Thinking about doing something different about monitization

Posted on by
10

I hate ads, and didn’t want to go down that road, but I was thinking of something different.  I keep reading in the news about these ‘javascript bitcoin miners’.  Many of them apparently are stealthy, but how about one that is overt?  I saw over at coinhive.com that they do have ‘opt in’ versions of their scripts as opposed to doing it silently.  So I thought this would be something interesting to ask for:

Loading Authed Mine…
100% volentary!

So, buddy, spare some CPU cycles?

OPL2LPT

Posted on by
5

I just saw this over at 8-bit guy, and thought this was pretty cool.  It’s an YM3812 / OPL2 of AdLib fame, on a parallel port.

Naturally the parallel port sits at a different IO port then where the Adlib would normally sit.  There is 2 strategies around this, the first is a 386 based driver that can intercept calls to the Adlib port, and redirect them to the parallel port, giving you audio.  However that apparently conflicts with protected mode software, and will require you to patch games to output to the parallel port instead.

So yes, this means you can boot MS-DOS with a USB stick on a modern machine, and get Adlib sound!  Or bring music to older machines either lacking an ISA bus, or being unable to source a working 8bit ISA card.

Currently working patched games include:

  • Sierra
    • Games using the “SCI” engine. Patch ADL.DRV.
  • id Software
    • The Commander Keen series
    • Wolfenstein 3D
    • DOOM (v1.9 tested)
    • DOOM II
  • Softdisk
    • Keen Dreams
    • Dangerous Dave’s Risky Rescue
    • Dave Does Nutz
  • Apogee
    • Bio Menace

You can pick them up in the USA from 8-bit guy, or in Europe from Serdaco.

PCem v13 released

Posted on by
26

Lots of new features added into this release!

New systems like:

  • IBM PS/2 Model 50
  • IBM PS/2 Model 55SX
  • IBM PS/2 Model 80

New disk controllers!

  • AT Fixed Disk Adapter
  • DTC 5150X
  • Fixed Disk Adapter (Xebec)
  • IBM ESDI Fixed Disk Controller
  • Western Digital WD1007V-SE1
  • Adaptec AHA-1542C
  • BusLogic BT-545S
  • Longshine LCS-6821N
  • Rancho RT1000B
  • Trantor T130B

And plenty of new fixes!  I just installed Citrix 2.0 with the older OS/2 1.2 based drivers, and it works great!

Citrix 2.0 on PCem v13

The full announcement is here, along with downloads for Windows & Linux.

Messing with the Microsoft JDBC Driver

Posted on by
2

Write once, debug everywhere!

Ugh so I was forced to setup something with JDBC. It’s been like forever since I have messed with Java in forever. So I thought I’d try something simple first. I found this very simple program to query against the NorthWind database from here.

// Import the SQL Server JDBC Driver classes 
import java.sql.*;

class Example 
{  
       public static void main(String args[]) 
       {  
       try  
       { 
            // Load the SQLServerDriver class, build the 
            // connection string, and get a connection 
            Class.forName("com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver"); 
            String connectionUrl = "jdbc:sqlserver://ServerName;" + 
                                    "database=northwind;" + 
                                    "user=UserName;" + 
                                    "password=Password"; 
            Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(connectionUrl); 
            System.out.println("Connected.");

            // Create and execute an SQL statement that returns some data.  
            String SQL = "SELECT CustomerID, ContactName FROM Customers";  
            Statement stmt = con.createStatement();  
            ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery(SQL);

            // Iterate through the data in the result set and display it.  
            while (rs.next())  
            {  
               System.out.println(rs.getString(1) + " " + rs.getString(2));  
            }

       }  
       catch(Exception e)  
       { 
            System.out.println(e.getMessage()); 
            System.exit(0);  
       } 
    } 
}

As you can see it’s pretty simple.  The server I’m using is on the default instance so I don’t need the instance name.  So first thing off, compile the program, and run it, right?

# ./javac sql.java
# ./java Example
com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerDriver

Well that’s great.  No doubt we actually need a driver from Microsoft, which surprisingly wasn’t too hard to find.  I’m sure the link will drift over the years, but right now here is the Microsoft JDBC Driver 6.2 for SQL Server.  From what I remember you would just use the jar flag, and be on your way.

# ./java -jar mssql-jdbc-6.2.2.jre8.jar Example
no main manifest attribute, in mssql-jdbc-6.2.2.jre8.jar

Great.  What’s this crap?

Well it turns out that you now need a Manifest.txt file.  Oh and the best part is that it needs a blank line at the end of the file.  So much time spent trying to figure that one out.

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Class-Path: mssql-jdbc-6.2.2.jre8.jar
Main-Class: Example

Ok, now to make my life easier I’m just going to throw this thing into a jar.

jar -cfm Example.jar Manifest.txt Example.class mssql-jdbc-6.2.2.jre8.jar

and now we get to the real fun, trying to get it to run.  My main testing SQL server is an ancient SQL Server 7.0 SP4 which I really need to just finally get around to upgrading.  While it’s served it’s time as a good base test instance, time has finally come to that point where nothing is going to talk to it anymore.  But while I was crazy enough to try to talk to it I got this fun error:

WARNING: ConnectionID:1 Prelogin error: host ServerName port 1433 Unexpected end of prelogin response after 0 bytes read

I guess the hint is the Prelogin, as it’s failing the higher security checks for the authentication.  So I quickly installed a 2003 server along with SQL Server 2005.  And oddly enough it was lacking the Northwind database, but I did find this great site, northwinddatabase.codeplex.com with a handy SQL script to generate the database.

Update the java file to point to the new server, and …

# ./java -jar Example.jar
Connected.
ALFKI Maria Anders
ANATR Ana Trujillo
ANTON Antonio Moreno
AROUT Thomas Hardy
….
WILMK Matti Karttunen
WOLZA Zbyszek Piestrzeniewicz

And there we go!  Hurrah!

Revisiting a Solaris on Qemu install

Posted on by
28

Since I had written about it the last time, quite a bit of the emulation on Qemu has improved significantly since then.  As always you’ll need to create and prepare a disk image, and I’m using an old SUN Station 5 PROM.

qemu-system-sparc -L . -m 64 -M SS-5 -bios ss5.bin -drive file=36G.disk,bus=0,unit=0,media=disk -drive file=solaris_2.6_598_sparc.iso,bus=0,unit=6,media=cdrom -startdate “1999-04-19”

One nice thing is that now you can boot off the CD-ROM.  And you can boot Solaris 2.6 directly into single user mode to format and label the disk.  It’s very convenient.  All you need here is

boot cdrom:d

And from there you can either kick off the disk partitioning, or the installer will boot up.

Booting from Prom to CD-ROM

And now to the graphical welcome screen!

Welcome

And then off to the ‘graphical’ installer.  Yes, it’s not that graphical at all.  Like before, it’s important that you don’t let it reboot on completion, you have to make changes to the system so it’ll boot up correctly, and make changes to the network config.  At least in graphical mode vi works.

installation

It is absolutely critical that you make this change or the disk will not boot at all.

cd /a/etc
# cat >> system
set scsi_options=0x58
^D

For networking:

And you will want a default route…

# cat > defaultrouter
10.0.2.2
^D

Then in the file /etc/nsswitch.conf change the following:

hosts: files

to

hosts: files dns

Then to ‘fix’ up your /etc/resolv.conf

# cat > resolv.conf
nameserver 10.0.2.3
#

And then I like to add the following hosts to speed up telnet…

# cat >> hosts
10.0.2.2 qemunat
10.0.2.3 qemudns
^D

And then hit Control+D and it’ll reboot back to the PROM.  Now all you have to type in the PROM monitor is:

boot disk0:

And in a minute you’ll be at the login screen.

Login Window

I went ahead with CDE, and over on archive.org the old SimCity for UNIX versions are over there.  One nice thing about being able to use CD-ROM’s is that Qemu can finally auto-mount the disk images.  It’s great.

Meltdown

There is no license for SimCity, and after 5 minutes the city goes into a ‘meltdown’ mode.  It’s a shame that back in the day the upstart x86 Linux was largely ignored by the UNIX market.  But Qemu has come quite a bit where you can run some of this proprietary VAR software.

And we’re back.

Posted on by
3

So this last 24 hours has been chaotic.  I’d had this word press installation for a number of years, going back to the 2 week Blogspot outage a long time ago.  But things change and I’ve found dealing with systemd and it’s bizarre need to hide and obscure things, along with it’s worthless logging a losing fight.  So over Thanksgiving I saw this “web reseller” package that has 250gb space and 1TB of network for $15 a year.  And being a reseller means I can add additional domains and whatnot for free.

As you may have seen rss was broken the menu bars stopped working and all kinds of other smaller issues.  I figured it was as good time as any to do a fresh install of word press and only copy the article, comments and user tables.

In the middle of this, the superglobalmegacorp redirection broke as it’s no longer a combined site.  And then disaster struck when I tried to move the install to PHP 7.1, getting away from 5.6 as I was constantly running out of memory.

Something happened on the hosting side and their server lost all configs for virtuallyfun.  I’d opened a ticket, and after 4 hours of nothing I moved the site back to the old machine, but I got interrupted with life and it was all messed up.  As soon as I got up, the issue has been resolved and we are back.

For me, this site feels substantiality faster than the older one.  The old server literally costs me $25 a month.  But it’s old and tired.  I have a sales call out on a new data center in Tai Po, Hong Kong so I may be moving all my USA hosting here. Which would be nice for me, at least the server will literally be down the street.

Oh well you know the internet, things move.

I’ve been debating about doing a SQL dump and purging the user table, and placing a copy of this blog on archive.org ..  I know at the same time people will load it up and place shitty ads all over it..  but at the same time I’d like to keep a better copy of my insane ramblings.  I see some people already tried, but their backup strategy is clearly automated and all they did was capture a single article.

As always, keep backups!

**added

For those with legacy systems, currently the HTTP site works.

OS X 10.6 Safari

Naturally for older systems the SSL support is still SHA-1 centered, and the entire SSL infrastructure is quickly moving to SHA-2.  Plenty of the site’s resources will be linked as https, and that’s pretty much the way it is.

I’ve tried to get some devs to write a simplified front end to the wordpress database to at least make things visible to legacy systems, but for some reason people just run away at the prospect.  Personally I’d love to have one in classical ASP so I can host it on Windows NT Server 4.0 … But I haven’t had any takers.

For my own benefit here is what I amputated to get rss working.


feed-rss2.php
====================================================================

]]>

]]>

0 ) : ?>
]]>

]]>


====================================================================

Building the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source

Posted on by
1

I just found this post over @pagetable.com, the source code to a bunch of old Commodore 8 bit products have been located and recovered, and place online over on github.  Even better there is detailed instructions on cross assembling from a suitable PET machine for building your own KERNAL ROM.

Other sources include:

  • BASIC_C64 reindented BASIC_C64, KERNAL_C64 and DOS_1540 to approximate the LST
  • BASIC_CBM2_A reindented BASIC_CBM2_[AB], KERNAL_CBM2_[AB] and EDITOR_CBM2 to appro
  • BASIC_CBM2_B reindented BASIC_CBM2_[AB], KERNAL_CBM2_[AB] and EDITOR_CBM2 to appro
  • BASIC_PET2001 added BASIC_PET2001
  • DOS_1540 reindented BASIC_C64, KERNAL_C64 and DOS_1540 to approximate the LST
  • DOS_1571 added DOS_1571
  • DOS_1581 added DOS_1581
  • DOS_4040 reindented DOS_4040 to approximate the LST output of the assembler
  • DOS_8070 reindented DOS_8070 to approximate the LST output of the assembler
  • DOS_8250 reindented DOS_8250 to approximate the LST output of the assembler
  • DOS_D9065 reindented DOS_D9065 to approximate the LST output of the assembler
  • EDITOR_CBM2 reindented BASIC_CBM2_[AB], KERNAL_CBM2_[AB] and EDITOR_CBM2 to appro
  • KERNAL_C64_01 added KERNAL_C64_03 and renamed the existing KERNAL_C64 to KERNAL_C64_01
  • KERNAL_C64_03 fix disclaimer of C64 KERNAL -03 to reflect the LST printout
  • KERNAL_CBM2_A reindented BASIC_CBM2_[AB], KERNAL_CBM2_[AB] and EDITOR_CBM2 to appro
  • KERNAL_CBM2_B reindented BASIC_CBM2_[AB], KERNAL_CBM2_[AB] and EDITOR_CBM2 to appro

Super late, but pretty cool too!

Of interest is the PET2001 Basic sources.  While there have been reversed efforts dating back for years, this is the actual source code.  Namely the header.


TITLE BASIC M6502 8K VER 1.1 BY MICRO-SOFT
SEARCH M6502
SALL
RADIX 10 ;THROUGHOUT ALL BUT MATH-PAK.

$Z:: ;STARTING POINT FOR M6502 SIMULATOR
ORG 0 ;START OFF AT LOCATION ZERO.
SUBTTL SWITCHES,MACROS.

REALIO=4 ;5=STM
;4=APPLE.
;3=COMMODORE.
;2=OSI
;1=MOS TECH,KIM
;0=PDP-10 SIMULATING 6502

Which is pretty damned interesting. The infamous “WAIT6502,1” feature is also included!

SimCity under Windows 3.0

Posted on by
17

In this case, I’m looking at the ultra-popular Sim series, and their Windows releases.  While I was a big fan of SimCity, especially having played it on an Amiga, when I found out that there was a Commodore 64 version, I had bought it immediately as I wanted to play it at home.  And let me tell you, it was a severely underwhelming experience.

SimCIty C64

From the logo it’s all down hill.  I know that SimCity is actually from 1985, and as the first version, the Commodore 64 version is basically the prototype.

SimCity C64

Which was just graphically underwhelming, but I still played the hell out of it.  And then I saw the Spectrum 48k version.  Yes, the blocks are ‘buildings’ as the units fill up, they will turn into black with only the letter remaining.  Despite the ultra-minimal graphics, the game play is there.  And once you get used to the bizarre combination keyboard+joystick controls it is addictive.  I mean it is SimCity!

SimCity Spectrum 48k

But going to the PC, I kind of grew out of SimCity.  DooM was the hot game, and the whole immersive 3d thing.  And of course during that era being on the PC I only knew of the MS-DOS version.  While there was a version for OS/2 Warp released much much later, and by then if I felt the urge there was SimCity 2000 for Windows.

But after getting the kick for SimEarth, and finding the Windows 3.0 version, I was much surprised to find out that there was a version of SimCity of Windows 3.0 as well!

And I can see why I never had seen this for retail, or knew anyone who had it.

Maxis Order Form

That’s right in the included form, the price was $59.95.  And SimEarth was $69.95!  To put that in perspective that would be now $107.17, and $125.04 respectively.  And people think $60 for a game today is expensive!

To get the full experience I went ahead and loaded up PCem, with a 386 and EGA graphics to get that original feel.

Since this requires Windows 3.0, with either EGA or VGA graphics, and 2MB of RAM, I figured I would go with a ‘top of the line’ souped up 386DX.  I tried to load it up with the Wyse700 driver, and the game fails to load resources.  I don’t know if its even possible to make black and white or four colour resources, as I live in the future, and I have millions of colours!

That said, I tested and it has no issues with 8bit depths either.

Installation is pretty smooth, the game is shipped on either two 360k 5 1/4″ diskettes, or a single 720kb diskette. While modern games have so much more, there is many things this game is lacking.  But Maxine isn’t one of them.

Maxine the cow

No really, she is listed as a feature.

The music is through the PC speaker.  Just like the sound effects.  Multimedia integration with Windows that we take for granted today just wasn’t a thing back then.  The version I have is 1.0, Although a pirated version 1.1 that was sent in actually includes WAV sound effects, and a single midi track. However it doesn’t run on Windows 3.0.  So lucky me!

Unrecoverable Application Error

Ah the UAE, the bane of Windows 3.0.  They were so unpopular that Microsoft had to rename the dialog.

SimCity on EGA

Living in the constraints of EGA feel absolutely claustrophobic in today’s world.  640×350 just isn’t enough screen rel estate.  Even 640×480 is far far too small.  And that lead to one issue I found

SimCity SVGA

While using a SVGA driver so I can get that impossible to afford experience of 1280×1024 in 256 colours, but the application was never meant to run in something that wide.  You can easily put child windows ‘behind’ the dead space, and you can never recover them.  You have to save and re-launch. bummer.

Which leads me to perhaps the most famous reputation of SimCity for Windows.  As mentioned on Joe’s site, there was a massive struggle to get games like SimCity running on Windows 95. As Raymond Chen says:

If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95. (Games were the worst. Often the game vendor didn’t even care that their program didn’t run on Windows 95!)

Yes, they basically knew it had problems.  In the box they even had this cute flyer:

I sure hope Raymond got something for his efforts!

And yes, rest assured it actually does work.  It even works on Windows 3.00a under Citrix MULTIUSER 2.0 Pointless as there is no way to have remote graphical displays but nice to see it work.

So what went wrong?  Where was all the follow up games for Windows?  Obviously, the hardware needed was incredibly expensive.  A 386 or even a 286 with a few megabytes of RAM was expensive.  VGA or EGA monitors were also very expensive.  Even mice were expensive!  Putting together a low end PC basically barred you from this high end premier experience.  I can’t imagine that Maxis sold many copies of this.  As mentioned above I’m pretty sure there is a reason why I never saw this in the wild.

Awesome Windows 386/486 machine prices February 1992

Spending $3000 in early 1992, which is $5197.95 in today’s money. I can’t even begin to imagine spending over $5,000 to play a game.  It’s no wonder when older machines show up on eBay people want far too much for them.

In a strange way I like to watch SimCity animate in the background.  It’s like a fish tank or staring out into a busy street.  With the advantage that I can summon a giant lizard to destroy it at my whim.