So I was messing with quake1 & DJGPP/DOSBox. So yes that means this table is largely nonsense. My larger goal was to see if a strictly softfloat could run Quake1. The answer, is no.
However I got some weird answers from messing around with the flags & fps from a timedemo of demo1
So surprisingly -O2 -m386 -m80387 produced the fastest code using GCC 2.7.2.3. On DOSBox so yeah that means literally nothing. Rebuilding DOSBox with no floating support code gave a weird error about the pov being out of range.
Obviously the next thing to do is run this stuff natively.. .which means GCC 2.7.2.3 for NT. Oh this is going to be fun, but utterly pointless. Or maybe not.
I re-ran the tests using VMware. There is no audio drivers involved just plain MS-DOS. The red is DOS-Box while green is VMware for the graph with FPS being the measurement. Interesting how the numbers aren’t as varied like DOSBox, however the -m386 -m80387 proved the be the worst for VMware, while the 386 soft float was so incredibly slow on DOSBox but performs great on VMware. yay?
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
The title is little complicated so let me explain! Ever since dawn of the web I been running some web server to host various websites. In the beginning it was a physical machine under my desk, then a colocated server, then a VPS Virtual Machine, then a container. Eventually all the websites that I look after or host for friends/family ended up in “the cloud”. Storage buckets to be precise, as they offer a super cheap and simple way of hosting static websites. I no longer have to maintain machines, look after updates, security or configuration. Just upload HTML and done.
However here lies a problem. You can’t just “edit” a file in a bucket, you can only download it, edit locally and re-upload. This typically is done via Storage Browser UI or gsutil cli utility (in case of GCP). Or some sophisticated IDE with storage API support or sometimes a FUSE client. In any case it’s hard and cumbersome. Why can’t there be a simple Edit function in the UI?
Why isn’t there a File Edit Option????
I have recently discovered that there even is a brand new Cloud Shell Editor which is a VScode instance bound to your “cloud shell instance”. It allows you to virtually edit files “in the cloud” but of course not in storage buckets! WHY NOT?
While this been bothering me for a while I also got interested in so called “cloud functions” which are small pieces of code that you can run “in the cloud” without need for a VM or even a container (although surely they run in one behind the scenes). Just paste the code and run… somewhere. Cloud Functions or AWS Lambdas have been notoriously abused by crypto miners. I wanted to play with these for legitimate reasons and finally decided to create a simple web based text editor that would allow to edit text files in storage buckets. So CFEdit was born.
The editor is super simple, no frills, just a file selector and textarea for editing files. You deploy it by creating a new function, either via the UI or CLI. You can restrict it just to a single bucket or allow editing in any bucket within a project. It doesn’t use IAM and thus doesn’t require Google accounts. I specifically wanted to avoid complexity of that and just went with own user database and HTTP Basic Auth.
Now I can create account for family members or friends and allow them to edit their web pages via simple web based editor rather than asking for uploading files or resorting to ftp/sftp GCS gateways or stuff like that.
In future I’m planning to add other function like create blank file, directory, upload/download etc. Let me know what’s needed.
CFEdit can be downloaded from github.com/tenox/cfedit, the readme describes in steps on how to deploy it.
So far things seem good, the torture test is usually compiling with QuickC for Windows, and SimCity for Windows 1.0. Excel & Word are as always bonus material.
I was so tired I ended up sleeping through the whole thing. Sometimes it’s hard being on the other side of the planet. But for anyone interested in Windows programming it’ll be super interesting in how much has changed, and yet how much things haven’t changed.
Damn!
As an added bonus, 65scribe has also blessed us with not only another great retrospective on iMacs, but also our favorite museum in Ontario, but left us with a cliff hanger (minor spoiler!).
Blue and Ice
I never knew about the artic blue ice thing before. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but who knows?!
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
This was previously well covered by Gunkies and Neozeed, however as almost a decade passed, some improvements could be made and annoyances fixed.
Firstly NT MIPS now works in 1280×1024 resolution under QEMU. It previously had issues with mouse tracking, but this is now fixed. So the new image has a higher resolution.
Secondly the old images were made with FAT filesystem which I didn’t like too much. The reason for that is the infamous RISC NT osloader needs to be placed on a FAT partition. Then, if NT is installed on a second NTFS partition the default drive will be D:\, C:\ being the just the osloader drive. This was super annoying in practice. So a common procedure was to just have one FAT partition for both osloader and winnt. I have fixed it by supplying a pre-partitioned disk and specified the second partition for osloader and the first for NT.
Also I only had just a bare/vanilla image with no additional software installed. The new image includes most of the available apps, including IE3, some editors, Reskit and Visual Studio.
Lastly I wanted to figure out all the right settings and flags for qemu as they were discrepancies between different sources and nothing seem to work smoothly. The correct flags seem to be:
The -rtc flag is not really needed if you are ok with having the current date in the guest.
Thanks to Neozeed for figuring out the network settings! Unfortunately the old/legacy -net nic -net user is no longer working while the new -device doesn’t like dp83932. The documentation was quite helpful.
Thanks to reader Mark for pointing out the correct NVRAM settings! See comments below.
The new image with all the apps preinstalled is here and a plain “vanilla” here.
Curiously this now works right out of the box on QEMU 6.1 and is pretty smooth and stable compared to what it was before. Good job QEMU team and thank you! Just in case I still keep the old binaries for Windows made by Neozeed here.
Update: I built Yori for NT MIPS! You can download here!
So a few months ago, gattilorenz had told me he managed to work out how to do direct video under Xenix, and was able to get DooM running! He made the source available, and I meant to do something back then, but I must have gotten distracted.
So I went ahead and added the zeeDooM thing I had been working on a while ago which is a combination of the John Romero released maps, and the FreeDoom assets. So it’s not 100% the released version, it just looks that way.
I’ve gone ahead and created a qemu disk image (if you convert it, it does run on VMware, so probably far more 386 capable emulators than I can imagine), along with an old Qemu exe for some stand alone fun on archive.org.
There is no sound, nor music. I should look closer one day, and see if I can drive some direct music to an Adlib since it’s just IO ports, and maybe grab all the direct sound code from viti95’s FastDoom?
For the impatient the short story is this on a SIMH LGP prompt:
SET CPU LGP30
SET CPU TAPE
LOAD BKJCK.TX
SET CPU MANUAL
G -T 4500
g
Naturally you’ll need the game as well which is currently on FTP at ftp.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de . Obviously thanks to our google overlords FTP is no longer integrated in the browser because the browser is only http, not gopher, telnet, ftp .. who needs to be universal?
You’ll find it in the /pub/cm/lgp30/papertapes/Games directory.
Important things is that your yes/no should be inputted as y’ or n’ The game will stop SIMH so you need to ‘g’ to start again.
FUN!
Although this comes up time and time again, I found this hacker news post, that actually has a picture of Mel, showing that he was in fact a real person.
Well back before, I had been looking into old linkers for 386 OMF, I knew I’d found some fun with some old GNU tools going back to the heyday of Xenix 386. As kind of expected the tools used to build Xenix, along with it’s SDK were in fact Microsoft C/MASM. So yes way back in 1987 Microsoft not only has MASM386, but they also had a 32bit Microsoft C 5.00. Let that sink in for a moment as OS/2 had been forced into 16-bit land despite FOOTBALL, and Windows/386 being a 386 VM86 multitasker. So in a weird way all the parts were in existence.
Back in the old days of GCC 1.x there was a bit of excitement about the file masm386.c in the old GCC source directory, sadly despite it being updated, there was no real public push on modifying GCC to support non AT&T assemblers. Instead something unexpected (well to me!) happened is that GAS had been modified to output OMF.
I tested this on MinGW with some simple stuff, and sure enough it links just fine. Considering its what is on the GCC on Xenix port I’m sure it’s pretty solid.
Enter OS/2
Now this is more fun, and again kind of sad that GCC didn’t take on the ability to target other assemblers (just look at the x68000!), Maybe they didn’t see GAS for OMF, or just didn’t know. Instead a more aggressive choice was made, to alter the binary output. Linking on OS/2 with EMX involved 2 very different and incompatible paths, the first one is the ancient Unix i386 a.out format, which then a utility called emxbind will convert into a loader & stub that OS/2 can run. Think of it as an OS/2 extender to take simple Unix programs (which is what they are) to run on OS/2. Neat!
The second more ‘native’ approach is to convert the binary a.out files into what is known as OMF files, which non GNU linkers like Wlink from Watcom or Link386 from Microsoft can then link into direct native EXE’s or DLL’s.
There had been an experimental ELF build of the EMX toolchain on OS/2 but I think it may have died? So as crazy as it seems bigger and crazier programs need to be built on systems like Windows or Linux and linked outside of OS/2 to get around the old memory limits. It’s really hard to say as I’ve never used it, although being able to do the link outside of OS/2 would be an advantage.
I’ve found 2 programs to convert the a.out objects into OMF, the first and oldest being o2obj. The one drawback I’ve had is that this doesn’t play so well with the Watcom 386 OMF linker. Instead the much later RSXNT/LIBC0.6 project’semxomf. I’ve done some painful hacking but it appears to do what it should do. A simple omfdump seems to be spilling stuff out.
Of course the alternative is to use a 64bit linker, and since a.out has been pulled from binutils the only real hope is the Watcom linker which is now running in a 64bit address space. And the Watcom chain won’t understand ancient i386 a.out, however Microsoft 386 OMF it certainly will, although it appears to be based around something later than the aforementioned o2obj, which is why I ahd to do the emxomf.
I know as this stands it’s not very satisfying but I kind of wanted to push this out the door as I’d been hacking from time to time on it, and didn’t want to leave it to rot completely. The EMX tools remind me of the NeXT stuff where everyone goes native platform wild never imagining a day when remaining portable would mean it’d be easier to target more software.
The one thing I wonder about sometimes if there was some kind of secret Microsoft extended DOS/Windows that relied on OMF & Link386 that predated the NT team and their switch to COFF? Obviously it’d be super obsolete and would have been something like the first PharLap 386 stuff. But I’ve only owned a disk dump of v4, and a legit copy of TNT v6. Old 386/DPMI/Extender tools are hard to find.
Linkers & loaders, along with binary formats are too hard for me, but I thought I’d share at least what I’d been able to conjure with MinGW. I’ll have to touch on EMX to native OMF linking later.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
While everybody is busy buzzing about Windows 11, I wanted to commemorate the finest operating system ever made by Microsoft – Nano Server.
For most of people Nano Server was esoteric, distant and unapproachable. It had a rather high entry barrier, requiring you to build it on a Windows Server 2016 host using PowerShell magic spells. You couldn’t just simply download and run it. Even if you managed to get it running, there wasn’t anything you could actually do with it for fun. People didn’t bother to even check it out. My goal is to demystify this a bit, lower the entry bar and made it easy for people to hack it.
Background info (you can skip it)
Nano Server was an interesting attempt at creating a datacenter grade OS that’s not managed via local GUI, keyboard and mouse, but rather full automation, remote tooling and code. It went one step further than Server Core or Windows PE by completely removing GUI components and local shell. Hence it’s not actually called “Windows” or “Windows Nano” but rather simply “Nano Server”. Rumor has it, it started as MinWin. The OS has a rudimentary text mode console with functionality similar of VMware ESXi console. However Nano was much more than a bare metal hypervisor. It was a fully fledged operating system. Unlike ESXi you can develop and install services/apps for it and hypervisor wasn’t even it’s default role.
Ever since I first saw a demo on Microsoft Ignite (previously known as TechEd) I wanted to run aclock on the text console. Much like the WinNT BSOD edition. This article started around my efforts to run (or port if needed) aclock to this platform. At the time of writing, the technology has been dead for several years now. However all the artifacts and documentation are still available on Microsoft’s website. Probably not for long, so a good moment to do it now, before everything gets deleted in to oblivion.
How to quickly deploy Nano Server and run command line apps on the console
Microsoft provides (soon to be deleted) Nano Server Quick Start. However the steps are trivial so you can totally skip that and just do this:
Launch PowerShell terminal window on the WS2016 host.
Run: Import-Module D:\NanoServer\NanoServerImageGenerator -Verbose (D:\ drive being where Windows Server CDROM is mounted)
Run: New-NanoServerImage -DeploymentType Guest -Edition Standard -MediaPath d:\ -BasePath c:\nano -TargetPath c:\nano.vhdx -ComputerName nano -Development (c:\nano folder and c:\nano.vhdx image will be created for you)
Done! This will build a .vhdx image that can be run under Hyper-V as “Gen-2” VM. For Gen-1 or to run it on any other hypervisor change .vhdx to .vhd in -TargetPath while running the PowerShell command.
The easy way: you can just download a pre-built VM image from here. There are VHD for Hyper-v Gen-1 and VHDX for Hyper-v Gen-2 and OVA for everything else.
First Boot
Once you boot it up you will be greeted with a PowerShell prompt. Just like that! You can type cmd to launch the good old cmd.exe shell. MS-DOS 2016?
Keep in mind, this is a developer mode (see -Development flag). Normally you would be greeted with a login prompt and a boring menu that allows to change some networking settings and not much beyond that. In production mode you need to resort to hacks (or this) to get stuff running, fortunately nothing like that needed here.
So what can you run on it?
Firstly in order to get some external utilities going, you can mount a SMB share using net use in cmd or New-SMBMapping in PS world. Nano being a server and all, you can also share out a folder via net share or use C$ (you may need to create a user by using either net user /add in cmd or New-LocalUser in PS). Alternatively you can install Posh-SSH and use SCP to transfer files. If you don’t have working network you can just shut it down, mount the vhd image on the host and copy stuff in to the image then detach the VHD.
Aclock worked on the first run, no issues, using standard win64 exe:
aclock running on Nano Server Console
Wow! So looks like Nano console does have basic terminal controls. That opens quite a lot of possibilities. But can you run more complex apps? Text editors? Web browsers? GAMES?
Well, yes…, but likely not, but it really depends – on dependencies (read: DLLs).
The font is lacking line drawing characters. Some editors like YEdit allow to use ASCII drawing characters fortunately.
There is no reverse video. This manifests mostly in menus, etc. however it also applies to the cursor.
There is no cursor, or rather the cursor is an underscore and not transparent cell. Moving arrow left in the CLI doesn’t actually move the cursor it erases characters. There is no line editing.
Also related to reverse video, it appears Nano console has some weird issues with colors.
Missing DLLs. Nano Server not being a “Windows” OS is missing a lot of Windows DLLs and it has its own nano DLL hell. This has actually been acknowledged in MinWin. As such a lot of apps will not launch due to dependencies.
For example YEdit works remarkably well except for the menus, which use reverse video:
YEdit running on Nano Server Console
Update: Malcolm has fixed it in latest version of YEdit! Thank you!
Update: thanks to Ron Yorston you can also run BusyBox on Nano! All you need to do is get the 64bit version and before you run it set an environmental variable to disable ANSI emulation. In CMD set BB_SKIP_ANSI_EMULATION=0 in PS $env:BB_SKIP_ANSI_EMULATION=0. Done!
BusyBox on Nano Server
You even get ls colors and vi editor works flawlessly! Unix shell on Nano, thats awesome!
So what about games?
Initially nothing worked as expected. Either due to line drawing, colors or previously mentioned DLL hell. There was one game that actually worked – PowerShell adaptation of snake:
PowerShell Snake running on Nano Server Console
But I wanted something better. I had high hopes for ascii-patrol, which is pure text mode and they build it for win64. Unfortunately the game requires a bunch of multimedia / sound DLLs from Windows which are not present in Nano.
Thankfully Neozeed has stepped in, took the source code, amputated all the multimedia stuff, borrowed the Unix clock code and gettimeofday, and used an older Visual Studio to build it. But he managed to produce a fully working and playable version!!!! Truly amazing stuff!
ASCII Patrol Running on Nano Server Console
The binary is available here. To play the game scroll down one screen to start a mission. If you enter profile customization simply press ESC to get out. Thanks again Neozeed!
I’m hoping readers can find more text mode/ascii apps and games that will work on the console. Please comment and send links!
In another dimension, having a working text editor, Yori shell, smb/scp, maybe with help of mingw64, sdk tools or borrowed compilers from Visual Studio, one could have a self hosted developer workstation with this.
For now please just download the pre-build image, or make one yourself and run it in your favorite hypervisor and have some fun with it!
With this, goodbye Nano Server! You will be always remembered. I know folks at Redmond tried really hard to make it such beautiful gem.
This is a bit cheating, but I broke down and did some dump/exports of a building system to get the file layout. Since the MiG phase was totally done native, I didn’t bother with that, or trying to ‘fix’ the nested Makefiles, rather I just dumped the output and worked with that. I guess I could make my own Makefile but for now it’s a stupid script. I used the a.out build tools for Linux as the objects are all the same anyways.
cd mach25-X113\obj\STD+WS-afs-nfs
build-gcc258.cmd
Since there is no Makefile it won’t run in parallel. About 20 seconds or so later you’ll get a linked ‘a.out’ but it won’t run. The script xport.cmd is rigged for me and Qemu 0.10.5 to create a tar file to extract inside of mach and perform the native link.
Obviously this means you can us modern UI’s tools and everything else as you are now on the outside! If you can force your build to use my ancient tools you can even do the build. Nice!
Doing a rebuild of the kernel in Qemu the 2.5.8 -O2 build shaved a whole second off the build, so yes it actually did something.
Things to do would be cross linking, fixing the drivers that don’t build, and probably improving stuff like bigger disks, filesystems and memory… or networking!.. .but that’s all too complicated for me!
