Category Archives: Win32

Ssystem 1.6

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ssystem logo

With all the talk of a possible ‘rocky’ earth like planet making the news, I thought it would be fun to seek out a really ancient (ha!) OpenGL program that did a basic simulation of our solar system.  I am of course talking about ssytem.

Back in the late 90’s I have to admit that this was pretty incredible to look at!  Although it was using OpenGL in software only, and to be honest the best and more stable way to use ssystem was on Windows of all things.

Microsoft had a deal with SGI around the 1993 timeline, and after the release of Windows NT 3.1 they were able to work out a deal to bring Windows NT to the SGI MIPS computers platform in exchange from OpenGL being made available on Windows NT.  SGI couldn’t see a way to monetize NT on their hardware and the port never actually shipped, evidence of it however is present in the leaked Windows NT 4.0 source code.  However OpenGL would prove very import for Microsoft as workstation style graphics could now run on ‘prosumer’ grade OS Windows NT 3.5, and eventually there was even a runtime for Windows 95!

All the old websites, and archives of ssystem have been wiped out, however I did find a copy of the source code for version 1.6 on a HPUX site of all places.

ssystem-1.6-src-11.00.tar.gz

With a filename tracked down, I was able to locate in archvie.org a partial backup of the main site here: http://www1.las.es/~amil/ssystem/english.html

So I thought I could start there.  Ssystem needs the GLUT toolkit and I found a ‘pre-configured’ version 3.7 that Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 can build on the command line here. Naturally with all the textures, it does rely on the IJG JPEG library (libjpeg) and I used version 6b as ssystem itself dates from 1999.

There was a bit of work to be done with the source code, as I had to massage it to compile with Visual C++, lots of missing headers, and there were some collisions in the lex for parsing the config file, but they were trivial to clean up.  After a bit of going back and forth with a seemingly defective pre-built version of GLUT, re-building it myself got it to link a working executable:

ssystem in orbit around Europa.

ssystem in orbit around Europa.

Of course in this day & age, any machine these days has hardware OpenGL acceleration so it is pretty trivial to run this program.

The artifacts in the picture were common at the time, and it’s how I remember it all those years ago so I’m not to worried about it.

I tried to compile with Visual C++ 4.0 however when trying to link I got this error:

Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Incremental Linker Version 3.00.5270
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-1995. All rights reserved.

init.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
ssystem.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
stars.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glBindTexture
init.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _glGenTextures
astrolib.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 2 unresolved externals
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: ‘link’ : return code ‘0x19’
Stop.

I’m not sure why, as I re-compiled with Visual C++ 6.0 and I get a working executable.  More bizarre if I try to link the objects that were compiled with Visual C++ 4.0 with Visual C++ 6.0 it also fails in the same way.

I’ve placed in everything I could find into this archive: ssystem-1.6.7z including a pre-compiled version, and the high resolution images.  Along the way I also did find a backup of the site http://www.wam.umd.edu/~kamelkev/Ssystem which actually has a much smaller download of ssystem 1.6 as ssystem-1.6.zip  You may need to play with ssystem.conf to get a more respectable display.  I have also tweeked it to work find on my machine, using the highest values I could get away with, without running over the 2GB per process limit on 32bit processes.

SetiHomeBanner

Let’s also not forget the SETI crazy of the 1990’s.

Spent some more time messing with NetHack 1.3d revived

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1.3d revived and reloaded

1.3d revived and reloaded

And now it runs on Windows 10 (probably lots of Windows NT as well) thanks to EMX+RSXNT.

I put a Windows binary build on sourceforge, with the needed termcap and rsxnt.dll to run.  It works best if installed into the root of a drive, but it doesn’t matter which drive letter (I suppose you could even use subst).  I was patching around the stock NetHack 1.3d, but considering the weird issues I was having with it ‘mostly’ working, it was easier to just lean on the NetHack 1.3d revived project.  I should also say this is what I also used to get NetHack 1.3d running on the x68000.

I’ve been able to save, restore and go up, down and even die without it crashing so it seems OK to me.

It’s kind of cool to build it with GCC 1.40 on Windows 10, and get a native executable.  Maybe pointless in the golden age of emulation / virtualization as you could just as easily build stock 1.3d on a 4.2 BSD VAX, or even 386BSD 0.1 system.

Maybe I’ll finish the work to see if I can get it running on OS/2 or MS-DOS via EMX, but for now the project stuff is on sourceforge.net

GCC 1.40 on Windows

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I know with all the talk of GCC 6.1.0 for MS-DOS, and other platforms, you must be thinking that all this talk of progress, and high versions numbers just isn’t right!  I’ve just started to migrate code to GCC 5.1, and now you are telling me there is a GCC 6!

Where can I turn away from all this so called progress!  I don’t like my C compilers to be C++ programs that require massive HOURS to compile.  Can’t we just go back to the good old days?

And the answer is YES, you can!

While looking for some libraries on another project, I came across this old defunct project called RSXNT. And it’s a port of EMX to Win32 platforms!  Well isn’t that fantastic!

So, considering I was able to build GCC 1.40 and cross compile to Linux 0.11 from Windows, can we do something with this?

Well ancient versions of EMX are very difficult to track down.  Somehow I did mange to find this hybrid of 0.8B & 0.8C.  The EMX runtime & binaries are from 0.8C, but the source code is from 0.8B.  And the best thing is that the 0.8B is based around GCC 1.40!  So with a little bit of tweaking the files, and messing around I got the assembler, linker, and C compiler to build with MinGW!  Sadly the source code to EMXBIND, wasn’t included in the zips that I have, but the aformentioned RSXNT packages included a version of EMXBIND that will run on Windows!  So I managed to mash them together, and for the fun of it, I’m using the old InfoTaskForce interpreter from 1987 to complete the vintage feel.

Compiling & Binding

Compiling & Binding

Now with my executable, I can run it on MS-DOS & OS/2!

MS-DOS via DOSBox

MS-DOS via DOSBox

and OS/2 2.0!

OS/2 (on Qemu)

OS/2 (on Qemu)

Well isn’t that fantastic!

However when running RSXNT’s bind, NTBIND I got this error:

D:\emx_w32\infocom>..\bin\ntbind info2
No relocations in file:
you have not linked the NT library

Great.  Some more digging around, and if you want to make Windows programs, you need to use the RSXNT includes & libraries.  So I shifted the libraries around, and patched gcc to call the linker the same way RSXNT’s gcc driver calls it, and first go this error:

io.o: Undefined symbol __streams referenced from text segment

And looking at the stdio.h there is this:

extern struct _stdio _streams[];

No doubt, the headers & libraries are tied together.  So now making both of the RSXNT versions, I can link the executable. (YES I did try declaring the structure anyways, and I get stdout, but stdin doesn’t work).

Running on Windows 10

Running on Windows 10

Just like EMX before it, RSXNT, requires you to have the RSXNT.DLL file in your path, or in the same directory.  I suppose it’s a fair trade off.  Not that I expect there to be a surge of people cross compiling from Windows to OS/2, or even MS-DOS these days.  GCC 1.40 is ancient, 1991 vintage, but even Linus Torvalds loved it!

For comparison, GCC 5.10 produces a 55,906 byte interpreter, while GCC 1.40 produces a 88,576 byte interpreter.

For an attempt at porting some code, I choose Nethack 1.3d, and used the MS-DOS based makefiles.  It didn’t work so well, but I was able to patch in enough of the unix based termios logic, and thanks to EMX/RSXNT’s built in termios capabilities I was able to get a working version!

Nethack 1.3d on Windows 10 x64

Nethack 1.3d on Windows 10 x64

I don’t know if there really was any advantage to compiling with GCC 1.40, but it was great to see that this 1991 compiler could handily compile the 1987 based code.

How about some speed comparisons?  I dug out the ancient dhrystone.c, and gave it a shot.  I had to define 500,000,000 passes, as my computer is fast.  GCC 1.40 only offers -O for optimization, while GCC 5.1 offers many more levels, but for this quick experiment they really aren’t needed.

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc140.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 57
This machine benchmarks at 8771929 dhrystones/second

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc140_O.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 40
This machine benchmarks at 12500000 dhrystones/second

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc510.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 43
This machine benchmarks at 11627906 dhrystones/second

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc510_O.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 16
This machine benchmarks at 31250000 dhrystones/second

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc510_O2.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 14
This machine benchmarks at 35714285 dhrystones/second

D:\emx\demo\dhry>gcc510_Ofast.exe
Dhrystone(1.1) time for 500000000 passes = 11
This machine benchmarks at 45454545 dhrystones/second

As you can see, GCC 1.40 produces the slowest code.  While it’s optimized code did beat out GCC 5.10 with no optimizations, turning on optimizations did blow it away.  And again GCC 5.1 beat out the older 1.40 for executable sizes.

29,960 gcc510_O.exe
29,996 gcc510_O2.exe
30,472 gcc510.exe
70,656 gcc140_O.exe
74,752 gcc140.exe

And this time by over a 2x lead!  It is fair to say that the new versions of GCC, despite being significantly larger do indeed produce smaller and faster code.

For anyone who’s read this far, I guess you want to take it out for a test drive?  Remember it is still EMX based, which means is wants to live on the ROOT of your hard disk.  I’m using the ‘D’ drive for myself, so if you are using C or whatever you’ll need to alter the environment vars.

You can download the exe’s and combined source here: gcc-1.40_EMX-OS2_RSXNT.7z

Adding ncurses into Qemu!

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Text mode.. text mode..

Text mode.. text mode..

One thing that’s always bugged me about the Qemu 1.0 and higher is that they don’t print anything to the Win32 console.  So you have to go digging around in stdout.txt or stderr.txt .  Very annoying.  And of course Windows users can’t have the nice ‘curses’ text mode interface.  Or can they?

While I was re-updating the 4.4LiteBSD MIPS Qemu package, I turned off the normal SDLmain so that it now acts like a console binary, meaning that stdout/stdin now function properly.  So if Qemu had a problem, you can see it!

And while I was in the source, I thought why not see how hard it is to manually turn on curses?  It’s a quick one liner to config-host.mak (since it’s not detecting) then updating everywhere it has <curses.h> hard coded to use <ncurses.h> …. I guess I could have made a symlink, but whatever.  It links and more importantly I can run text mode MS-DOS in text mode!

To activate simply use the -curses flag.

Rest assured that SDL is still in there as well.  But now you can see error messages like this:

C:\qemu>qemu-system-i386.exe -L pc-bios -m 16 -soundhw sb16
dsound: Could not initialize DirectSoundCapture
dsound: Reason: No sound driver is available for use, or the given GUID is not a valid DirectSound device ID

So now you know there may or maynot be issues… In this case, I don’t care about recording audio, so it doesn’t matter.

I’ve updated the existing files on my server, so simply re-download.  Otherwise for new people my i386 only package (~4MB) is here:

qemu-2.4.0.1_win32-x86_x86_64.7z

And the ‘full system’ package (~22MB) is here:

qemu-2.4.0.1_win32-all.7z

For the two of three people who like this kind of thing..

Qemu 2.4.0.1 binaries for Windows

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So here is my cross compiled Qemu binaries for Windows.

I added in my Control+Alt+d ‘fix’ to be a Control+Alt+Delete that anyone who runs Windows NT or MS-DOS will no doubt love.  The kbd_put_keycode function had been removed, so I also put that back in.

I also undid the weird scaling thing that has been around since version 1.1.  And I tried my best to merge in some NE2000 fixes.

Solaris 9

Solaris 9

I threw a Solaris 9 ISO at it, and it booted up to the text installer!

asd

MIPS ARC

The MIPS ARC firmware however always bombs out on reset with an Interrupt Controller Error.

I tried the ‘doom’ test, and installing DooM 1.1 took FOREVER.  Writing to the disk is slow. Incredibly slow. I guess forcing the write thru cache is mandatory?

-drive file=bla.disk,if=ide,index=0,media=disk,cache=writethrough

I haven’t tested.

Also DO NOT USE THE PCSPEAKER DEVICE.

I nearly went deaf.  It doesn’t work properly, but rather loops so that one beep turns into a hurricane of beeps.

I’ve included the needed DLL’s, and compiled everything I could statically.  I guess I could have fought more but I have other things to do.

So the ‘cut down’ version which is i386/x86_64 only is HERE.

Those who want to try out the various RISC processors download the ‘full’ package HERE.

Building SDL2 for Android

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Phew is this rather involved.  First you need to download over a gigabytes worth of files. For something that is going to be embedded you need a MASSIVE amount of space.

You need:

I went ahead and installed the JDK in a normal directory,  The same went for the Android SDK.  The NDK is a 7zip file, that I went ahead and put at the root of my C drive because I’m that kind of guy.  Next I unpacked ant into the NDK directory, and SDL.  For SDL be sure to use some command line or other unzip tool that makes sure that the text files are translated appropriately, otherwise they are impossible to read in good editing tools, like notepad.

cd C:\android-ndk-r10d\
unzip -aa \Downloads\SDL2-2.0.3.zip
unzip \Downloads\apache-ant-1.9.4-bin.zip

Now to stage the project directory.  The ‘Android project’ that we are going to build out of is *INSIDE* the SDL archive.  And SDL needs to be inside the project directory, so we xcopy out the bits we need.

md proj
cd proj
xcopy ..\SDL2-2.0.3\android-project\*.* . /e/s
md jni\sdl
xcopy ..\SDL2-2.0.3\*.* jni\sdl /e/s

Now we need to set some environment variables.  Again this is where my stuff is, yours may be different.

set NDK_ROOT=C:\android-ndk-r10d
set ANDROID_HOME=”C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk\”
set PATH=%NDK_ROOT%\apache-ant-1.9.4\bin;”C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_79\bin”;%ANDROID_HOME%\tools;%ANDROID_HOME%\platform-tools;%PATH%

Now we need to edit the jni\src\Android.mk and point it to your sources.  In this case I’m using dinomage.com‘s simple main.c &  image.bmp as I haven’t written anything exciting yet. Change YourSourceHere.c, to main.c

Now copy in the image.bmp file into the assets directory:

md assets
copy image.bmp assets

Now we can fire up the native compiler tools, and by default it’ll compile for ARM thumb, ARM v7a, and x86

..\ndk-build

Now for the java.  Android is a java platform, so now we have to compile the wrapper that calls our C/C++ code.  First we have to set what version of Android we are compiling for:

android update project –path . –subprojects -t 12

And now we compile with ‘ant’ by typing in:

ant debug

And if all goes well you’ll get:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 2 seconds

Now to run the program, we can fire up one of the emulators (you will have to configure one no doubt) using AVD.  I just clicked around, and picked something that’d launch.  The shell seems to crash a lot, but otherwise yeah.

Now to upload our application to the emulator once it is running:

ant debug install

And if all goes well, you’ll see:

install:
[echo] Installing C:\android-ndk-r10d\proj\bin\SDLActivity-debug.apk onto d
efault emulator or device…
[exec] pkg: /data/local/tmp/SDLActivity-debug.apk
[exec] Success
[exec] rm failed for -f, Read-only file system
[exec] 1985 KB/s (1028625 bytes in 0.506s)

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 5 seconds

And on my first shot at running, it crashed.

Unfortunately SDL App has stopped

Unfortunately SDL App has stopped

Using ‘adb logcat’ on the emulator I was able to find this line:

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: dlopen failed: cannot locate symbol “signal” referenced by “libSDL2.so”…

Well it turns out signal was an inline function until platform android-21, now it’s not inline anymore. When you use the ndk r10, android-21 is used by default but it’s not fully retro-compatible with devices running former Android versions. In this case, signal can’t be found on the emulator. (It did run properly on my Lollipop phone).

Fixing this is simple just edit jni\Application.mk and add in the APP_PLATFORM line:

# Uncomment this if you’re using STL in your project
# See CPLUSPLUS-SUPPORT.html in the NDK documentation for more information
# APP_STL := stlport_static
APP_PLATFORM := android-12
APP_ABI := armeabi armeabi-v7a x86

Re-compile with ndk-build, and re-upload with ant then you are good to go.

working

working

I grabbed, and borrowed some phones around the office, including an x86 phone and yeah it works!

SDL2 test!

SDL2 test!

I haven’t even tried to cross build libraries on Windows… I suspect I should be doing this on OS X or Linux.

Apout on Windows

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I read somewhere that kids these days are interested in games where you can modify how the game operates with sub programs written in their own languages etc.

Hello from Unix v7

Hello

So while this does sound interesting, it does remind me of that good old fashioned syscall emulation, where you emulate the CPU, load an executable, but any system calls that are made, are handled by the simulator, little if any hardware is actually emulated. Yes Basilisk II is an example of this, but so is Wine, WOW, NTVDM, i386 code on x64 platforms, and various others. The major advantage is that they typically can access your native file system so you don’t have to mess with virtual disks. Of course it all depends on the implementation.

I did remember this old simulator, Apout, which could run UNIX v6, 7 along with BSD 2.9 stuff on modern Unix. The emulation layer here being LIBC, and how pretty much the basics of how UNIX operates hasn’t changed since those ancient days in the 1970’s.

So I thought I’d try to see how much of this works on Win32 using Microsoft Visual C++ 5. And surprisingly I didn’t have to glue in that much, the biggest thing I had to do was trying to detect if a file about to be opened was ASCII or BINARY as the UNIX platform doesn’t distinguish these two but Win32 with it’s MS-DOS legacy does. As you can see I did get the banner program running, some of the games work ok, although I had to comment out the sgtty functions as there is no immediate equivalent on Windows, and I didn’t think there would be that much of a demand for such a thing anyways. I can even run the login program. Which brings me to the issue which is that it’ll spawn new programs fine, but when an exit is called Apout just exits. Even on Linux it’ll just do this. I tried doing something with setjmp/longjmp but it crashes shortly afterwards… No doubt some stack unwinding fun. As such trying to compile things just bomb out. I went ahead and took the source code to cc and made a native Win32 version that then calls apout for the various parts and that almost worked except I then found out that the assembler on the PDP-11 is a 2 pass assembler, written in assembly. And yes, when as calls as2, and unwinds all hell breaks loose. Which is another problem that UNIX likes to share file descriptors among itself and children, but children like to close things when they die. I guess the solution is to give each child it’s own descriptor table as everyone likes to close stdin/stdout/stderr and even #4, which the simulator uses for logging. it’s very annoying so I just prevented it from closing handles under 4.

But running each of the phases manually does get me an executable but it doesn’t seem to do anything, the only syscalls are closing all the file handles and exiting.

So close!

I don’t think anyone will care, but here is my source/binary along with Unix v7. It’s hard coded to dump stuff into c:\temp for temporary files, the Unix v7 must be in c:\v7 … ugh.

Hunt the wumpus on NT

Hunt the wumpus on NT

But yeah, you can play that thrilling game from 1979, hunt the wumpus!

Did you know that GCC used to support Windows NT ?

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I’m not talking about MingGW, Cygwin or anything else like that, but rather when support for Windows NT first appeared, it had to be compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 of all things.

It was back in the 2.6 days of GCC, right before the stagnation that led to EGCS.

`i[345]86-*-winnt3.5'
     This version requires a GAS that has not yet been released.  Until
     it is, you can get a prebuilt binary version via anonymous ftp from
     `cs.washington.edu:pub/gnat' or `cs.nyu.edu:pub/gnat'. You must
     also use the Microsoft header files from the Windows NT 3.5 SDK.
     Find these on the CDROM in the `/mstools/h' directory dated
     9/4/94.  You must use a fixed version of Microsoft linker made
     especially for NT 3.5, which is also is available on the NT 3.5
     SDK CDROM.  If you do not have this linker, can you also use the
     linker from Visual C/C++ 1.0 or 2.0.

     Installing GNU CC for NT builds a wrapper linker, called `ld.exe',
     which mimics the behaviour of Unix `ld' in the specification of
     libraries (`-L' and `-l').  `ld.exe' looks for both Unix and
     Microsoft named libraries.  For example, if you specify `-lfoo',
     `ld.exe' will look first for `libfoo.a' and then for `foo.lib'.

     You may install GNU CC for Windows NT in one of two ways,
     depending on whether or not you have a Unix-like shell and various
     Unix-like utilities.

       1. If you do not have a Unix-like shell and few Unix-like
          utilities, you will use a DOS style batch script called
          `configure.bat'.  Invoke it as `configure winnt' from an
          MSDOS console window or from the program manager dialog box.
          `configure.bat' assumes you have already installed and have
          in your path a Unix-like `sed' program which is used to
          create a working `Makefile' from `Makefile.in'.

          `Makefile' uses the Microsoft Nmake program maintenance
          utility and the Visual C/C++ V8.00 compiler to build GNU CC.
          You need only have the utilities `sed' and `touch' to use
          this installation method, which only automatically builds the
          compiler itself.  You must then examine what `fixinc.winnt'
          does, edit the header files by hand and build `libgcc.a'
          manually.

       2. The second type of installation assumes you are running a
          Unix-like shell, have a complete suite of Unix-like utilities
          in your path, and have a previous version of GNU CC already
          installed, either through building it via the above
          installation method or acquiring a pre-built binary.  In this
          case, use the `configure' script in the normal fashion.

Well, that is quite the tall order!  I can’t believe I somehow managed to build it back then, and out of curiosity I managed to build it again.  And as you can see you need a ‘beta’ release of the GAS assembler, which is kind of impossible to find now, but it was part of the GNAT project, which used to distribute binary builds of the GCC core back in the day.  Luckily, I have a version stuffed away, although it’s from GCC 2.8.1, not as ancient as it would have when GCC 2.6 was a new thing.   But it at least assembles enough for my simple Hello World experiment.

To build GCC you need a working SED, which surprisingly CL 8.0 from the Win32s SDK, and it runs fine on Windows 7 x64 of all things.  I had to mess with some of the files, and substitute the linker & headder files from Visual C++ 2.0 but much to my amazement not only can I build GCC along with libgcc.a, it also builds incredibly fast.  On my machine I can compile GCC in about 5 seconds. Â I remember in 1995 building this on Windows 95 (I was crazy) and it is taking HOURS and HOURS.

So, one nice thing about these binaries is that you don’t need any external DLL’s  Even the import section of a simple hello world exe is tiny:

GetVersion GetEnvironmentStrings GetCommandLineA ExitProcess RtlUnwind UnhandledExceptionFilter GetModuleFileNameA GetFileType GetStdHandle GetStartupInfoA VirtualFree VirtualAlloc WriteFile WideCharToMultiByte GetLastError FlushFileBuffers SetFilePointer SetStdHandle CloseHandle KERNEL32.dll

Which implies that it only needs KERNEL32 to function.

I don’t know if it’s of any use to anyone else, but HERE is my dump of all the source and tools I used to build GCC.

Shoebill now has working Ethernet support!

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Great news!  The excellent A/UX capable emulator Shoebill, now has working Ethernet support!  The sad news is that it only supports the TUN/TAP interface.  So Windows users are kind of left out in the fun.

Shoebill + Ethernet

Shoebill + Ethernet

Except, I’ve been here before with SIMH ages ago.  So I dusted off my source code, and injected it into Shoebill.  The first issue I had was that SLiRP was rejecting all the inputted frames, because of invalid frame length.  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.  And it’s the same reason why Shoebill originally didn’t work on Win32, the blasted packed structures!  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.  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.  It turns out Shoebill was trying to read & write a the same time, which caused SLiRP to crash as it is not re-entrant.  I tried to place mutex’s on every SLiRP call but that ended up having SLiRP not process any packets.  Very strange.  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.  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.

Fun with PGP 1.0

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Well I got slightly bored, and thought I’d dig into some old crypto software.  And PGP 1.0 was as good as any place to start.

Now one scandalous thing at the time was the inclusion of RSAREF 1.0, the RSA reference library which redistribution required a license that wasn’t exactly included with PGP.

A company called Public Key Partners (PKP) holds the exclusive
commercial license to sell and sub-license the RSA public key
cryptosystem. For licensing details on the RSA algorithm, you can
contact Robert Fougner at PKP, at 408/735-6779. The author of this
software implementation of the RSA algorithm is providing this
implementation for educational use only.

And wow was this fun at the time.  As far as I know this license lapsed on September 21, 2000. 

And then there was this slight issue:

After Biham and Zimmermann go their food and sat down, Zimmermann took out a few pages of computer listings.  Within minutes, Birham was finding fundamental flaws in Bass-O-Matic.  Some of the flaws were subtle-weaknesses that made the algorithm susceptible to differential cryptanalysis, which was Birham’s speciality. Others were more embarrassing, like a conceptual error in Zimmermann’s algorithm that prevented the last bit of each byte from being properly encrypted.  After ten minutes of Birham’s onslaught, Zimmermann realized that Bass-O-Matic was a lost cause.

So now you would be wondering, why would I even bother with what was a quickly abandoned encryption?  Well I was bored, and I was more interested if I could locate the source to 1.0.  What would be more interesting to me is to revive it onto somewhat more modern 32-bit platforms.  Namely OS X, Win32 and MS-DOS.

With a little luck, I found the unix_pgp10.tar.gz, which does contain the source code for a Unix version of PGP!  This version is more so geared to the SPARC of all things. Specifically it mentions:

Tested on SunOS 4.1 with gcc 1.39

However building on OS X was trival with changing the Makefile.  The CC had to be changed to reflect a 32bit build, and the DEFINES had to remove the HIGHFIRST define, as the x86 platform is little endian.

CC=cc -arch i386

DEFINES= -DUNIX -DPSEUDORANDOM -DUNIT16 -DPORTABLE

Is the relevant changes.

And even better it’ll work!

$ pgp pgp.ctx pgp.exe

Pretty Good Privacy 1.0 – RSA public key cryptography for the masses.
(c) Copyright 1990 Philip Zimmermann, Phil’s Pretty Good Software. 5 Jun 91

File has signature. Public key is required to check signature.
File ‘pgp.ctx’ has signature, but with no text.
Text is assumed to be in file ‘pgp.exe’.
.
Good signature from user “Zimmermann, Philip R. – [email protected]”.
Signature made Wed Jun 5 13:51:18 1991

Signature and text are separate. No output file produced.
Plaintext filename: pgp.exe

Wasn’t that great!

Now getting this to run on Windows was a little bit more of a challenge.  I was going to build from the UNIX source code again, however both Visual C++, and Watcom C++ build an executable, but neither are able to add keys to the keyring, verify the executable reliably and deadlock all the time.

So I thought I’d get a little creative and start replacing some code from the MS-DOS version of PGP. It turns out that all I needed was rsaio.c & rsaio.h and I was able to build an executable.  But I ran into other snags, and stack errors.  A glance at the MS-DOS Makefile, and I saw that they had to up the stack size from the defaults.  So I figured the same would hold true, and I picked a much larger 32kb stack for the heck of it.  I mean it is 2014, and if you can’t handle a 32kb stack well..

Compiling on Visual C++ went like this:

cl386 -c /DPSEUDORANDOM /DUNIT16 /DPORTABLE *.c
cl *.obj /F32768 /Fepgp.exe

And for Watcom C++

wcl386 -c -dPSEUDORANDOM -dUNIT16 -dPORTABLE *.c
wcl386 *.obj -fe=pgp.exe -k32768

And now I can build for either compiler.  And even better, it works!

PGP 1.0 on Win32

PGP 1.0 on Win32

Even for completness sakes, DOS4G/W works as well! Just remember to link for MS-DOS

wcl386 *.obj -fe=pgp.exe -k32768 -l=dos4g

And you should be good to go.

PGP for 32bit MS-DOS

PGP for 32bit MS-DOS

So what happened to PGP?  Well version 2 used a more ‘acceptable’ encryption, the IDEA cypher, then the company was sold, IP was sold again and again.  It’s still out there, mostly for email encryption.

While it sure did ignite the world on fire for a while, the overall difficulty of using it, combined with the ease of losing the private key and all your data is just too easy.  But this really is the nature of the beast.