Ion Fury released!

So I’ve been busy with the day job stuff, and although I had ordered this I haven’t had time to play Ion Fury until today.

And yes, I’m sure you’ve seen video of it all over, and it’s so out of place, as it squarely belongs in 1997. And it’s great. The musical oddity is using samples much like a MOD, instead of the full synth or CD sounds. But it’s all the more era appropriate that I’m sure with a 90MB data file it would have been on CD-ROM, although I guess in the day it’d have audio tracks that would be quickly lost in the mists of time like the Quake 1/2 soundtrack.

I’m absolute crap, but it was fun enough to play. Although I did get ‘lost’ in the fan service, I didn’t realize I could make those jumps between the giant fans in the ventilation area.

So yes, this being a 3-D Realms experience means it’s not on rails. And the maps feel absolutely massive, and just look so great.

$109 HKD or $13.89 USD!

And it’s pretty cheap too! Although I think that is the local pricing for Hong Kong. For just under $110 it’s a steal.

From the sales blurb:

· While Shelly “Bombshell” Harrison earned her codename defusing bombs for the Global Defense Force, when evil transhumanist mastermind Dr. Jadus Heskel unleashes the members of his cybernetic cult onto the streets of Neo DC, she knows it’s time to start causing explosions instead of preventing them.
· Her quest to slay Heskel leaves a trail of carnage throughout huge, multi-path levels filled with gigantic explosions, more secret areas than we can count, and inhuman foes behind every corner. There’s no regenerating health here; stop taking cover and start running and gunning.
· Shelly’s crusade to take down Heskel’s army will see her leave destruction in her wake with a wide arsenal of weapons, complete with alternate fire modes and different ammo types. Her signature revolver, the tri-barreled Loverboy, brings enemies pain and players pleasure with both single shots and Old West-style hammer fanning action. Who needs a regular shotgun when you can load buckshot into your grenade launcher? Violent, over-the-top Bowling Bombs rip enemies apart with ease.
· Ion Fury laughs at the idea of mandatory checkpoints and straight paths through shooting galleries. But, just because this is a true old-school first-person shooter doesn’t mean we’ve ignored all the good new stuff the last two decades have brought. Headshots? Hell yeah. More physics and interactivity? You betcha. Widescreen, controller support, and Auto Saves? 3D Realms and Voidpoint have taken the best of both worlds and cooked it all into a bloody stew.
· The true successor to classic shooters such as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, and Blood. Experience the original BUILD engine on steroids, pumped up and ready to rock again after 20 years! Duck, jump, climb, swim, and blast your way through 7 exciting zones packed with multiple levels of mayhem!
A beautiful game world assembled from thousands of hand-crafted textures and sprites An awe-inspiring arsenal of devastating weapons, including multiple ammo types and alternate fire modes. Tri-barreled revolvers, grenade launchers, and heat-seeking smart bombs are your best friends!
The classic ’90s FPS action you love, meshed with modern inventions like locational damage and seamless level transitions ZERO PROCEDURAL GENERATION. All levels are hand made and full of multiple paths, cool effects, and complex set pieces!
Thumping soundtrack comprised of true tracked module music, in authentic FastTracker 2 format Easy access on to level editor and other development tools on day one, plus Steam Workshop support

For any Duke/Blood/Nam/TechWar fans really how could you pass Ion Fury by?

As goes Linux, so goes Microsoft

It’s entirely expected as print media is a dead artifact on 8/7 it was announced that Linux Journal would cease publication.

And then on 8/8 it was announced that MSDN magazine would also cease publication.

In the 90’s both magazines had an important role in both communities of developers and enthusiasts. I suppose it’s only fitting that they both passed away a day apart.

Both trade publications have been sources of pain with ‘new and exciting tech (that isn’t quite ready), but seeing their demise seems to just relegate us back to the world of word of mouth, that had served us poorly in the 80’s and before times.

There is something authoritative and to be said for putting print on word.

So I wanted to compare the new NCC vs the old one, and found that my CVS was broken.

Don’t you love upgrades that’ll break everything? For some reason now when I cvs init a repo the defaults have changed (where are they even stored?) and it’s been breaking things since going to Debian 9.

Although it presents itself as a warning if you see anything about warnings they apparently are errors. Such as this fine fatal error: “warning: duplicate LogHistory entry found.”. I was getting this from trying to login

cvs [login aborted]: unrecognized auth response from unix.superglobalmegacorp.com: cvs pserver: /ncc/CVSROOT/config [23]: warning: duplicate LogHistory entry found.

But it’s just a warning right? Well it turns out no, and that since I have multiple repos.

Apparently this was a bug in passing going back to 2006!

The problem is that a static variable is defined at line 618 in src/parseinfo.c. It is set when the first --allow-root option is processed for our first repository and then when the second --allow-root option is processed, the warning message is issued (erroneously, I believe) saying that another LogHistory line is encountered. But this is for a completely different repository, so it should have no relevance to the first config file.

Unless, serving multiple repositories is for some reason no longer
supported or the new syntax for using sections in a common config file is now mandatory. I hadn't seen any indications that either were intended, hence my question.

Thanks to Bob Bowen

The way out of this without re-compiling is to now comment out each repo’s LogHistory. Great.

The next issue at least presented itself as an error! .. if that’s progress.

$ cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/ncc ls .
cvs ls: failed to create lock directory for `/ncc' (/ncc/#cvs.lock): Permission denied
cvs ls: failed to obtain dir lock in repository `/ncc'
cvs [ls aborted]: read lock failed - giving up

Yep, now the lock directory needs to be specified. Maybe I should have made one per directory although this is pretty much just a read-only anoncvs so I don’t think it matters. And looking back on the logs it was only used by a few people so, honestly that’s fine.

The final error goes back to something I must have figured out with a template that is now wiped out. I have the CVS book, but left it at the office, so I’m here just hacking as a guess, but there is no passwd file being copied into place.

Logging in to :pserver:[email protected]:2401/ncc
CVS password:
Fatal error, aborting.
anonymous: no such user

This is at least simple to take care of, Just copy one from an older repo to a central location and propagate it everywhere. There is no point in doing system authentication as again it’s readonly and I don’t want users on my cvs crap thing.

So in 3 easy lines to remediate the thing, it is:

find ./ -type d -name CVSROOT -exec sed -i 's/LogHistory\=TMAR/#LogHistory\=TMAR/g' {}/config \;
find ./ -type d -name CVSROOT -exec sed -i 's/#LockDir\=\/var\/lock\/cvs/LockDir\=\/var\/lock\/cvs/g' {}/config \;
find ./ -type d -name CVSROOT -exec cp /virtual/unix/SOURCE/cvs-passwd {}/passwd

Current repos include such hits as:

  • 32v
  • binutils
  • cblood
  • cci
  • coherent
  • Corridor8
  • CSRG
  • darwin0
  • darwinstep
  • djgppv1
  • dmsdos
  • doom
  • dynamips
  • frontvm
  • gas
  • gcc130-x68000
  • gcc1x
  • gcc2x
  • gdb
  • gnumach
  • gsmaster
  • hatari
  • linux
  • linux001
  • lites
  • mach
  • mach3
  • machki386
  • MacMiNT
  • MiNT
  • msdos-player
  • ncc
  • net2
  • nextstep33examples
  • ntsdk
  • os2sdk
  • pgp
  • plan9next
  • previous
  • qemu
  • quake1
  • quake2
  • research
  • rsaref
  • sbbs
  • simh
  • TekWar
  • tme
  • truecrypt
  • uae
  • Witchaven
  • WitchavenII
  • xinu
  • xnu

General instructions are still valid on My crappy CVS archive of old crap is now online via pserver!

$ cvs --version

Concurrent Versions System (CVS) 1.12.13-MirDebian-25 (client/server)
$ cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/research login
Logging in to :pserver:[email protected]:2401/research
CVS password:
$ cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/research ls .
CVSROOT
researchv10dc
researchv10no
researchv3
researchv6
researchv6id
researchv6kw
researchv7hs
researchv7kb
researchv7ni
researchv7th
researchv8dc
researchv9

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Back in 1995 I bought this rather expensive, and ambitious book simply called: Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating

And while it is a LONG read, it really is the embodiment of Apple pie from scratch. Rather than rely on open and available tools, the author Richard Burgess instead goes on to write his own assembler, compiler, and then onward to a simple message passing RTOS.

No doubt the price he paid for eschewing popular GNU tools, and having a non BSD/GPL license for the time is that it was quickly relegated to history as the inevitable rise of Linux took place.

Recently while reading a comment about PC-MOS/386 v5.01 final, I came back to MMURTL, which is now in the public domain.

For those wishing to look, not only is the source code and a few patches available on the site ipdatacorp.com, but so is a PDF of the 1st edition of the book.

While MMURTL may not have caught on in the marketplace of ideas, it’s still astounding to look at the volume of work produced, that even though open source tools and starting points were available (The book easily could have been using CMU Mach 3.0) instead it’s all written from scratch by a single person.

TheGrue is doing further work doucmented on the BBS, along with work on github.

GXemul for Win32

Luna m88k booted off RAM disk

Don’t get all to excited, it’s a terrible port, but it’s to the point where it can barely run stuff. Although I don’t know how much is me, and how much is GXemul. I probably should have tested on Linux first.

Anyways it’s enough to boot the Luna m88k OpenBSD ram disk up to the single user mode, and poke around. The hard disk doesn’t pick up, and I haven’t even tried the NIC, although the address is looking pretty bogus.

I wanted to try the PMAX version of Mach, but then it hit me, that there is no server to load. And porting the system level from Mach 3.0 to 2.5 looks way more involved than Mach 3.0 being ‘something minor’.

Back on the 88k front, the Luna shipped with something called UniOS-Mach, but good luck finding that in this day & age. I guess I’ll have to go back to Japan.

For the crazy among us, go ahead and try gxemul-0.6.2-ultra-primative.zip The name says just how stable it is.

In the meantime here is a super low resolution capture of the screensaver from a Luna via http://www.nk-home.net/~aoyama/luna88k/

As an update, I added in the timer code from PCemu, and now that the timers appear to be firing some stuff like OS/F 1.0 get’s further!

OS/F 1.0 in single user mode

I need to go through the setup stuff a lot better as this is just untar’d and not setup at all. Not that it’s useful, but here, osf1-barely.7z .

So if anyone downloaded gxemul prior to this update, re-download it again! I put the m88k ramdisk kernel in there too so you can quickly test the Luna 88k emulation.

Confessions of a paranoid DEC Engineer: Robert Supnik talks about the great Dungeon heist!

What an incredible adventure!

Apparently this was all recorded in 2017, and just now released.

It’s very long, but I would still highly recommend watching the full thing.

Bob goes into detail about the rise of the integrated circuit versions of the PDP-11 & VAX processors, the challenges of how Digital was spiraling out of control, and how he was the one that not only championed the Alpha, but had to make the difficult decisions that if the Alpha succeeded that many people were now out of a job, and many directions had to be closed off.

He goes into great detail how the Alpha was basically out maneuvered politically and how the PC business had not only dragged them down by management not embracing the Alpha but how trying to pull a quick one on Intel led to their demise.

Also of interest was his time in research witnessing the untapped possibilities of AltaVista, and how Compaq had bogged it down, and ceded the market to the upstart Google, the inability to launch a portable MP3 player (Although to be fair the iPod wasn’t first to market by a long shot, it was the best user experience by far).

What was also interesting was his last job, working at Unisys and getting them out of the legacy mainframe hardware business and into emulation on x86, along with the lesson that if you can run your engine in primary CPU cache it’s insanely fast (in GCC land -Os is better than -O9).

The most significant part towards the end of course is where he ‘rewinds’ his story to go into his interest in simulations, and of course how he started SIMH when he had some idle time in the early 90’s. SIMH of course has done an incredible amount of work to preserve computing history of many early computers. He also touches on working with the Warren’s TUHS to get Unix v0 up and running on a simulated PDP-7 and what would have been a challenge in the day using an obscure Burroughs disk & controller modified from the PDP-9.

Yes it’s 6 hours long! But really it’s great!

Scored what I hope is an awesome motherboard for $30

I saw this great board online carousell, on some local seller board. Although eBay may be the defacto site for buying old garbage, keep an eye out for local stuff too. There is craigslist in the USA & Kijiji in Canada.

Intel l440gx+

Yes, it’s an Intel l440gx+, a dual processor motherboard, with an ISA slot! I’m pretty sure it’s all 5v PCI slots, but who knows. And at $250 HKD, much cheaper than the ones on eBay. Although condition is pretty much unknown.

Pentium III 750Mhz

And it has two Pentium III’s clocked in at an amazing 750Mhz. It’ll make a great MS-DOS box for sure, with plenty of punch. Along with being great for Windows NT 4.0

I think it may have 128MB of RAM as well. Not great, but it’s still pretty good.

Being this old also means it most certainly is MP 1.1 compatible, as I just found this mp_v1_1.c lurking in the OSFMK used in the ancient/abandonded mach kernel for MkLinux. Of course half the fun will come in trying to build the kernel from source (can’t find any intel binaries), and seeing if this old board works.

Of course getting the board was a mission in itself, as I had to cross through one of the big protests last night to get it. I took some video of it on my way back, and walked up to where the front line was going to be.

Sometimes translation software provides unique insights

When asking youth about the PLA blowing up stuff…

In China the tradition of using hard subs so that no subversive messages can be later inserted sometimes leads to some ‘funny’ situations.

As you may have heard there has been numerous protests here again over the extradition bill, along with the lack of universal suffrage, to outright collusion with the police & the triads. Now the PLA is getting in on the messaging, by doing a promo video featuring the Hong Kong garrison reminding us that they have all various calibers of machine guns, armored vehicles, boats, helicopters and rockets to subdue unarmed civilians.

At the 2:12 mark these kids are saying ‘So fierce’ and of course the translation slips through what the video is really about.

With all the ridiculousness of the past month, I really cant see the government taking us to the point of Martial Law. But there is always that possibility the last month has been anything but typical.

Remember when the PowerPC 620 was going to rule the world?

The Pentium processor, like the 68060 was the end of the line, there was nothing more that could be done for CISC, the future was RISC, and Intel along with Motorola had painted themselves into the corner, and the only way out was RISC. But both the i860 & 88010 failed to gain critical traction, paving the way for AIM to deliver on the PowerPC, leaving Intel behind.

Except it didn’t.

It’s always somewhat amusing and disappointing re-reading old stuff, looking for things and finding stuff like this.

Just as 1993 was the year that brought Windows NT out into the world, and the 32bit x86 wars really ignited. Who would have thought that only NT would remain out of these 5, and that ‘school kids project’ would have eclipsed them all?

The PC of tomorrow, love that dual 3 1/2″ & 5 1/4″ floppy drive!

There was something always ‘cool’ about the 80/90’s computer magazines and their shameless clip art, art packs. I wonder how much was physical cut outs and photographs vs being all digital? The shadows on the processor pins & heat sinks make me think that this was a physical layout.

For a fun call back, check out the May 31st 1994 issue of PC Magazine, PowerPC vs Pentium. It surprisingly has a lot of RISC reviews past page 120.

As luck has it, the 620 was delayed, and did not launch in 1994. It wouldn’t be pushed out until 1997, and by then the performance was lackluster, and I think this is what pushed IBM back into the POWER processor business. Making this the foreshadowing of abandoning Apple yet again with the G5 years later, despite IBM’s massive sales of PowerPC’s to Microsoft, Sony & Nintendo for various games consoles getting the volume that they desperately wanted to only later hand it over to AMD & ARM.

Bethesda DooM for the PC

$1.70 USD!

With all the excitement regarding the DRM, disapearing Xbox versions and the terrible music in the Unity port, I thought I’d check out the PC version that is thankfully on sale on Bethesda.net. I really have lost track the number of times I’ve bought this game, but here we go again. The last time I went through this was back in 2014, with the aptly titled: “Just how ‘original’ is the Ultimate Doom on steam?” story.

And much to my surprise they use the same version of DOSBox, 0.71, and have the same AdLib pre-config, along with the missing SETUP.EXE to allow you to change it.

HOWEVER, there is one big difference, the WAD file.

The steam version includes this wad file:

c4fe9fd920207691a9f493668e0a2083 doom.wad

Where the Bethesda.net uses this wad file:

e4f120eab6fb410a5b6e11c947832357 doom.wad

And looking on the DooM Wiki, that means that the wad file is from the PlayStation Network version.

Now with extra hell!

And it’s true they really did change the cross to a pill for the medical kit, per the red crosses request:

iD DooM on the left, Bethesda DooM on the right.

There is a few changes here and there but overall it looks pretty standard to me. Am I missing anything else?