Office 4.2 for Windows NT

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At some time during the whole Windows NT vs OS/2 thing in the workplace, one of the funny things is that we all had to use Win16 versions of office, which I think we all agreed kind of sucked. Even at the time I thought it was rather sad that here is Microsoft pushing this new and exciting operating system, and the only applications that are available is a program to talk to mainframes (SNA Server), and a database (SQL Server). Oh sure there was MSMail, but there was no Word & Excel that the world was rapidly moving to, away from WordPerfect & 123.

So was I ever surprised to find out that there was a version of Microsoft Office for NT, and it at least ran on both i386 & Dec Alpha. The box claims that the PowerPC and MIPS versions will be along, but I don’t know if they ever shipped. But at the same time, it’d be hard to be touting these ‘advanced’ RISC CPU’s and all their glory, but when it comes to day to day work, they are running Word/Excel in emulation. I have the box with the coupon to redeem but I suspect MS would just laugh if I called them up asking for Word/Excel for the MIPS so I can run it on Qemu…. But I digress.

Naturally because of the day & age, the requirements are kind of laughable, but it was targeted towards Windows NT 3.5, with:

  • Microsoft Windows NT(tm) operating system 3.5 or later
  • 486 or higher
  • 16MB of memory
  • 59MB of disk space (minimum) 84MB maximum

So playing around with Win32s, I figured if i were to install say word into a VM, then xcopy it out, and try to run it, would it work? Win32s 1.10 wouldn’t run as this version didn’t include the new OLE 2.0 stuff… Which is why I suspect it won’t run on NT 3.1. Win32s 1.30c crashed and burnt in the worst way possible. Even Lemmings died on this version. damn.

But Win32s 1.25 actually ran it, along with Lemmings & Doom!

Word for NT on Windows 3.1

I can’t say it’s terribly useful, but considering how flakey Word 6.0 was on Windows 3.1, hell back in the day it’d been really nice to have a Win32 version.

Now I guess I ought to dig thru my stuff and see how many versions of both retail & debug Win32s I can find.

Lemmings demo for Win32s

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Lemmings on Windows Vista

Lemmings on Windows Vista

While digging around I came across this demo of Lemmings for WinG/Win32s. And what’s great is that it runs on Windows 7 x86_64! Pretty snazzy!

The game play is still there, but the ‘speed up’ stuff is instant in the world of Ghz CPUs.

Oh well, it’s worth having some fun with. Here is the download.

I just remember this game when it was an Amiga thing…

Quake in FLASH!

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Sure we’ve seen iD’s Doom in flash, but what about something more intense, say, Quake?

Quake in flash (actionscript)

Try it out here, The only requirement is that you have a flash 10 plugin, which supports the Alchemy VM. Source code is available here as well.

Sadly there is no networking play, perhaps it’s a limitation that you need a socket server to allow inbound connections from flash..? Maybe if I can get Alchemy to build anything under x86_64 maybe I’ll play with it… But no promises.

There is a new Dec Alpha emulator out there…

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EmuVM‘s AlphaVM!

Currently it emulates an AlphaServer DS20, with up to 4 disks, a CD-ROM, two serial consoles and pcap’d ethernet.

AlphaVM

The UI is pretty self explanatory, however I was unable to boot either OpenBSD, nor Digital UNIX 4.0b (no wonder they support .e onward…) on it. I suspect it’s mainly targeted to VMS users as the Itanium is inching towards a silent death.

The requirements for this version are;

  • The emulator runs on x86 or x64 architecture. The appropriate build is chosen by the product installer. We recommend an x64 system. On x86 the performance is lower. Some features are supported only in x64 (for instance SMP trial ). These limitations arise due to the fact that Alpha AXP is itself a 64-bit system.

 

  • On x64 host system the CPU must support the instruction CMPXCHG16B. Note, that this instruction is not supported by older AMD CPUs, which are rare.

 

 

  • There must be at least two cores. There must be at least 3 cores for the SMP trial.
  • We recommend at least 2GB memory.
  • OS is Windows7, or later. The product may run on Vista x64, but it has not been tested there yet. The product will definitely not run on earlier versions.
  • The installer installs .NET framework client profile. The .NET framework is not included in the installation package of AlphaVM, but rather the downloader is included. You can download and install the framework prior to the product installation. The framework is used for the launcher GUI implementation.
  • The ‘tested’ installed OS’s are…
  • OpenVMS (starting from 7.1-2)
  • DigitalUNIX/Tru64 (starting from 4.0e)
  • Linux (tested with Debian Linux 5.0.6)

 

Windows NT July 1992 Preview

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So I got my hands on another early Windows NT preview. This one is so rough around the edges, it’s more of an alpha then a beta. It’s even reflected in the bootup screen.

Bootup Bluescreen

Well, what has changed from the 1991 releases? Plenty, the registry is coming along quite a bit, but there is no integrated setup program at this point. I almost wonder if this build was meant to be internal only, as it does drop stuff about your Microsoft badge ID. No, really!

Freaky, isn’t it?

Winver showing Build 297

In this build 297, and it includes the OS/2 & MS-DOS/WOW subsystems. The POSIX subsystem is absent, further cementing the idea that it was included much later to target Windows NT at government contracts with a POSIX check-box. I’ve only done some simple testing with the MS-DOS compatibility and it was ‘ok’ but nothing too solid. I didn’t have any luck with the OS/2 stuff, maybe I’m just doing it wrong. One thing is for sure, if it’s this rickety in 1992, they were nowhere near ready in 1991!

I guess if you paid for it, you can put your name all over it!

Another fun touch is who it’s registered to. I guess since Bill is footing the bill for NT, it’s all his anyways.

Broken boot.

With that being said, the installation which involves a batch script dos2nt.bat is very touchy, it does require few files to manually edit. I’ve found it works best with a d drive to swap to, but for the most part NT cann’t find itself properly and you wind up with a blank desktop, stemming from the “An error has occurred in the registry. The Program Manager’s settings and groups can not be accessed.” error. Since NT at this point is far more closer to Windows 3.1, then 1991’s builds being closer to Windows 3.0, the famed game reversi is missing…

However the administrative tools is in NT now, the logon/logoff and locking works. NT at this point is transitioning from an OS running a 32bit version of Windows 3.0 into a fleshed out operating system.

Shutting down.

SDL_Mixer

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While building SDL_Mixer on MinGW I ran into this nice error…

Makefile:65: *** multiple target patterns. Stop.

Turns out the version of bash on my MinGW (3.1.0(1)-release) is screwed up. So the solution is to upgrade to at least bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release…

Which means…
*libtermcap-0.20050421_1-2-msys-1.0.13-dll-0.tar.lzma
*libregex-1.20090805-2-msys-1.0.13-dll-1.tar.lzma
*bash-3.1.17-3-msys-1.0.13-bin.tar.lzma

Phew, wasn’t that fun?

Ok, maybe it was more of a pain in the middle of it, while I broke my msys install in the middle of it..

WinDoom, WinG, Win32s on Windows 3.1 (on Qemu)

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So since I was looking at the Doom stuff, I thought I’d try to track down the WinG version of Doom, and luckily someone pack ratted away two versions! Needless to say the older one didn’t work for me, but the last one, the April 13th, 1995 build, worked just great!

WinDoom on Windows 7 x64

Even on Windows 7 x86_64, sp1!

So how much of a chore was this to run back in 1995, before Windows 95?

Well to start WinDoom requires a display capable of at least 256 colors. I thought I’d use Qemu for this, but this proved to be… exceptionally difficult to locate a satisfactory display driver. I know lots of people point to the SVGA.EXE update from Microsoft, that uses VESA extensions to drive the video. Oh sure it sounds great but this is what I got:

And.. corruption.

Ok, so you say, there is this great patch to enable better VESA support right?

Wrong.

Yeah. I also hunted down various cirrus drivers for the specifically emulated chip (I checked the source) and they were all consistently defective. So I tried using a lower chip driver from HP and amazingly the 640x480x16MM colors works! (well, works ‘enough’).

Installing the right driver.

It’s the GD5430 v1.25f, 640x480x16.8M

The next thing is that Doom in both MS-DOS and Windows are full 32bit executables. On the MS-DOS side, it relies on the DOS4G/W extender. For Windows, it relies on the then new Win32 standard, and Windoom was written to conform to the Win32s standard, meaning with an addon it can run on Windows 3.1, Windows 95, And Windows NT. I just fished around the internet and scored a copy of Win32s 1.25. I just remember this being a somewhat stable version.

Installing Win32s

Win32s installs pretty smooth, (as long as you remember the share.exe). Now we just need the WinG runtime to be installed. WinG was Microsoft’s first real attempt at high speed gaming video under Windows. From what I understand it kind of went down because it was ‘too difficult’, and buying DirectX seemed to be a better fit.

Setting the midi mapper.

Another thing I’ve found is that if you change the midi mapper from the default “Ad Lib” to “Ad Lib general”, you can at least get the midi working in Doom.

Once WinG is installed, then it’ll want to do some blit tests…

WinG calibrating.

And after that, we can even bump it up to glorious 640×400, something the initial MS-DOS version couldn’t do easily as VESA wasn’t a big standard with INSTALLED cards at the time, and it’d require lots of work from the iD team, where the move to Windows pushed all the peripheral development to the Vendors to work around Microsoft. Even to this day, it’s still a big deal with video and audio.

One thing that is cool about Qemu is that at compile time, you can put in adlib & soundblaster cards to give the ‘full’ Windows 3.1 multimedia experience. There is also GUS (Gravis Ultra Sound) support
in Qemu, but I’ve never played with it..

With all of that out of the way, WinDoom will launch.

WING dispdib.dll missing error that turned out to be Video for Windows.

Then it’ll throw an error, because Windows 3.1 doesn’t have the same video backend as Windows NT 3.5 (and higher), hit ok and then …

And it works! WinGDoom running on Windows 3.1 on Qemu!

Sadly on Windows 3.1 the sound effects do not seem to work, but overall it’s a GREAT little port, mostly because as it comes up on 16 years old, it still works, and with sound. I wish other OS’s could give this kind of support for legacy applications, even ones that had such a brief window of support.

Anyone crazy enough to even think of playing along can download the blob of software I used to get this going here (Updated on archive.org here: Windows-3.1-WING-doom)

I should also add if you want sound effects to work on WinDOOM you really should install the Video for Windows Runtime, and it’ll work… poorly on Qemu/SoundBlaster 16, but it does work!

Desqview/X

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Desqview/X

I never used Desqview back in the day, as I didn’t have a good enough computer. A 286 with 1mb of ram just wasn’t enough to push the thing. And by the time I did get a 386, OS/2 2.1 was all the rage. But in that time between OS/2 2.x and the release of the 80386 CPU there was all kinds of programs to take advantage of the 386’s v86 mode.

Desqview X really is different in that it not only incorporates the desqview multitasking, but it also supports the X11 protocol found in the UNIX world. Sounds cool right? A friend wanted to run it, so he actually dug out a web page, chsoft.com with all the bits.

The first stumbling block is that Desqview requires that you use the memory manager QUEMM, which the majority of emulators we tried couldn’t work with it. Qemu 0.14.0 however proved itself up to the task, as long as you didn’t let it do the aggressive optimization, just let it install, and reboot.

Installing DesqviewX was pretty straightforward, the only catch was the video. VGA doesn’t work but the SVGA modes work fine. I just used the 800x600x256 mode.

With that out of the road, the next thing needed was a good mouse driver. For some reason the majority of the mouse drivers I tried just wouldn’t work with desqview, until I tried ctmouse.

Naturally for the whole X11 experence you need networking. The tcpip package on the desqview webpage uses some old netware thing with a ne2000 driver that is hard coded to 0x300 irq 4. Which won’t work in any machine I know since everyone has at least one com port. So I had to take the lsl & ne2000 parts from my Netware 3.12 client. But doing so revealed that the lsl wouldn’t run because of a lsl buffer pool error. And of course to work with slirp you need to be running ethernet_II instead of 802.3 …

So you’ll need a net.cfg like this:

link support
buffers 4 1504
mempool 8096
max stacks 4
link driver ne2000
port 300
irq 3
frame ethernet_ii

Naturally you’ll need to change the source to Qemu if you have your own build to use IRQ 3 instead of 9 (it’s in hw/pc.c), or use one of my binaries. It’ll configure via bootp and at the end you should be able to ping 10.0.2.2

Putting it all together, running it like this:

./qemu -L pc-bios -hda packet2.qcow -net nic,model=ne2k_isa -net user -redir tcp:6001::6000

On OS X has qemu listen on 6001 for X11 sessions, then redirect them into the VM on it’s X11 port. So I could then easily run xeyes like this:

xeyes -display 127.0.0.1:1

And the output appears inside of Desqview X. Likewise, removing the session security, and allowing remote connections in OS X’s X11 widget, then allowed me to send xeyes from Desqview to my mac like this:

xeyes.exe -display 10.0.2.2:0

And exeyes pops up on OS X as running from the Desqview VM.

I don’t know if it’s terribly useful, but I thought someone may get a kick that Desqview X can run on Qemu 0.14.0 In this day & age though you can get easier versions of X11….

Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega 32x

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So I was stumbling around the internet, and wondered if there was any good SEGA 32x emulators, as I recently found the Jaguar port of DOOM, and there is some mention of MARS stuff (32x) buried in there.

Then I came across this post from dcemu.co.uk

A split disassembly for Sonic 1 converted to 32x format has been released.
With that, you can edit anything in Sonic 1 to be how you want. It is very possible to recreate Sonic Mars with it, but that would take a lot of time and effort. And there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to play it on your 32x system.

Whoa, that’s pretty amazing! So with a little google-fu I find the mentioned split disassembly, on sonicretro.org

This is pretty amazing stuff, so it also turns out the emulator in question to use is Kega Fusion, which does Genesis, Sega CD and of course 32x.

And the best part is the sonic disassembly includes the tools that you need to gen your own sonic rom! simply extract the source, and run the ‘build.bat’ and it’ll assemble the SH2 code, bind it to a blob, assemble the m68k code, and strap it all into a ROM.  Honestly you’d be hard pressed to even tell if there any difference between this, and the original ROM. Other then it won’t run on a standard Genesis (Megadrive).

Since this is done with off the shelf tools, there is of course, a demo scene, gendev, which include a MOD player, and Wolfenstein!

It’s a damned shame the 32x only has 256kb of ram… If it had the 2MB the Jaguar had, or even more, things could have been.. different, but then again after MARS it was off to Saturn.