on IRIX 5.3

The container is dual platform for both AMD64 and ARM64. It can be run even on Mac host with Apple Silicon. Raspberry PI maybe?

Is it future proof? Maybe. Apparently Wayland supports VNC, including Tight protocol. Some day I will migrate the server. But for now x11 vncserver works pretty well.

Useful keyboard shortcuts:

  • F8 – TightVNC Menu – Including clipboard transfer etc
  • F11 – Firefox Full Screen Mode

More info and customization, including dealing with retarded scrollbars:
https://github.com/tenox7/vncfox

DUX SimCity UNIX aka Micropolis on IRIX 6.5, AIX 4.3, 5.1, HP-UX 11.31

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(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Previously I managed to crack and unlock the demo version of DUX SimCity for UNIX. It worked just fine on the original pre-built platforms, DEC Unix, HPUX, SunOS and IRIX. Unfortunately the IRIX binary is for 5.3 in COFF format and doesn’t work on more modern ELF based IRIX like 6.2 and above. More importantly however, there never has been a release for IBM AIX! Inability to play SimCity on RS/6000 is excruciating. Not to mention several other Unix systems of that time.

SimCity for UNIX Exhibit on VCF West 2024

A few days ago I ran a VCF West 2024 exhibit showcasing this important piece of software history. I got to chat with many people about these shortcomings and decided to see if something can be done about it.

On the right of the picture above, you can see a OLPC XO. This laptop plays an important role of SimCity history. During conception of OLPC, the game has been open sourced under a new name “Micropolis”. This was insanely fantastic endeavor, kudos for everyone involved. Unfortunately the software has been “enhanced” to run on XO Sugar GUI thing, ported to C++ Python and otherwise defaced in several different ways.

Fortunately there survives a very early source code of Micropolis, aka old gen. While GPL and under a new name, has only minor, cosmetic changes compared to the original source code. With some minor tweaking and working around funnies with xlC and MIPSpro compilers, I was able to build old-gen Micropolis for AIX 4.3, 5.1, IRIX 6.5 and HP-UX 11.31 on IA64.

Most importantly however, in the process, I discovered that the original DUX SimCity assets, including TCL/TK GUI cruft was directly usable with just a few small changes in sim.c. Effectively undoing all the changes mentioned in DONE and making it almost the original, except for name. A hybrid GPL Micropolis – DUX SimCity Demo Asset build has been born!

SimCity on AIX 4.3
SimCity on IRIX 6.5

You can download it from here: https://github.com/tenox7/micropolis

Quick thought on the CrowdStrike outage

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first off I was surprised when I got up about the reach of this through South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

its shocking how nobody stages anything just roll directly to production. I know this is CI/Agile so expect more of this, not less.

next is the file everyone is crying to reboot into safe mode to delete. It’s all zeros. Not a valid device driver. Not a valid anything.

how is it getting loaded??

Credit to Sean Nicoara

looking at the stack trace I found on twitter the driver csagent is faulting. Is it actually binary loading a blob into kernel space and executing it, bypassing all checks for valid/signed code by the kernel?

i hope I’m wrong or this is like I can’t even.

time will tell.

Totally unfair comparison of Microsoft C

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Because I hate myself, I tried to get the Microsoft OS/2 Beta 2 SDK’s C compiler building simple stuff for text mode NT. Because, why not?!

Since the object files won’t link, we have to go in with assembly. And that of course doesn’t directly assemble, but it just needs a little hand holding:

Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility   Version 1.40
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1988-93. All rights reserved.

        cl386 /Ih /Ox /Zi /c /Fadhyrst.a dhyrst.c
Microsoft (R) Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1984-1989. All rights reserved.

dhyrst.c
        wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' dhyrst.a > dhyrst.a1
        wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" dhyrst.a1  | wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > dhyrst.asm
        ml /c dhyrst.asm
Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 6.11
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981-1993.  All rights reserved.

 Assembling: dhyrst.asm
        del dhyrst.a dhyrst.a1 dhyrst.asm
        link -debug:full -out:dhyrst.exe dhyrst.obj libc.lib
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Executable Linker Version 1.00
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-93. All rights reserved.

I use sed to remove the FLAT: directives which makes everything upset. Also there is some weird confusion on how to pad float constants and encode them.

CONST   SEGMENT  DWORD USE32 PUBLIC 'CONST'
$T20001         DQ      0040f51800r    ;        86400.00000000000
CONST      ENDS

MASM 6.11 is very update with this. I just padded it with more zeros, but it just hung. I suspect DQ isn’t the right size? I’m not 386 MASM junkie. I’m at least getting the assembler to shut-up but it doesn’t work right. I’ll have to look more into it.

Xenix 386 also includes an earlier version of Microsoft C / 386, and it formats the float like this:

CONST   SEGMENT  DWORD USE32 PUBLIC 'CONST'
$T20000         DQ      0040f51800H    ;        86400.00000000000
CONST      ENDS

So I had thought maybe if I replace the ‘r’ with a ‘H’ that might be enough? The only annoying thing about the Xenix compiler is that it was K&R so I spent a few minutes porting phoon to K&R, dumped the assembly and came up with this sed string to find the pattern, mark it, and replace it (Im not that good at this stuff)

wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $.a1 \
| wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > $*.asm

While it compiles with no issues, and runs, it just hangs. I tried the transplanted Xenix assembly and it just hangs as well. Clearly there is something to do with how to use floats.

I then looked at whetstone, and after building it noticed this is the output compiling with Visual C++ 8.0

      0       0       0  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
  12000   14000   12000 -1.3190e-001 -1.8218e-001 -4.3145e-001 -4.8173e-001
  14000   12000   12000  2.2103e-002 -2.7271e-002 -3.7914e-002 -8.7290e-002
 345000       1       1  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
 210000       1       2  6.0000e+000  6.0000e+000 -3.7914e-002 -8.7290e-002
  32000       1       2  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001
 899000       1       2  1.0000e+000  1.0000e+000  9.9994e-001  9.9994e-001
 616000       1       2  3.0000e+000  2.0000e+000  3.0000e+000 -8.7290e-002
      0       2       3  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
  93000       2       3  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001

However this is the output from C/386:

      0       0       0  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
  12000   14000   12000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
  14000   12000   12000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
 345000       1       1  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
 210000       1       2  6.0000e+000  6.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
  32000       1       2  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315
 899000       1       2  5.2998e-315  5.2998e-315  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
 616000       1       2  5.3076e-315  5.3050e-315  5.3076e-315  0.0000e+000
      0       2       3  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
  93000       2       3  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315

Great they look nothing alike. So something it totally broken. I guess the real question is, does it even work on OS/2?

Since I should post the NMAKE Makefile so I can remember how it can do custom steps so I can edit the intermediary files. Isn’t C fun?!

INC = /Ih
OPT = /Ox
DEBUG = /Zi
CC = cl386

OBJ = dhyrst.obj

.c.obj:
	$(CC) $(INC) $(OPT) $(DEBUG) /c /Fa$*.a $*.c
	wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' $*.a > $*.a1
	wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $*.a1 \
	| wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > $*.asm
	ml /c $*.asm
	del $*.a $*.a1 $*.asm

dhyrst.exe: $(OBJ)
        link -debug:full -out:dhyrst.exe $(OBJ) libc.lib

clean:
        del $(OBJ)
        del dhyrst.exe
        del *.asm *.a *.a1

As you can see, I’m using /Ox or maximum speed! So how does it compare?

Dhrystone(1.1) time for 180000000 passes = 20
This machine benchmarks at 9000000 dhrystones/second

And for the heck of it, how does Visual C++ 1.0’s performance compare?

Dhrystone(1.1) time for 180000000 passes = 7
This machine benchmarks at 25714285 dhrystones/second

That’s right the 1989 compiler is 35% the speed of the 1993 compiler. wow. Also it turns out that MASM 6.11 actually can (mostly) assemble the output of this ancient compiler. It’s nice when something kind of work. I can also add that the Infocom ’87 interpreter works as well.

YAY!

It’s really awkward when your mistakes are public

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Blessed is the RS232

Blessed is the RS232

On the way back from a day trip with my muse I came across this interesting thing on all the sign boards in Waverly. Not sure if it’s a firmware update that went rogue, or if someone is messing with them, but for the most part all the signs would alternate between the two. I guess if I was running the rails I too would have them set on a serial MUX and keep that crap off a network to make the bar higher for the haxor kids.

But all the same, if someone goofed up, and zapped all the boards, they better set their serial lines correctly to get ahold of them. And maybe update from V14.5, I mean 2017 is so old!

Expect more DEC Alpha madness coming in. And as always, I want to thank my Patreon‘s for making all of this crazyness possible!

#include <names.h>
Brian Ledbetter
Joakim L. Gilje
Bamdad
Andy Wallis
Endir
Tink

Web Rendering Proxy v4.6 released

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(this is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Pleased to announce WRP version 4.6! After almost two years of no updates due to dependency issues I finally resolved everything. More frequent work should resume now.

The main improvement visible to users is the new GIF encoding. I have been struggling with poor GIF performance for quite a while. This was mostly manifested on lower end machines running WRP such as Raspberry PI or these micro instances in the cloud.

Thanks to invaluable work of Hill Ma we now have blazing fast GIFs. Probably order of 100x improvements! This comes at a cost of quality, especially of color palette and dithering. However worse quality of imagery has a surprise improvement of font/text quality which is what a lot of people wanted.

WRP 4.6 with default 216 color GIF

Note that by default WRP uses GIF with 216 “web safe” colors. We choose this not so much for number of colors but rather activation of the super fast GIF encoding.

WRP 4.6 in 256 color mode GIF

When switching to 256 color mode the image look much better, however it takes around 25x longer to encode (7ms vs 170ms).

When using PNG this is of course not a problem.

0 height mode, which renders tall images of full page length has also been improved and is now more stable. Be careful when using very old machines with little memory as the images can be pretty big.

I hope that WRP will help you use your vintage computers more 🙂

Please report bugs and issues on github!

Downloads here.

Missing Neko98

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Neko on ARM

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!

So there has been a problem

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I’ve been on the road for a few months, basically in exile. I’ve downsized my once large online presence to a desktop in an office I’m still obligated to for rent and internet. So my i7 workstation had been up to the task, although it seems I didn’t have the right power settings to turn back on from a power failure.

So now I’m faced with a stale backup as i can’t find my currents. so yeah content has been lost. So i also don’t want to race back to a single point of failure, so once more again I’m going to try a cloud. Microsoft keeps sending me these $200 trial things so i thought I would try it. There is a large learning curve about their networks , and deployments. although there is a bunch of ”shake and bake” deployments to speed things along. As always the key is reading the documents.

I still have a lot of stuff to upload, so for the moment the database is restored but there is a lot of messing around needed for the the old layout.

So appologies for the mess.

Special thanks for Tenox for helping me with all kinds of issues, and support from my muse.

Its always darker before its bright, and its already getting dark in northern Europe.