I found a bunch more issues, and weird stuff, so I’ve updated the downloads yet again…
The resurrection directory, is where I’ll keep what is current, I just hope the sourceforge stuff isn’t too screwed up.
Speaking of NetBSD I see that 5.1 has finally trickled into the mirrors, maybe it is time to build another SIMH installation guide, for the new version and upload it as a tape…..
There it is, all done, NetBSD 0.8!
While it still says 386 BSD all over the place, trust me, I’ve built it from the NetBSD 0.8 CVS (with lots of donations for missing parts from 386 BSD).
Anyone interested can download it from sourceforge.
And no I didn’t bother doing the f2c thing, so many files were lost to the great bitbucket this isn’t a 100% restoration but considering the state it was in a few days ago, this is as good as it gets.
Well, ok it’s not 100% the NetBSD 0.8 kernel, as a good chunk of the files have been intentionally removed from CVS. However from the announcement, it does make it clear that NetBSD 0.8 is 386 BSD pl22 with some pre pl23 changes thrown in. Since patch level 22 is lost, however patch level 23 is still around, then it wasn’t to hard to install a 386 BSD system, patch it to level 23, then unpack the NetBSD 0.8 sources, and fill in the missing parts.
I guess this is the Jurassic Park of kernels?
Anyways, here is the 386 BSD pl 23 kernel booting up
And now..
NetBSD 0.8 booted
As you can see there is some differences in the boot strings, but at the same time, because so many files were just pulled in from 386 BSD, and I’m still using a 386 BSD userland, it reports itself as 386BSD.
dmesg’s were so small back then, here is the whole thing from the kernel:
386BSD 0.1 (GENERICISA) #2: Sun Dec 5 13:30:14 PST 2010 [email protected]:/usr/src/sys.386bsd/arch/compile/J real mem = 67104768 avail mem = 64663552 pc0 at 0x60-0x6f irq 1 on isa pc0: color wdc0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7 irq 14 on isa wdc0: wd0 at wdc0 slave 0 fdc0 at 0x3f0-0x3f7 irq 6 drq 2 on isa ne0 at 0x320 irq 10 on isa ethernet address 52:54:00:12:34:56 npx0 at 0xf0 irq 13 on isa
Oh well it was moderately interesting.
For the insane, the merged source is here. I’ll provide a snapshot of my build environment, under Qemu here.
Honestly I didn’t really go through the release notes…
I think 386 BSD 0.0 may just need to be installed on an actual disk, as me trying to duplicate the settings of that connor disk doesn’t produce a bootable disk… I thought it was in the step that disklabel doesn’t supply the bootblocks, but even doing that manually got me nothing.
I mashed in Net/2 into NetBSD 0.8 to get something that is one file away from compiling, but it’s short about 50 references from linking….
I should try it again but not using Net/2 it’s probably too old.. but I’m afraid there was way more drift between 386 BSD pl24 and Net 0.8, and certainly in those files between Net 8 & Net 9.
At least we have a nearly complete Net 9 (it’s only i386, but that’s ok.).
I came across this 386 emulator, Aeon(updated to use archive.org, as it’s dead now). What is interesting is that it’s written in C#!
That’s right it’s all managed code…!
If you can run .net 4.0 you may want to check it out, it’s quite capable….
Yes it can run doom!
The DPMI is good enough to run doom, and quake! While slower then DosBOX, I’d still say it’s a contender, you can never have too many possibilities…
Thanks to Bert Kiers, the source to NetBSD 0.8 has been located!
Currently it resides at http://netbsd.itsx.net/netbsd-0.8-src.tgz
I haven’t tried to build it yet, but I would imagine that it should be possible from either 386 BSD 0.1 with all the patchkits installed, or maybe from within NetBSD 0.9 …
I don’t know if the install diskettes are easily generated… So this may be a source up/down grade depending on how you look at it.
But this is a ‘good thing’ as this would be the last ‘lost’ version of NetBSD. Then I can tackle 386 BSD 0.0 & FreeBSD.
Well by some strange google search I actually found a site in Russia that had NetBSD 0.9 for the i386! Wasting no time, I mirrored the site on my VPS, then spent some time late last night trying to figure out how to boot this thing, but to no avail. Qemu, Virtual BOX and Virtual PC, could not boot the disk images correctly, while BOCHS was running into all kinds of errors related to the 0.9 kernel’s floppy, and hard disk errors with 1.0’s handling of the hard disk.
So for the heck of it, I tried it on VMWare Fusion for OS X, and lo, it booted the NetBSD 0.9 kernel floppy! So I went ahead, and made all the diskettes for the release, and went ahead and installed it on VMWare. Now while VMWare may be able to install NetBSD, it doesn’t emulate peripherals like NE2000’s so networking would involve PPP or SLIP over the COM port, which sounds like a lot of work, looking back to my adventure with SLIP a while back, that I’m not looking to redo anytime soon.
So with my installed VMDK (the disk file VMWare uses), I used the qemu utility qemu-img to convert it to a compressed qcow2 image, then booted up Qemu with the image.
And it worked!
So with that in hand, I rebuilt Qemu to remove the NE2000 on 0x300/IRQ 9, and then rebuilt the NetBSD kernel to remove all the devices I don’t need/care about (SCSI,NFS,MATH EMULATION,etc..) and reconfigured the NE2000 to be on 0x320 IRQ 10, to match Qemu, and then ran the whole thing together, configured the network, and it seemed to be working fine.
From there it was a matter of transferring the disk image back to VMWare, I copied in the source code for lynx and ircII-4.4 then transfered it back to Qemu. And yes they worked as expected!
The only thing remaining in my flight of adventure was to build f2c, and see if it’d run Dungeon.
Yes it runs Dungeon!
So with all of that out of the way, for anyone that wants to run it, I’ve uploaded my work on my sourceforge project page.
Now I just need to find myself a copy of NetBSD 0.8, and spend some more time with 386 BSD 0.0 & the hard disk parameters to see if I can get that to cleanly install.
In the meantime, feel free to load up NetBSD 0.9, fire up irc and say hi.
I just noticed that sourceforge is making changes to their downloads, so it’ll probably break a tonne of my stuff on this blog (and other places)… but look at the nice picture!
1. United States 913
2. China 321
3. Hungary 152
4. United Kingdom 111
5. Germany 73
6. Canada 36
7. Russia 36
8. Argentina 26
9. Japan 22
10. Greece 16
Which is interesting… well to me anyways. I wonder if it’s more representative of internet penetration, or language barrier?
So I’ve been working on some instructions to install the first NetBSD I could find that would run on SIMH’s MicroVAX II… Think of it as a lineage continuation from the 4.3 BSD to the Net/2. Anyways the 1.2 install proved to be.. .difficult to say the least, however once it’s installed I found a weird snag, that NetBSD 1.2 doesn’t seem to have curses…. And I though curses was one of those things that made any BSD a BSD.
I haven’t put together an install just yet, I figure I’ll have to download ncurses over, and build with that but I just don’t have the time today, so I’m leaving things where they are for now. Although I did manage to get a bunch more other stuff built, which I’ve posted package tapes on my sourceforge page here. And if anyone is that motivated they can always follow the above instructions, and install their own NetBSD 1.2 VAX, although I’m not holding my breath.. lol
Also I noticed that NetBSD 1.2 doesn’t have any fortran, so I built f2c, and managed to get dungeon running. woo!
Yep, it runs Dungeon!
Oh well it’s all good fun from 1996.
Reviewer Notes: REJECTED – Issues with plug-in
There appears to be an issue with the plug-in not working with local speex files once an http version is played and shows a messagebox of ‘Speex Error’ – ‘Not a Speex stream’. Restarting Winamp will then play the local file but am sure this shouldn’t be happening. Please fix and then re-submit the fixed version.
Don’t you hate it when you focus so much on the big things you forget the small stuff, like switching between local and remote?
Sigh.
Thankfully the fix was trivial, and only involved one line of code… I spent more time re-building a VM with Visual C++ 4.2 then I did fixing the code & recompiling…
Naturally the download is on the sourceforge page, and I bumped the version to 0.76a … If anyone ever wonders years from now what the deal was… lol