Category Archives: Windows NT 4.0

Installing Windows NT 4.0 on Qemu 0.14.0 with SCSI

Posted on by
Reply

So for a test I needed an email server, so I thought I’d setup an Exchange server quickly. Exchange 5.5 runs best on NT 4.0 so I’m going to install it on Qemu 0.14.0. Along the way I ran into a few little gotcha’s so I thought I’d update on how to do this.

qemu.exe -L pc-bios -cpu pentium -hda nt4-server.qcow2 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -cdrom nt4server.iso -boot d

As you can see on NT 4.0 you now have to set the CPU level. This needs to be done going forward with NT 4.0 as again it’s too old to detect newer CPU’s and gets confused. Also I’d recommend selecting the ‘standard pc’ HAL. Oh sure it may look all nice with a MPS/Uniprocessor, but I’ve found it noticeably slower.

The default cirrus logic driver works at 16bit depths at 800×600 well enough (The hardware mouse pointer doesn’t work so you’ll need to turn on a custom pointer). Another thing is my choice of the AMD PCNet NIC, is that it’s the same that VMWare uses, so you can always run these disks under VMWare if need be (as long as VMWare has IDE disk support, and you convert the disk first!!).

Ok that basically covers an IDE install, but let’s get onto SCSI. Qemu now (it’s been in there for a while..) emulates a SCSI controller, the PCI 53c895a adapter. And I’ve found that you can get it to work with Windows NT 4.0! First you’ll need a driver diskette & BIOS both found at LSI’s webpage. The NT driver is nt896.zip if you’ve gotten the correct one.

Now that I’m going to install exchange, the best practice I’ve found for NT is something like this:

OS DISK 4GB
SWAP DISK 256MB
INSTALLS 2GB
MAIL STORE 8GB
LOGS 128MB

So that’s a bunch of SCSI disks, right? I guess I could build a stripped set but that’d be kind of crazy… so here is how I’m going to do it:

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow2 scsi0.qcow2 4G
Formatting ‘scsi0.qcow2’, fmt=qcow2 size=4294967296 encryption=off cluster_size=0

qemu-img.exe create -f raw scsi1.qcow2 256M
Formatting ‘scsi1.qcow2’, fmt=raw size=268435456

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow2 scsi2.qcow2 2G
Formatting ‘scsi2.qcow2’, fmt=qcow2 size=2147483648 encryption=off cluster_size=0

qemu-img.exe create -f qcow2 scsi3.qcow2 8G
Formatting ‘scsi3.qcow2’, fmt=qcow2 size=8589934592 encryption=off cluster_size=0

qemu-img.exe create -f raw scsi4.qcow2 128M
Formatting ‘scsi4.qcow2’, fmt=raw size=134217728

Since the swap & log disk are constantly being written to, it’s best to leave them in the ‘raw’ disk format.

Ok now to install. I know it’s a massive command line but this is how I’m going to kick off the install:

qemu.exe -cpu pentium -m 256 -L pc-bios -net nic,model=pcnet
-net user -drive file=scsi0.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=0 -drive file=scsi1.qcow2,
if=scsi,bus=0,unit=1 -drive file=scsi2.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=2 -drive file=sc
si3.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=3 -drive file=scsi4.qcow2,if=scsi,bus=0,unit=4 -opt
ion-rom 8xx_64.rom -fda lsi.vfd -cdrom nt4server.iso -boot d

And if it’s done right, you’ll notice that now the SCSI bios will be initializing as seen below with a bunch of disks…

qemu 0.14.0 scsi bios

qemu 0.14.0 scsi bios

Once your NT CD starts to boot up, you’ll see a blue screen like this. It’s important that you hit both F5 and F6 over and over to tell the setup program that you want a custom HAL, along with an install time SCSI driver.

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi hit f5/f6

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi hit f5/f6

And as I did above, I’ll first select the ‘standard pc’ HAL.

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi load Symbios driver

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi load Symbios driver

Select the Symbios driver

Select the Symbios driver

Then You can tell it to load the LSI / Symbios scsi driver, and install will roll through as normal. Since this is going to be an Exchange server, I’m also going to make it a PDC on it’s own domain, since Exchange requires DC functionality.

Make it a DC

Make it a DC

And from there it is a somewhat normal NT install. I did leave out the messaging stuff, because it’s that ancient “Microsoft Mail” stuff, and it’s somewhat crippled at that.

For the fun of it, if you load 256 colors, you’ll wind up with this:

Windows NT 4.0 with 256 colours

Windows NT 4.0 with 256 colours

And all the icons will be blank squares. Not terribly useful. Maybe for low displays the regular VGA would be best…. But again with 16bit and custom pointers (much like an old MIPS issue) it will work enough. 1024x768x16million colors at 43Hz (interlaced) works pretty good too!

Next I fired up the disktool, (diskman) and slapped down a bunch of partitions… I let the swap formatted FAT as I don’t care about it’s crash to crash integrity, but the rest can be NTFS. Also from a boot limitation the first disk is only 1GB out of it’s 4… I don’t know if that matters.

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 partition disks

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 partition disks

Then into the system tool to move the swap to the ‘s’ drive.

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi setup swap

qemu 0.14.0 nt 40 scsi setup swap

I don’t know if the actual setup of Exchange is all that … interesting so I’ll just leave it to your imagination.

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS revisited

Posted on by
3
MIPS at it's best

MIPS at it’s best

Over the last few days, I’ve received a few ports of some software for Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, that I am sure the rest of everyone will be interested in.

The first one provided by nandhp is lynx, the text mode browser! While it may not seem like a super big deal, it *IS* a http 1.1 compliant browser, and it is more useful then Internet Explorer 2.0.

The next, also by nandhp is putty! So now you can ssh out into the world!

I’ve also received unzip & gzip for handling compressed files.. .No word on a tar yet. For now I’m using gnutar for MS-DOS.

And finally I took my quakeworld for MS-DOS with some of the SDL parts merged in to provide a preliminary QuakeWorld for the MIPS.

What is more cool, is that there is still people out there playing Quake. I suspect the non intel numbers are pretty low.

At any rate, enjoy!

Net Hack wiki moved

Posted on by
Reply

I just received notice that the NetHack wiki has now moved and the new site is nethackwiki.com.

It’s great when old software just doesn’t revive for a little while then fade back to obscurity, so update your links, or just browse the site and be blown away by all their information on such a great (and difficult) game.

And of course, I have NetHack for the Windows NT 4.0 MIPS, and various 4.X BSD on sourceforge under the package tapes….

OpenWatcom for the DEC Alpha

Posted on by
3

Someone had contacted me about running some Fortran programs on the DEC Alpha with Windows NT. Now I know that DEC had released some compilers for the Alpha, the Digital Visual Fortran thing which some people still sell for around $600 USD.

OUCH.

But luckily a friend mentioned that I should look at the source code for Open Watcom.

So, I figure for the hell of it, I’ll show how to build a Dec Alpha cross compiler for both C & Fortran. First I’m using Open Watcom 1.8, the current ‘release’ version. You are on your own for older or newer versions.

First install Open Watcom 1.8, with whatever your host is (I’m running on win64, so I’m using the win32 install), and set the target for 32bit NT. We will need the headers so this is the easiest way to ensure your Watcom can make NT exes.

Next you are going to need the file owaxp0401.zip. This is a pre-compiled version of the compiler & libraries for the DEC Alpha. All we need from this is the libaxp directory, which you can just unzip to your Watcom directory.

Now we’ll need to copy some files to satisfy the build process.

C:\WATCOM\binnt>copy wcl386.exe bwcl386.exe
C:\WATCOM\binnt>copy wlib.exe bwlib.exe
C:\WATCOM\binnt>copy wrc.exe bwrc.exe

Ok, now with that out of the way, run c:\watcom\owsetenv.bat to setup your environment, and now let’s extract the source to 1.8. I’m just going to use c:\temp as a place to put it. Also you will have to edit the setvars.bat file, and change the following:

set OWROOT=c:\temp\ow18src
set WATCOM=c:\watcom
set DOC_BUILD=0

Now I suppose you could save this into a batch file, and kick that off, and this will build the needed libraries, then the C compiler.

cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\builder\nt386
wmake
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\dwarf\dw\osi386\
wmake
cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\yacc\nt386
wmake
copy yacc.exe \WATCOM\binnt\byacc.exe
cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\re2c\nt386
wmake
copy re2c.exe \WATCOM\binnt\re2c.exe
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\cg\risc\axp\nt386\
wmake
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\sdk\rc\wres\flat386\mf_r
wmake
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\cfloat\osi386
wmake
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\as\alpha\inline\osi386\
wmake
cd c:\temp\ow18src\bld\owl\osi386\
wmake

Now this will build the cross compiler…

cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\cc\wcl\nt386.axp
wmake
copy wclaxp.exe \WATCOM\binnt
cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\cc\nt386.axp
wmake
copy wccaxpc.exe \WATCOM\binnt\wccaxp.exe
copy wccdaxpc.dll \WATCOM\binnt\wccdaxp.dll
cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\as\alpha\nt386
wmake
copy wasaxp.exe \WATCOM\binnt

Now for the Fortran 77 compiler. Please note that the default flags include -we which will cause the compiler to error if there is a warning. And as luck would have it, one function doesn’t declare a prototype… So you can either remove the -we flat from the mif file, or fix the c file… The choice is yours.

cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\f77\wfl\nt386.axp
wmake
copy wflaxp.exe \WATCOM\binnt
cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\f77\wfc\nt386.axp
wmake
copy wfcaxp.exe \WATCOM\binnt
attrib c:\temp\OW18src\bld\f77\f77lib\flags.mif -r
notepad c:\temp\OW18src\bld\f77\f77lib\flags.mif

Do a search and replace on -we and replace it with nothing…

cd c:\temp\OW18src\bld\f77\f77lib\winnt.axp\_s
wmake
copy flib.lib \WATCOM\libaxp

With all that out of the way, let’s build some test programs…

Let’s start with hello.f for the Fortran compiler.

C234567
program hello
print *, ‘Hello!’
end

c:\temp>wflaxp hello.f
Open Watcom F77 Alpha AXP Compile and Link Utility Version 1.8
Portions Copyright (c) 1990-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.
wfcaxp hello.f
Open Watcom FORTRAN 77 Alpha AXP Optimizing Compiler Version 1.8
Portions Copyright (c) 1984-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.
hello.f: 3 statements, 40 bytes, 1 extensions, 0 warnings, 0 errors

Open Watcom Linker Version 1.8
Portions Copyright (c) 1985-2002 Sybase, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source code is available under the Sybase Open Watcom Public License.
See http://www.openwatcom.org/ for details.
loading object files
searching libraries
creating a Windows NT(AXP) character-mode executable

c:\temp>

Watcom Fortran cross on Dec Alpha

Watcom Fortran cross on Dec Alpha

Ok, now that’s enough for now…! Later I’ll show how to build these compilers so they’ll run on the Dec Alpha.

Just got a DEC AlphaServer 800…

Posted on by
12

All 100lb of it. It is HEAVY.

Anyways, long story short, after hauling it around Financial District, and Times Square, it’s now safe and installing Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server.

AlphaServer 800

AlphaServer 800

It’s got a single 5/500 CPU, along with 256MB of ram, and 2x 36gig disks. I’ll have to check to see if I have any ram that’ll fit it. I may very well turn it into a public access thing too….. But we’ll see.

Updates for NT 4.0 on the DEC Alpha

Posted on by
21

It seems that the ‘official’ updates for NT 4.0/Alpha on the Microsoft website are long gone… I know that Internet explorer 5.0 will be a part of that SUN vs Microsoft lawsuit which barred Microsoft from distributing any product containing the MS JVM… (like Office 97, IE5, J++ etc…)

However I found a stack of CD’s containing among other things the last updates that were provided for the DEC Alpha platform running NT 4.0.

For Windows NT 4.0 workstation & server users you’ll want Service pack 6a.

Terminal Server users will no doubt want Service pack 5. As far as I can tell, this was the last update to Terminal Server for Alpha users. Also there are MANY WTSALPHA.EXE’s out there, that are ALL corrupt… I was very lucky to have found this on a CD, and I can safely say that it runs perfectly fine on my Alpha.

Finally, on the Service pack 6a CD, there is a copy of Internet Explorer 5.0, and I’m pretty sure this was the last Alpha version of IE released. I’m sure its possible to run Firefox 1.5 or maybe even IE6 via !FX32, but native exe’s are so much the better. Internet Explorer 5.0 contains the standard accessories, namely outlook express, netmeeting, comic chat, and the media player…

I’ve been lucky enough to have a MSDN CD set from 1998, that included the MS Word, and Excel for the DEC Alpha… Back in 1997 when I used a DEC Multia, as a primary machine, I remember how ‘cool’ it was to run Office 97 through FX32, along with lotus notes to do work stuff… But I have to tell you, sure it’s 2010, but having a native version is way more cooler.

Also I have to say the C++ compiler for the DEC Alpha is the buggiest thing I’ve ever seen. The ‘hint’ should have been from the NT 3.5 SDK that builds all the Alpha stuff with the /Od flag turning off all optimizations. I had such a hard time with unzip it’s not even funny.

Luckily Visual C++ 6.0 for the Alpha is way more stable, even unzip will build with the /O2 flags. I can only wonder how much Microsoft went crazy fighting this compiler.. They seemed all to willing to give up on public releases of NT for the Alpha, but rumor is that the Itanium was so delayed for physical units, the 64bit version of Windows 2000 was started on the DEC Alphas… Then finally ‘tested’ with the Windows 2000 Data Center limited availability release…

For what it’s worth, here is the version strings of the compiler….

Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) Alpha C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8217
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1998
Copyright (C) Compaq Computer Corporation 1998.
All rights reserved.

And the compiler that is on the NT 3.5 SDK…

Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) AXP C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 8.03.JFa
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1994.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1994
All rights reserved.

It’s funny that there is almost *NO* mention of this 8.03.JFa version… But then I’m sure most people at the time, didn’t realize that the i386/MIPS compilers were on the 3.1 SDK, the Alpha on the 3.5 & the PowerPC on the 3.51… I never did figure out why they didn’t keep on providing these compilers…. But then MS works in mysterious ways at times.

Oh, and I finally benched quake on the console with a 32k video card.. It was just shy of 60FPS! Which for a 600Mhz machine circa 1996 is pretty dammed fast! The fastest intel cpu at the time would have been the 200Mhz Pentium PRO… I actually have one, and I’ll have to install NT 4.0 on that and do a comparison..

Well today I got my new Dec Alpha running!

Posted on by
1

Ok, my friends say I’m insane to have bought this… but I couldn’t resist.

It’s a DEC Alpha 221164 machine, with 64MB of ram, and a 4GB disk!

It’s the best technology of 1996-1997!

So I’ve gone ahead and installed Windows NT 4.0 on the beast… at 600Mhz it’s pretty dammed fast… considering how old it is. Although I suspect a Pentium III I found in the garbage with a 1Ghz cpu is 2x faster…..

But at any rate, this is a DEC Alpha, the long time geek cpu of dreams etc…
What makes this slightly useful for me, is that I do have Visual C++ 4.0 & 6.0 for the Alpha. So at least I can build *SOME* stuff to run on the thing….

So I’ve been fighting the compiler, and it seems it’s default blended optimizations do *NOT* work on my machine.. I’m sure this will be fun down the road. However it seems setting the target cpu to the 21064 produces ok code.. I’ve got to bench the stuff, but at least my exe’s are not crashing.

So what have I manage to produce today so far?

Well…

unzip is a major one.. It’s hard to use a machine today without it.

The other thing I’ve manage to get running, is Quake! I’ve included my source & project trees as it was a feisty little thing to build..

I’m currently building & testing over terminal services so I don’t know what the speed is on the console… Also, this build does not include networking… I’m sure the winsock code will work just fine, I’m just not in a good position physically to test it, as Quake1 will *NOT NAT* correctly.. Also the SDL sound doesn’t actually output anything, so I’ve built it with the null sound driver..

I’d love to get that m68k->C build of frontier elite to go on the Alpha but I’m afraid my 64mb of ram will be a major constraint..

I know this isn’t much of an emulation thing, as the only emulator that possibly can run Windows NT for the Alpha costs upwards of $16,000 USD… It’s cheaper to score an alpha on ebay for $100 USD.

Well here is the screen shot…

Quake on the Dec Alpha

 

I know it’s not much to ‘look’ at, but the pallet is correct, because it’s a real Alpha!.. Unlike the MIPS thing.

Polling around….

Posted on by
Reply

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!!!

Quake for the MIPS (NT4)

Posted on by
3

Well I started this off hoping I could get Quake running on Windows NT 3.1 … I’m almost there I have the null version running just fine. However I’m not all that great with DIB programming so I was looking thru SDL and saw that it has a WINDIB driver!

So with a LOT of tweaking through SDL 1.2.13 I got it to compile with Visual C++ 1.0!! However it is lacking one critical call, the CreateDIBSection api call in GDI is not present in NT 3.1. So remembering all the MIPS stuff as of late, and that I have Visual C++ 4.0 which should easily support this call, I first got it running with Visual C++ 2.0 on the i386 (Under XP of all things). So it was just a matter of building the source, and making sure there is no errors, uploading it to the emulator, and rebuilding for the MIPS.

And after 30 minutes, I got my exe, and it ran!

Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT

Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT

I’ve included a link for any other MIPS people out there that want to play quake. I haven’t built the networking as I was having issues with my network earlier and couldn’t get it working…

The exe is available here.

And the source code with all the bits is right here.

In this build I’m not building SDL as a DLL or static library, but rather compiling Quake right into the source. Now that SDL is running on the MIPS, and possibly other Win32 OS’s (I have yet to test Win32s… I suspect the inherent threading in SDL will prevent it, but could the DBI calls be made directly stripping out SDL…?) but who knows, I think anything past 3.51 would work.