I updated to Catalina and kind of forgot about the break with the ‘awesome world of home 32bit computing’ as it’s all 64bit now.

Needless to say none of my favourite stuff runs.

I’ve been maintaining a subscription to Crossover for a while, as I really like to support the future of Wine. I know a while back they too had the 64bit freakout, but they apparently found some shim to keep on running Win32 apps. And sure enough I loaded up my old Fortran Power Station bottle and it actually run!

Sadly SQL Server 4.21 seems to lock up, but it has been doing that under Wine when I last gave up on OS X a few years back. I tried some Win16 games (SimCity) and it bombed out. Looks like there is no support for Win16 apps. Pitty.

Steam is 64bit now, however none of Valve’s hits that have 64bit versions for Windows have made the 64bit leap for OS X. I have a feeling it’ll never happen as OS X users are so few and far between they are literally outnumbered by Linux users.

I did fire-up Subnautica, and of course the PC with the RTX 2070 blows this thing away. Although it’s hardly a fare competition. But who wants to play fare?

It’s far too early to really tell, and who knows I might just wipe this thing and install Windows. In my opinion OS X 10.6 was the greatest release ever bridging the divide from PowerPC to x86, just as 10.2.7 on the G5 was the greatest PowerPC version to bridge that 68000 divide. I still have that G5, but now my 2006 machine is dead. I’ve seen them in the used stores for around $100 USD. Although I don’t know if I can be bothered as they are incredibly heavy. And I’m pretty sure 10.6 will run on VMWare thanks to hackintosh efforts.

Also I should add as a personal note, my 2006 MacPro 1,1 died. I let someone else use it, and she broke it in one day. I’ve had it for years, several moves in the USA, then to Canada, then to Hong Kong. It died with only one day on the job. Sad.

One of the more exciting things is that as long as I do a print setup first, I can actually print on a new printer from MS Word 2.0c!

You can download it from the releases page here:

The latest source build WineVDM_2018_07_30b.7z is now capable of loading and running Sim City for Windows 1.0.

I found it best to install Windows 3.0 into DOSBox, and then your application.  After the install I copy the application so the physical drive of the hosts matches where it was installed, and then unpack the 7z build archive into that directory.  There is a ‘WINDOWS’ directory and I xcopy the installed Windows directory into there so it has all the INI files, fonts and all that jazz.  To make sure it doesn’t conflict I delete the following from Windows 3.0:

del windows\system\*.drv
del windows\system\*.exe
del windows\system\*.mod
del windows\system\WIN87EM.DLL

Since these files are most certainly going to be emulated by WineVDM.  After that it’s time to run stuff!

130 KLOC!

I should also add that I’ve been able to use QuickC for Windows, and build a ‘non trivial’ program, the Fortran f2c compiler weighing in at 104,245 lines , and use that to compile 16,182 lines of Fortran 77 into C, and then compile the resulting C + the Fortran runtime library a staggering 130,405 lines of code, and the resulting binary works, just like it did on Windows 3.0!

I’ve also been able to print a text file using Microsoft Word 2.0 much to my amazement, although anything involving fonts just locks or crashes.  I can’t say I’m all that surprised.

And yes, it does in fact run SkiFree 1.0

SkiFree on WineVDM

So no need to wait for Win3mu, there is WineVDM which is being developed RIGHT NOW, and the source is already available.  You can see my notes on building it here.

Excel 3.0a

Yes, it really can run Excel 3.0a.  I don’t know how much people will want a 27 year old spreadsheet, but here we go!  It’s incredibly buggy, and many Microsoft programs don’t like their accelerators, or menus, more things don’t run than do, but when they do it’s great.

The releases on the github page are quite old, and you’ll really want to bulid this from source.    You will need Visual Studio 2017 to build this, and I used the Community Edition.  While trying to compiling I got this error:

Really it’s no help at all

Performing Custom Build Tools
The system cannot find the path specified.

Well that doesn’t help us at all!

Setting the Tools -> Options -> Build and Run, MSBuild sections to both detailed verbosity revealed:

“C:\Users\neozeed\source\repos\winevdm-master\Release\convspec” “krnl386.exe16.spec” KERNEL > “krnl386.exe16.asm” && “C:\msys32\mingw64\bin\as” –32 -o “krnl386.exe16.obj” “krnl386.exe16.asm”
Performing Custom Build Tools
The system cannot find the path specified.

So it turns out it is using GNU GAS to assemble itself.  So I just copied in an ‘as.exe’ from another MinGW install I have lying around.

c:\msys32\mingw64\bin\as.exe –version
GNU assembler 2.17.50 20060824

So it doesn’t even have to be a hyper modern version, as you can see with the –32 we are building 32bit based stuff anyways.

And with that all done we have a release build.

F2c Dungeon

I had no luck with Sim City, but Sim Life & Sim Earth load at least, but not being able to use the menus means you can’t really use them.  Microsoft Word 1.1 won’t load at all, while Word 2.0 will load but again no menus, and it’s unable to register enough OLE to open documents so it’s not very useful again.  Although my ancient QuickC for Windows F2c port of Dungeon, works okay, although QuickC for Windows itself does not currently run.

WinHelp 3.00

Another great thing is that you can run WinHelp for all your ancient documenation fixes!  Also MS Write from the ancient days of Windows 3.0/3.1 works as well

Write

You can download my binary build here: WineVDM_2018_07_30.7z.  It’s almost a given that you will need the Visual C++ 2017 runtime.

The latest version allows the menus to work properly so you can actually use Word for Windows 2.0 and SimEarth & SimLife now!  Further updates let you actually select and open files in Word for Windows 2.0!

Not this kind!

I got a tip in another post about this fantastical project, boxedwine!  It’s Wine + a 386 processor emulator, and it’s been targeted to SDL.  What does this mean? Wine on Windows!

Sim Earth for Windows 3.0

I went ahead with one of the oldest Windows games I have around, SimEarth, for Windows 3.0.  I don’t have Balance of Power, although I guess I may procure a copy one day.  Anyways it’s Windows in it’s 1990 glory 16bit, 286 protected mode, and sure as heck won’t run on Win64.  Oh sure you can run this on MS-DOS + Windows, but where is the fun in that?

Now that’s all good fun, sure Wine can run stuff, sure, but it’s still wine.  Well remember all that noise about android running Wine?  Yeah, well here we go.

Wine + x86 emulation +SDL in javascript!

Here we go.  Games, and the BoxedWine project page.   And yes, it can run stuff like Quake 2, and other far more intense applications.  Just like Wine.  It’s really great stuff, check it out, if only in a browser.

If you want to run ancient Win16 stuff in a pinch, it may actually run.  I had issues with win87em.dll stuff, but just like Wine it’s a moving window of compatibility.

Dungeon being debugged

Not only does the CLI tools run, and compile stuff like say Dungeon, but much to my surprise, the UI works, and even better so does the debugger!

Personally, I’ve always preferred the Microsoft debugging tools.

Very cool, if I do say so myself.

The first thing is, if you’ve ever dealt with MSSQL is that it is VERY picky about machine names.  So first install MS SQL 4.21 in a NT 3.1/3.5/3.51/4.0 VM with a name you like. Also remember to set the default client library to TCPIP. Then create a Wine instance on your target box.  Next you’ll need to make a few changes to the registry to force the machine name:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Wine\Network

UseDnsComputerName

REG_SZ N

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName\ActiveComputerName

ComputerName

REG_SZ MSDE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\ComputerName\ComputerName

ComputerName

REG_SZ MSDE

I called my machine MSDE, as I have no imagination.  With those keys in place the next thing to do is grab the service keys..

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SQLServer

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\SQLMonitor

Then finally the MS SQL product key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SQLServer

The final step was to copy over the c:\sql directory, and create icons for the SQL Server, and the management tool.

To run, start the server first (SQLSERVR.EXE) , then launch the admin tool (SQLADMIN.EXE), and you should (hopefully) be able to connect!

MS SQL Server 4.21 running on OS X

And there we go! Is it useful? Not really, but I mean it is cool! I haven’t tried this with 6.0 or 6.5 but I imagine they should work as well. 7.0 and beyond are more complicated to transpose as they require a great deal of COM integration. In theory they should work.