And there is a map of all the locales and when the launch. I was busy working and didn’t notice that Hong Kong had already launched.
many geo zones!
Thankfully I did get a payment voucher which fully covered the super fancy edition. Sadly there was no option for GPU’s so I’m going to try this with an OG 6GB GTX Titan.
It was a bit weird to figure out if I could run the game or not but I did get a pop up that today was the day so I guess so.
0% verified
I’ll have no choice but to update as it goes, so nothing yet to report.
I’m just hoping it’s not the hollow world experience of Fallout 76.
After all that downloading, turns out it doesn’t like my video card at all.
So yeah GTX 1070ti minimum. wow.
So I abused a work machine that ironically has a decent mobile GPU. swapped some storage and booted into the game, played a few hours.. And yeah
Old tyme Bethesda quality
When |I could, I took a detour to Earth’s moon, and went out for a walk. Naturally there was a base less then half a click away, and naturally it had 30 insurgents automatically hostile. What a vast but populated world. And then the NPC following me around suddenly took off her space suit, and broke the whole thing. I wanted to maybe get an ARC but apparente it doesn’t run at all on ARC. Seems kinda fishy to me tho. NVIDIA released a new driver like today for the special launch. I don’t know if there will be any fallout.
So, I rebooted my Windows laptop after some update, and was greeted by this surprise!
well that was a surprise
I guess lucky for me I had the machine tied to a Microsoft account which in turn had the key backed up. After some tedious typing later and I was back in business.
I guess this was the culprit?
BitLocker was so transparently well working I didn’t even know it was even running. Got to give it that much credit. And if anything, probably should just give up and run it everywhere.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
Preparing for Windows NT RISC Exhibition for VCFW 2023, I wanted to have NT running on an IBM RS/6000. This was previously covered in this excellent article by Shoutmon as well in this excellent video by NCommander. However both are missing some crucial information that I had to go through and learn myself the hard way. I hope it will help someone in the future.
Windows NT PowerPC was designed to run on PReP machines, however that by itself is not very useful. Which of the RS/6000 models are REeP and which are not? This is coincidentally answered by NetBSD/prep supported system models.
Firstly there are IBM PC Power Series. Yes IBM PC but with PowerPC CPU, and not to be confused with RS/6000 which is a different IBM product. However the IBM Power Series have equivalent RS/6000 “counterpart” models. WTF IBM.
IBM PC Power Series 440 6015 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7020 40P IBM PC Power Series 830 6050 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P IBM PC Power Series 850 6070 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P
There are also other models mentioned by Windows NT 4.0 HCL, namely E20, E30 and F30, and PowerPC ThinkPads. To summarize here is a more definitive list of IBM RS/6000 models supported by Windows NT 4.0:
Model 7020 40P Model 7248 43P, 100 and 133 MHz Model 7248 43P-140 (with a big asterisk) Model 7024 E20 and E30 Model 7025 F30 ThinkPad 820, 850 ThinkPad 860 (with a big asterisk)
If you could pick any RS/6000 machine, the 40P would probably be the most recommended. 40P can also run OS/2 PowerPC if you are in to this thing.
Unfortunately all I had on hand was 43P-140, which is PReP, but it’s not Power Series based and not supported by NT out of the box. WTF IBM. Chances are that you will run in to this as well. 43P-140 are way more popular and easier to acquire than any other hardware listed above.
The main trouble with 43P-140 is that the onboard GPU and NIC will not work with ARC and NT. Yes, you can hack in some generic S3 card (see below). It will work in ARC/NT but not PROM and AIX. I wasn’t happy. Upon some collaboration with Shoutmon and NCcommander and my own research, I was able to find the one and only graphics card that will work in both the RS/6000 PROM as well as ARC BIOS, AIX and Windows NT. The lucky winner is:
IBM FRU 40H5838 aka GTX110P
Update: It’s been tried, tested and verified to use IBM ROM with a regular/stock S3 Trio64V+. You can download it here and program yourself. It will work with both AIX and NT.
As for NIC, there are way more options as it’s not used by PROM, ARC or AIX, just NT. In my case I opted for a standard Etherlink III card.
Windows NT Installation
Once you have the correct hardware bits, NT installation is pretty straightforward with some caveats. You start by booting the ARC 1.51 floppy disk. Then you need to go to Installation and Setup Services, Advanced Installation and then Disk Partition Management Services.
There are 3 types of partitions. Confusing, skipping on creating or trying to merge them in to one partition will not get you far.
Boot (ARC) Partition – aka PowerPC Boot partition. This is where ARC loader will be copied from the floppy, so you can boot ARC directly from HDD without the floppy disk. Has nothing to do with Windows NT.
System Partition is a small FAT partition where \os\winnt\osloader.exe will reside.
OS Partition is a large FAT or NTFS partition that will have \WINNT folder.
First you create the Boot (ARC) Partition and copy data from ARC floppy disk to the ARC Partition on the hard disk. This will allow booting ARC firmware directly from HDD. At this point you may want to remove the floppy disk, reboot, get to SMS and change boot device to HDD.
Secondly go to FAT Data or System Partition. Make it small like 5MB, then answer Yes to System Partition. This will create the partition for osloader.exe. This is an equivalent of arcinst.exe on Alpha and MIPS.
Thirdly go back to the main menu and select Run Maintenance program. Then type cd:\ppc\setupldr. Once Windows NT setup boots, you will have an unpartitioned space left. create the Windows NT partition, preferably as NTFS.
Note that OSLOADER is on SYSTEMPARTITION. The OSLOADPARTITION is where \WINNT folder is located.
I guess not surprising, Internet Archive is under fire yet again, and needs help. Again.
For more than two and a half decades, we have collected, preserved, and shared our digital cultural artifacts. Thanks to the generosity of our patrons, the Internet Archive has grown from a small preservation project into a vast library that serves millions of people each year. Our work has impacted the lives of so many of our users who value free and open access to information.
From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people. Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That’s why we don’t charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects.
If you can’t imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million books and texts, and 14 million audio recordings.
If you find our site useful, please chip in! Your support will help us build the web we deserve.
Thank you for joining me.
Brewster Kahle Founder & Digital Librarian
And how can I support them by doing not much? BING!
Turns out that BING / Edge(ium) has this point thing for using it, and a tip jar to get Microsoft to fund IA. Every 1,000 points you tip will be $1 in real life?
Maybe it helps, I don’t know, I’d like to think it does. I figure 10,000 points let’s me feel like I’ve done something.
Yay slacktivisim.
Oh, and follow me on archive.org as neozeede! I try to upload strange and interesting things as I find them. Or remember to find them.
Sometimes there is a great seemingly timeless resource on the internet, and you pull from it from time to time, make giant compilations, but never really reach out to the creator, or just archive the entire thing.
Then the unspeakable happens and it just up’s and disappears.
I never reached out to Peter Koch, to even thank him for preserving so much, or to apologise for not preserving his site, for some reason it felt like someone else would have done a better job. But then sometimes you find out you were that one person, and you didn’t do it, so you didn’t do it.
I don’t know the story, but it seems Peter did know that it was coming to and end.
May 01 2010 – Ending
Dear friends!
I have to give up my collection.
So if you’re interested in some pieces or know someone who might, please send me an e-mail.
So I’ll put in a call for help for the world at wide? Did anyone save anything more comprehensive than what was in archive.org, or what was in the ‘Titor Special‘?
In the meantime, the site has a new owner, and it’s been restored.
I thought I’d slap together some github thing with MS-DOS 2.11 that’s been made buildable thanks to a whole host of other smart people. The default stuff out there expects you to build it under MS-DOS using the long obsoleted ‘append’ utility which can add directories to a search path. Instead I created a bunch of makefiles that take advantage of MS-DOS Player, and let you build from Windows.
building should be somewhat straightforward, assuming you have the ms-dos player in your path. JUST MAKE SURE YOU UNZIP as TEXT mode. If you are getting a million errors you probably have them in github’s favourite unix mode.
D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>..\tools\make
msdos ..\tools\masm ibmbio.asm ibmbio.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysimes.asm sysimes.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysinit.asm sysinit.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83
DOSSYM in Pass 2
Warning Severe
Errors Errors
0 0
msdos ..\tools\LINK IBMBIO+SYSINIT+SYSIMES;
Microsoft Object Linker V2.00
(C) Copyright 1982 by Microsoft Inc.
Warning: No STACK segment
There was 1 error detected.
msdos ..\tools\exe2bin.exe IBMBIO IBMBIO.COM < 70.TXT
Fix-ups needed - base segment (hex): 70
del -f ibmbio.obj sysimes.obj sysinit.obj ibmbio.exe
D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>
As an example building the bios by running make. For the impatiend you can download dos211.zip, which includes a bootable 360kb disk image, and a 32Mb vmdk!
Billed as “NT RISC: Windows NT on RISC machines. Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium.”, the exhibit demonstrates a lot of work in sourcing & restoring the machines. The exhibit features:
PDF’s look nice on an iPad, but maybe that’s me being old.
It’s crazy that once uppon a time, corporations thought developer documentation was a revenue stream to their upstart Operating System. It went as well as you can imagine it would.
or the Unbridled rage of living on the trailing edge.
I hosted a Porting Party last where where I setup my Dec Alpha as a terminal server allowing people from all over the world to connect in and cross compile software for the 64bit version of Windows for the Dec Alpha. While many problems were overcome, and many more remain, I have to say the most annoying thing was joining a domain hosted by a SAMBA server.
In my mind, I though the easiest way to get files in & out of the Alpha was not to use something like IIS/FTP where it would probably lead to end-less issues with text/binary/active/passive modes, but rather I should rent a VPS, install the OS default SAMBA and just map drives. The benefit of the VPS is that it has a public address, so no NAT is required. The VPS had an option for either CentOS (no) or Debian 10. I went with the Debian, and did an in place upgrade to 11, then 12. Nothing special.
I’d never actually used SAMBA as a domain controller before, but I thought this would be a fun experiment. So the idea is then that the VPS running SAMBA is the Domain Controller, and my Alpha joins it as a member server. Everyone else can use Windows or any SAMBA client and map drives, and then copy files to the VPS, and then copy back and forth from the Alpha to the VPS. This part worked fine.
What didn’t work was SAMBA version 4.
I had come up with this config, based on the fragments of the default config, and and hints from samba.org.
[global]
netbios name = PDC
passdb backend = tdbsam
server max protocol = NT1
username map = /usr/local/samba/etc/username.map
workgroup = ALPHAPARTY
server string = Samba Server
security = user
hosts allow = 127.0.0.1, <<<peoples networks...>>>
load printers = yes
log file = /usr/local/samba/var/log.%m
max log size = 50
passdb backend = tdbsam
local master = yes
os level = 33
domain master = yes
preferred master = yes
domain logons = yes
wins support = yes
dns proxy = no
add user script = /usr/sbin/useradd %u
add group script = /usr/sbin/groupadd %g
add machine script = /usr/sbin/adduser -n -g machines -c Machine -d /dev/null -s /bin/false %u
delete user script = /usr/sbin/userdel %u
delete user from group script = /usr/sbin/deluser %u %g
delete group script = /usr/sbin/groupdel %g
[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = no
writable = yes
[printers]
comment = All Printers
path = /usr/spool/samba
browseable = no
guest ok = no
writable = no
printable = yes
[public]
comment = share for everyone
path = /public
public = yes
writable = yes
printable = no
creaet mask = 0777
I had endless issues with the machine account not being either created correctly or not being authenticated. I tried manually creating it, to no avail. No matter what I tried it didn’t work.
Working with NT 4.0 must be depreciated or something but no matter what I tried IT JUST DIDN’T WORK.
Feeling outraged, I purged the old Samba, downloaded the source code to 3.6.25, built that, and using the same configuration I had tried to put together, it just worked.
Creating both a Linux user & directory, and the SAMBA credentials. On the terminal server, all that remains was assigning a local home directory & profile directories, as you really don’t want those over the WAN.
I have no idea if this is a warning to others, or whatever the larger issue is.
Porting Party II
At any rate I’ll be running another porting party this coming weekend. I can host cross compiling fine, but we need people with the 64bit Whistler beta installed to test. The best way to get details is over on discord. Lately the IRC bridge is down more than it’s up, and I can’t effectively send out passwords & get your network block to allow access to the RDP, since I’m not going to open up worldwide access to a Windows NT 4.0 SP5 machine.
Porting Party II
So for anyone interested in porting their C/C++ to either the 32bit Alpha Windows, or 64bit Alpha Windows come join us on discord!
I’ll fire up the Alpha on Friday afternoon GMT and expect the event to run all weekend!
