While it’s been … quite some time, I used to use an early beta of VMware 1.0 back in the day early 00’s I believe for Linux, where I could run Lotus notes and some other apps that just of course were not available for Linux. And it was neat but a bit pricey. And as I’d tout the benefits of having desktop virtual computers, getting rid of the need of having a stack of random junk PCs from your desk.

Connectix was trying new things, and yeah, the Mac was a dying platform, and bringing their tech to the PC was a winning move that would have lasting ramifications for the industry for decades. Well that and getting bought out by Microsoft.

Virtual PC for the PC, was another great, but short-lived solution for those few of us that got the ‘pc virtualization’ bug early on, before the tidal wave of bare metal hypervisors, and the serious business it’d create.

For me, it was the ability to use server class hardware with multiple PSU’s lots of RAM, redundant disks as firewalls that I could easily setup with multiple network cards, and instances allowing full isolation, and hide the mess of wires with something that looked pretty elegant.

I’d recently come across a copy of Virtual PC 4.0 for Windows, the system requirements are pretty log, Windows ME (98 is reported to work), NT 4.0 & Windows 2000. As a bonus it includes PC DOS 7.01. Just like the Mac minimal versions.

Running VPC on NT under Qemu is dooable, even under OS X, although you’ll want sound, of course which is a bit tricky now.

qemu-system-i386 -m 256 -cpu pentium -hda nt4wks.vmdk -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -cdrom nt4allinone.iso -device sb16,audiodev=snd,iobase=0x220,irq=7,dma=1 -device adlib,audiodev=snd -audiodev coreaudio,id=snd -parallel none -serial none -drive file=fat:rw:/tmp/vbemp

Although this is a bit involved, I have issues with the later QEMU’s sound blaster emulation and found it best to specify IRQ 7, which means removing the parallel port (who prints anyways?!). I also used the vbempj driver for that full colour experence.

Although games like Links386, Return to Zork, DooM should have had retail Windows versions IMHO, but I know that getting 32bit games up and running on Windows 3.1 had so many dependancies and hardware requirements that made it quite the ordeal (as mentioned when running DooM on Windows 3.1)

For a long while your options for playing ‘old’ circa mid 90’s MS-DOS games was going all in on NT4/2000/XP with a fast machine and VirtualPC (there was a time when DOSBox wasn’t a thing) or the NTVDM emulated sound blaster driver. At least XP 32bit had one built in (and hidden sadly). But as machines pulled away from ISA and got faster, dual booting to MS-DOS for games with sound became a thing of the past, very quickly.

As shown above, of course I had to run DooM. even on the glorious 16 colour display, but yeah. And yeah it’s great!

I should add, that also for a long while this was my preferred way to play DOS games like DooM, or a multitude of things, also like running OS/2, this was my go-to way to get things done. You can check in the history that I was also a super big fan of Virtual PC 2004 on XP. It’s kind of crazy that Virtual PC for Windows is some 24 years ago now!

I had to limit the CPU to pentium level for the installation, then Virtual PC requires a Pentium II or higher. But luckily that’s a simple switch for Qemu.

So, while on this path, I thought it’d be fun to try the next evolution, Virtual Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003. Because I love old stuff, I ran Qemu 0.15.1 because yeah it’s so ancient. bonus!

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -m 512 -cpu pentium3 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -hda 2003.vmdk -redir tcp:1024::1024

The good news is that Windows Server installed okay, and so did Virtual Server. However running was a different story:

Changing the CPU flag to any combination got the same result that a Pentium II or greater is required. Bummer.

I have a copy of VMWare Workstation handy, and thought I could just mount the VMDK, and good to go. No. Nooooo. Or at least I failed. Use the install template for 2003, and just deal with it. I know. dissapoint.

However, the best part is that it runs fine on VMware. Although it is SLOW. so slow. I updated the VM to 4 core, single processor, 512Mb of ram, and installed Service Pack 1 for the 2003 server. It helped a bit too!

The big fun of Virtual Server is of course being able to manage it remotely, although the remote console is an ActiveX control, so you need to enable IE mode on Edge. It’s under settings and ‘compatibility’ , turn on the 11 mode, and add the admin site and blamo good to go!

And yeah!

You can kinda use the server remotely from a modern machine. Many menu options don’t render correctly, and I had to copy/paste some of the URL’s directly. I think I had this issue with FireFox 20 years ago, although I don’t feel like digging that far deep. It may have been chrome too, but does it matter? I need that ActiveX hook.

With the control loaded, and DooM set to low resolution and drop the render window and..

Well yeah, it’s almost okay.

I’ll have to dig out a P4 and try it native, as emulation in emulation is of course a finicky thing. But I’m all too happy to run this on my laptop without getting my hands dirty dealing with old hardware.

Kind of what got me into this in the first place, running it all, virtually.

‘Till next time!

Once upon a time this was a legitimate ad. Tad from VM-limted.com. Sadly the domain has all but lapsed and finding any reference to this ad is pretty much impossible to search for. You’d think with the ‘glamp’ of vanlife and living in a van that people would love to take notes from the Microsoft VM-limited 70’s style conference van.

Instead I was getting crap like this Nissan NV350 which looks so 1960’s SciFi that it’s just unlivable and unusable. Compare that pod living thing to this incredible 1970’s themed van from VM-limited!

From leather chairs, rolodexes, tube televisions to the mandatory ashtrays, wood paneling and shag carpet how could this not be a ‘work from the road’ thing today? While looking at other solutions for working on the road they seem to be so boring and unlived in that they feel about as legit as that new starwars hotel that looks like a telephone game of ‘space conflict’.

As far as I can tell it started as a print campaign in 2011 to be launched the same time as the big VMware convention (vmworld?!) back then.

I do have to admire the very Atari-esque look of it. Apparently it was good enough to get some videos shot in the van:

And along with that was a TADTalk. I mirrored it on my site, and with a bit more searching I found some more and put them on archive.org.

It’s too bad the domain lapsed, and Microsoft didn’t hop onto the van-life trend with their future thinking retro 70’s conference van.

Anyways to help me google/bing it in the future Microsoft man in van selling virtualization.

Anyone else living the nomadic life? I guess with wife + kids it’s hard, but I’m sure someone is doing it.

CLOCK_WATCHDOG_TIMEOUT

Of course.

As much as I’ve put it off, it looks like i have to use Hyper-V.

So I downloaded and installed VMWare Player, as I’ve heard you can use it to run ESX among other things requiring hardware acceleration, and  player fits the bill for being cheap.

Passing the hardware acceleration to a child VM is a matter of checking a single box in the settings.  Namely the ‘Virtualize Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI” box.  Although you don’t have to click it if you want, it just offers greater performance.

VMWare Player

Now I installed my old copy of XP x64, as I felt like something different, then I went ahead and installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 sp1.  The installation was pretty uneventful.

Now with that out of the way, I could setup a VM,and I decided to install OS/2 1.21 for the heck of it.

Virtual PC running OS/2 1.21 without hardware acceleration

And it booted up no problems, like it did back in the XP days.  I even ran it with and without CPU acceleration and it works on both, but is noticeably faster with acceleration.

With Intel-VT acceleration

So I thought this was interesting, although Virtual PC has been essentially dead ended, it can go on with an older OS in a VM, to let you run VMs.

I would imagine that if VMWare Player could run Virtual PC 2007, that 2004 should work as well.

SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T5

Which translates to an IO base of 0x220, IRQ 5, DMA 1 and High DMA 5.  Because it has a high DMA channel, it is a Sound Blaster 16, and specified by T5.  If you want to play MS-DOS games in Qemu, be sure to compile in the adlib..

Or at least this works for running Quake & Doom …

While a kind person had sent me a copy of this rare pre-release version of OS/2, I never could install it because it crashed on my real hardware, nor would it install in any emulator I had access too.

Apparently the two problems for this version, like the 1.x series of OS/2 revolves around timing issues, and floppy drivers.  While the limited availability seems to be more laid out like a 1.21 version it still 32-bit, so attempts to replace the floppy/country.sys from 1.21 or 1.3 just result in instant crashes.

Back when I ran OS/2 the big issue with 486 computers and booting was the L2 CPU cache.  It would induce all kinds of timing problems with booting from floppy to install.  And the number ONE fix for this was to disable L2 (and even L1) cache, and the install could proceed, then once you are booting from hard disk you could re-enable them.

The funny thing is that while OS/2 2.0 & 2.1 were so temperamental on so many clones, they install just fine in emulation.  So I had an idea…

What if I used the 2.0 GA to boot up the LA install program?

So, I simply copied the following files from LA’s disk1 onto 2.0 GA’s disk1 ..

• CMD.EXE
• HARDERR.EXE
• SYSINST1.EXE
• SYSINST2.EXE
• FDISK.COM
• SYSLEVEL.OS2
• DISK.NUM

So then I simply booted off the GA install/disk1 then swapped in the LA disks as needed.  Surprisingly it boots from the hard disk on Virtual PC 2007 without issue.  It traps on Qemu.

So as a ‘quick’ tour, here is the LA desktop.. .It’s… almost 2.0 but not quite there.

The LA includes a tetris clone, Blox that never made it to the GA.  I wonder if it’s a SDK example or maybe IBM didn’t want to get into licenses etc etc..

Also the applications were more or less the same, although there is some icon differences and it feels kind of rough around the edges as it isn’t finished but it does work.

 Nubble lighthouse, edited after the fact

Another weird thing I noticed while looking to see if there was any exciting bitmaps in OS/2 2.0 LA, and finding it’s the same lighthouse.  But something looked different, I’m amazed I even caught it.  So I quickly fired up an OS/2 2.0 GA VM, and put them side by side. Â Do you see it?

For some reason, IBM edited out the American flag.  I presume it was to make it more “international” but at the same point I had always assumed this lighthouse was in the USA.  It does seem like a strange thing for an American company to do, as Americans always tend to slip stuff like flags & music into their products…

I figure someone out there who wants to run OS/2 LA will want this to get this OS running. At the same time, I haven’t even thought about seeing if LA upgrades 1.3 and how 2.0 GA overlays the LA.

And if that onslaught wasn’t enough, a month earlier Windows NT 4.0 had hit the shelves.  And as I had mentioned it was so popular and so desired, where I worked people were going out and purchasing it themselves, and replacing their corporate sanctioned OS (Windows 3.11 or Windows 95) as the productivity of not crashing or the conflicts of old/bad drivers etc etc.

At this point to say OS/2 4.0 had significant competition is an understatement.  Not to mention how Microsoft leveraged it’s OEM channels to force bundling & instillation of Windows/Office, even on IBM hardware.

When I got OS/2 1.3 it was at a HAM Fest, as nobody sold it retail.  OS/2 2.1 for Windows, and OS/2 Warp were all sold through retail channels.  When OS/2 4.0 had finally gone retail none of the local retailers in the Ft Lauderdale, Miami area were going to even stock it.  Instead me & a friend had to drive all the way up to some small retailer out around Boynton Beach.  Needless to say this release wasn’t going to be a big one.

While the hype around Merlin, had been quite intense, when it had come time to deliver it seemed at this point IBM was only going to push this out because of all the time & effort that went into it.  But the PowerPC version was basically dead, and it seemed with them the hope of OS/2 had gone with them.

Also at this point there were no plans to build a Win32 subsystem into OS/2.  This meant that you couldn’t run Office 95.  And of course when Office 97 came out, there was no way you would be running that on OS/2 either.  Oh sure there was this half hearted framework, Open32, 800 some popular Win32 calls adapted to OS/2, but it was only source compatible, there was no way it’d run stuff on OS/2 (while others have taken up the torch via Odin).

Ok, enough with the back story!  Let’s upgrade!

Hello old friend, it’s time to go to the end….

The installer had now swelled up to 3 disks.  I’m not sure if 4.0 was even available on floppy disks.  I know the version I had was on CD.

I’ve got to admit it, this boot logo looks the best.  Although in my opinion they should have dropped the Warp thing, at this point 4.0 was it’s own thing, and even in this logo they are using warp like a deformation, not warp speed.  Could it have been that hard to slap some Star Trek people on this?

In this day in age, there would have been a ‘Jean Luc Piccard’ limited edition.  But I guess IBM wouldn’t want to offend the STAR WARS fans or something.

Well this is a change, a welcome screen touting new and exciting features!

And it pretty much looks and feels like Warp 3’s colored installer, which we all know really goes all the way back to OS/2 1.1 .  Especially when it comes to this:

Yep let’s NOT format the disk.  Although in retrospect I think I really did only half read this once, and I just saw the “convert to a different file system” part and said oh yeah let’s do this HPFS thing! … Too bad I missed the “erases all files”… Maybe a blink tag would have been appropriate there… Oh well it’s been a long long time since then.

Now with OS/2 prepped, it’s time to go into the GUI boot…!

Oddly enough the Sound Blaster was not preserved from Warp.  And at least in a virtual machine I do have the ability to test, and quickly go redo this, so I know the “Sound Blaster 16 PnP” works best in Virtual PC 2007.  And as you can see it picks up the S3 video, and it remembered my printer!  But it still asks me to go thru a list of printer & video drivers, I guess it’s to make sure they are correct.  I just hope this doesn’t leave me with 3 printers…

And as a sign of the times.. My 500MB disk is looking pretty small with all these features.

And look, networking!

It does support DHCP, and it found the DC21x4 network card in Virtual PC.  So far it looks pretty good!

Let’s let the installer do it’s thing!

Also you may notice that OS/2 4.0 looks nothing like the prior versions.  Gone is the old 5 color flag thing, and in with the ‘warp bounce’ thing.

I’m sure all of this is helpful to someone.  But it’s not me.  I just assumed it knows what it’s doing.

A quick reboot and um.. it’s doing something.  I guess someone had a placeholder in there…

Then another reboot and…

There is this weird animation of a computer and a LAN going down the drain or something..

Then we get this welcome screen.  Closing out of this, I get to the desktop!

Which is… different.  It sure looks like *NOTHING* desktop wise was preserved.

Although I do like the status bar up top. Right away I know I’m using more then half my disk!

And there is some OS/2 answer to the start menu..

Which in the world of Windows 95/NT 4 feels. Weird.  So quickly let’s see how we stack up in terms of legacy applications.

Excel acts weird.  I don’t know if this is to blame on the new graphics drivers, or what. Granted Excel is circa 1991 but it’s worked up to this point.

Ironically, Word 1.1 for OS/2 works great.  Although it’s far obsoleted in terms of it’s document format, left behind by Word 2 for Windows, this version just keeps on rocking.  I can’t help but wonder if I had an older version of Excel that it may have worked better.

SimCity loads up and plays fine. No weird artifacts.  Even digging through the old desktop folder I find my old stuff from OS/2 1.1 and I fire up bricks.

So far so good.  Seeing I found my old applications, let’s see about games & all the desktop accessories we’ve collected since OS/2 2.0

Talk about horrible!  They are almost all GONE!  Even poor Neko didn’t make the cut!  And yet gwbasic 3.23 from OS/2 1.0 made it.  Honestly I really feel let down by IBM at this point.

Another thing that didn’t make the cut was my Win32s install.  It was completely removed. I almost wonder what would have happened if I’d installed apps in OS/2 2.0’s Windows 3.0 .. I may have to time travel to find out.

Also any attempts at running MS-DOS in a full screen freezes OS/2.  Looking at the Excel glitch I can’t help but feel it’s a video driver thing.

I know this post is very heavy in terms of pictures, and there is a lot of ground to cover in this final release of OS/2 (I’m counting 4.0 as the last one as it’s the last one I’ve ever used, and I don’t think that 4.5 was even attempted to be marketed in a retail fashion, and I really can’t justify the $$$ for ecomstation.. but maybe I’ll see if there is a demo…)

I’ll try to cover some of the new features, in the next post.

Now the downside is that while Virtual PC 2007 supports XDF to some extent, it doesn’t like the XDF driver that comes with Warp 3.0… Which I guess isn’t a surprise, anyone would after all be loading the latest version, I mean who would load up and upgrade every version of OS/2 for the heck of it?

So as it is pointed out here, simply replace the ibm1flpy.add & xdfloppy.flt from OS/2 4.0 and it’ll work!

Now we get the usual, do we want to format my disk… As always the answer is NO… But it’s so delightfully colorful now!

Then it’s a simple matter of feeding it disks, and waiting for it to chew through the 6 disks…  I remember on a physical machine, these XDF’s weren’t exactly speedy.

And then with that out of the way, it’ll be time to reboot, into the GUI, and to see how much hardware (if any) has been preserved.

I had to change the Video to regular VGA, for some reason it this this is a Chips video…? And it had no idea about the CD-ROM.  It did pick up the sound blaster, and it kept my printer!

Wow fully loaded out, and 29.33MB.  I can’t remember the last time getting so much out of so little.  Anyways, time to swap more disks…

And as part of the update, it’ll let you compare your config.sys with a before and after… And honestly… WTF?  Since the lines are so long, why did someone thing this was actually legible?

I know it’s part of the legacy of config.sys, but really.. WTF!

Well we’ll just trust it’s upgrade process, and let it ride!

So we reboot, another splash logo and….

We not only get the desktop, the tutoral, Introducing OS/2.  Which is really nice looking.  It’s like they hired someone that’s not old school IBM to do this.  It’s at least a big enough of a change since the days of OS/2 1.2’s tutorial.

Closing that, I get the desktop.  I’m no fan of the launchpad, so I just shred that thing from the get go.  I know I know.. it’s like windows 95’ish but from 1994.

And how did my legacy applications hold up?

Bricks from OS/2 1.1 is still there, and still works great.  Word & Excel also working, just as they did when I installed them in OS/2 1.2.

Even SimCityLite is working, along with DOOM.  I’d have to give Warp an A+ on it’s migration from OS/2 2.1.  It did look a little scary with the config.sys thing from hell, but really you can tell a *LOT* of work went into this release of OS/2.

Speaking of games, Warp gave us.. Mahjongg Solitaire.  I don’t know why it’s not spelled Mahjong, maybe it’s some British English vs US English thing?  Anyways I’ve always associated the game with old ladies, and gambling rings.  Honestly IBM would have been better off paying out some developer for a ‘top selling game’ and doing an OS/2 version.  Even in OS/2 2.0 it is possible to write 32bit programs that’ll run in VGA 320x200x256 mode, which was still popular with plenty of the MS-DOS games of the time.  But I guess even a full screen port of DOOM wouldn’t be all that IBM GREY/PC/DULL enough.  Oh well even Tetris would have been a popular game.

One thing that bugged the hell out of me was the sounds.  It still was annoying to use OS/2 in an office with it constantly making noise… But in all fairness it was kind of the rage of the time, even Windows to this day has all the hooks in for it’s themes of custom mouse pointers, and GUI actions. Thankfully we’ve all moved beyond that.

This was going to be the the effort to really wow people before Windows 95 shipped.  In some regards it really was too little too late.  The world was shifting away from the idea of an isolate powerful ‘workstation’ to the connected computer.  As it does say on the box, this was the ‘on ramp to the information super highway.  In my opinion this is where OS/2 weakspots really started to show through.  First TCP/IP was an addon, not part of the OS.  I don’t know how they thought slapping other diskettes in the box is ‘ok’ but it’s not part of the default install, and easily missed by novice users.  The next, and forever lamented part is that it only included support for dialup.

That’s right, although dialup was pretty much the norm for 1994, the world was rapidly changing, and the first cable modems were starting to be slowly rolled out.  It also meant in the corporate world as LANS had taken over everything, and companies were just starting to think about TCP/IP and internet strategies, OS/2 was setup to be left out.  Instead, someone at IBM decided that LAN based network should be a premium and people should pay twice the price for OS/2 Warp connect.  This proved disastrous.

Right about this time, Microsoft had released Windows for Workgroups, which was all about LAN / NetBEUI access, but they even did throw out a free TCP/IP protocol upgrade.  Windows NT 3.1 had finally shipped, and it too included LAN TCP/IP support.  Then it was cemented in the more responsive Windows NT 3.5 which had a smaller memory footprint, and of course included support for PPP/SLIP along with LAN networking, and support for IP forwarding!  That’s right you could use Windows NT 3.5 as a router!.. (Yes, even the workstation version).

However IBM did at least have the foresight to include popular internet programs in their internet pack (which sadly I don’t have.  I’ll have to review it later), I recall it had a gopher client, NNTP client (Probably News/2 from the TCP/IP for OS/2 2.0 days) and a cut down version of LAMAIL…

The other massive shift online was the coming rise of the web browser.  Specifically Mosaic.  And Mosaic ran on all kinds of UNIX platforms.  It even ran on Windows NT.  They even made it ‘safe’ enough to run on Win32s.  But there was no port to OS/2.  Thankfully someone recognized the importance of Win32s, and provided a driver to interface Windows 3.1’s 386 enhanced mode, to a workalike driver for Win32s.

I chose the ‘runtime’ version of Win32s 1.1 .. I just wanted to see if it’d work.

And the good news is that not only did it work, but it runs in seamless mode, with OS/2 1.1’s color scheme.  Pretty snazzy.

There was a short windows, but it was there, while people were on dialup, and before Windows 95 had shipped and had some extended driver support under it’s belt, OS/2 was the best way to run Win32s stuff outside of Windows NT.  But even people who had devices like this thing I had at the time:

The web ramp was really cool, it had 3 serial ports, which let you connect 3 modems.  It would then round robin your outbound requests so that people could share all 3 lines (if you had them) and it did NAT in hardware.  This mean in the age of dialup this little guy would let you build a small LAN (it had a 4 port ethernet hub in the back) and suddenly all the computers at home with ethernet were online.  It’s stuff like this that really left people asking why did OS/2 warp have such a substandard networking stack.

The year was 1994, the internet was starting to gain momentum.  Windows 95 was a year and a half away.  The answer to Windows 95 would no doubt be OS/2 4.0.  Would IBM do anything about these shortcomings?

We’ll find out as we upgrade to ‘project Merlin’ AKA OS/2 4.0.

So some googling around I found this.

1. Do it all over again, but make sure to uninstall the Virtual Machine Additions before you convert the machine.
2. Install VMWare tools without the mouse driver (choose custom installation)
3. Open regedit, and use your mad keyboarding skillz to navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96F-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
..then remove the value msvmmou and any adjacent spaces from the Regvalue UpperFilters, leaving whatever else is there, then reboot.

And it actually worked!

It’s not secret that this is regarded as one of the worst advertising campaigns in the history of the world.  Watch it and remember this ad aired on American TV.  If you want to alienate people first speak to them in a foreign language that they have no hope of understanding.  Next get people who clearly are not users of that product to promote it.  And finally… DON’T SHOW THE PRODUCT.

Nobody wanted to get ‘warped’.  After all warped rotors cost people a LOT of money.. Bad connotations, you know.  But apparently nobody with any common sense asked what the hell was this crap.

Anyways, let’s go and do the upgrade.

Old blue, forever there…. forever… IBM.

Oh what’s this?  A new boot logo! Clearly this isn’t OS/2 2.x!

I can feel the excitement already!  So I’m going to take the easy way out, right? It should.. keep my printer, keep my applications, and get me warped right!?

The best part about Warp is that it supports IDE CDROMs out of the box! Outside of the boot disks, no more floppy shuffle!

And tragedy struck.

Well of course I have a greater then 35MB disk, Invalid Base Product Level?  What is so wrong with OS/2 2.11?  I have a bad feeling my OS/2 3.0 CD is one of the ‘red spine’ varieties that includes no Win-OS/2 support but rather relied on the user to provide a regular copy of Windows 3.1 … And for some reason it won’t upgrade a prior Win-OS/2 installation.

Oh well.  I’ll have to dig around some more for a ‘red’ spine copy of Warp 3 …

I guess for now this is a ‘work in progress’.. but I’ll get OS/2 all the way to 4!

—- Edit

Some kind person sent me some disk images, so onward to Warp 3!