Who is the drizzle?

In case you’ve been hiding in a cave, you’ll know that Oracle has bought out just about all the real competition to their flagship product and basically driven the developers out.. Just as they have strangled SUN’s products in some vain attempt at a lawsuit against Google, they basically have killed mysql.

Well enter, drizzle.

I haven’t loaded it yet, but it’ll certainly be something worth investigating going forward since MySQL is effectively dead.

SPARC NetBSD on Qemu 0.14.0

I came across this link, in some kind of vain search to see if NetBSD Sparc could run on Qemu.  And the answer is a resounding yes!

I have to admit it was pretty simple to setup too. I did a network install, so all I needed in a minimal config was a GENERIC kernel, and the miniroot. I did it this way because booting with the inserted kernel lets me easily choose my root…

First I created a 2GB data disk, then start up Qemu like this…

qemu-system-sparc.exe -kernel netbsd-GENERIC -L pc-bios -hda sparc.disk -hdb miniroot.fs -net nic -net user

And it’ll boot up!

I specify the root to be sd1c, I’m not sure if it’d pick up on sd1, or sd1a but at any rate sd1c certainly works. The other gotcha I found was the keyboard, sun-type4 worked best. I also had to configure the network manually (maybe I missed something?) but the settings are simple for NAT.

address 10.0.2.15
mask 0xffffff00
gateway 10.0.2.2
dns 8.8.8.8

Any attempt to ping the gateway will fail. But it’s nothing to worry about, and the install can continue normally. I pulled the rest of NetBSD down via HTTP, and it booted up!

I should also add that the CD-ROM iso install works as well. And the NetBSD site has lots of ways of getting the install ISO for the sparc.

And of course, will it run Zork?

Yes it does!

Word for Windows 2.0 demo

Someone managed to save the Word 2.0 demo executable, and a few files to do with it, but not the install. It appears to work ONCE per session, and if you launch word twice it’ll destroy the install… Very strange.

But for anyone looking for a demo copy of Word 2.0, along with Excel, Powerpoint & Schedule, it’s right here.

It runs great in DOSBox, and really if you use these for a few minutes, then try the later ones, what are you really missing?

Internet Explorer 9 released..

Well today Internet Explorer 9 has been released… I guess they timed it for the pi day thing yesterday (3/14!).

You can find all the languages & versions here.

So how does it perform? Well the CP/M Javascript page doesn’t work at all in IE9 mode. In compatability mode, it can’t execute commands with an argument so booting or loading disks seems not to work. It’s such a shame.

The javascript NES emulator not only works, but seems to perform pretty well I get just under 60fps. Oddly performance is just slightly slower then Chrome, yet the sound in IE is far smoother. That was really unexpected, but still interesting.

Outside of that, I’ve only used it for 10 minutes now so I really can’t say. But we all know that for better or worse, IE always holds the largest ‘surface area’ so it will remain the most targeted. But for now it’l be fun to play with, but I’ll be lery of remaining on it.

Trumpet Winsock 2.0b

So while browsing around k7tty, I came across this file, internet.zip, that pretty much has everything you need for a windows 3.1 machine to get into the internet using Trumpet Winsock.

I used a packet driver, along with Qemu’s built in ne2000 and it works pretty well!

While I never used Trumpet back in the day, setting it up for LAN access was pretty easy, and while Trumpet 1.0 loads on Windows 3.0 I never could find any applications that actually work with it. Trumpet 2.0 seems more along the line of the finalized Winsock 1.1 stacks, with applications abound to run with it and Windows 3.1

Well it looks like I’m popular in China again.

China & Technology

China & Technology

This time I’ve had over 1,400 Windows 2000 users with IE 6.0 download the ‘full’ binary build of Qemu 0.14.0

119.166.31.202 – – [12/Mar/2011:23:53:33 +0000] “GET /install/qemu-0.14.0.zip HTTP/1.1” 200 13320793 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”

Like this….

# cat install-access.log|grep ‘ MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0’ | wc -l
1403

Honestly I don’t see why they do it, so I’ve pulled the download. I really don’t see the appeal of it, and most anyone who cares about Qemu will be using the x86/x86_64 stuff anyways.

Virtual Internet Teletype

I came across this page, while hunting down the source code to WinVN before NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre picked it up.

Do you remember those old movies where the news is coming across the ‘wire’? Or better they are using the wireless?

I’m not sure if they still do broadcast over the air, I suspect they do, but you’ll naturally be required to have all kinds of special radio and teletype equipment. Which naturally takes times, money and effort. And my attention span is WAY too short for that kind of thing.

To get this to run, I’m using VLC, and MMTTY. If you don’t want to go deaf, or you don’t want the ‘full’ experience, then I’d suggest Virtual Audio Cables.

So basically it works like this. You can click on one of the two links below and

http://65.243.191.51:8000/listen.pls
http://65.243.191.51:8030/listen.pls

Which will then kick off your streaming audio player… If you can withstand the noise, crank it up so your microphone picks up the noise… 🙂

Then launch MMTTY and it will listen on the microphone, and suddenly start to translate the bauddot!

mmtty in action

If you have issues, or wish to finagle the audio devices, or perhaps to use VAC so you don’t have to listen to it, first set VLC to use a different audio output (Tools -> Preferences) then I used the Direct X output feature so I can specify which audio card to use.

VLC audio preferences

Then to configure MMTTY, go under Options -> Setup MMTTY, click on the sound card tab, and you can set the input.

mmtty preferences

And there we go.

The Itty news feed is user driven, so feel free to get the mailer mentioned on the page, and try to submit some news.

There is a lot going on today, esp with the earthquakes that are ongoing in Japan, and the unrest, and populist uprisings in the ME.

But now you can ‘enjoy’ the news in a really old fashioned way.

A little more fun with the Windows 3.0 working model

FORTRAN Dungeon on Windows 3.0 Demo

So with a little pushing around I managed to create a stand alone version of dungeon (zork) for Windows 3.0 . Naturally this version doesn’t require windows, just some kind of MS-DOS system with a 80286 processor, and either EGA or VGA graphics card. I guess I could have tried some CGA/MDA love but I didn’t.

So for anyone wanting to have some fun with an ancient box, I’ve provided both floppy disk images, and an install directory source to install this. It’s kind of funny how 7zip can get another 50% on the Windows 3.0 compress utility.

Otherwise it’s like the other Windows Demo/Working model software..

Text based installer…

GUI Installer

And the desktop.

This is the old f2c version of dungeon/zork I ported ages ago. Oh and thanks to the magic that is jdosbox, you can testdrive it from a Java enabled pc just by simply clicking here.

Twinsock and early windows internet usage

A friend of mine let me know that there is a current drive by former users of trumpet winsock to actually send the author the $25 ($35 in adjusted money) that he had asked for the shareware program. While I’ve seen Trumpet, it required a SLIP or PPP connection which I just didn’t have back in 1993/1994 timeline. Sure there was SLiRP, but it was far more involved to compile on the Ultrix machine university gave us access to, or the pay internet connection (sefl.satelnet.org!) that ran IRIX. So I ran Troy Rollo’s Twinsock.

Besides being GPL’d twinsock proxied the socket access from your Windows 3.1 computer, and ran the requests on the Unix host you connected to. The best part is that they didn’t have to know that you even ran it. Twinsock transformed the internet from being a Unix shell account that kept many people away, into a graphical experience with windows applications executing on our desktop. Since it wasn’t a real TCP/IP stack, it effectively firewalled us, and seeing we were running Windows 3.1 that was a good thing.

So to make this experence more… realistic, I took the 386BSD 0.1 image from sourceforge, and made one tweak into how it runs. I added the following to the Qemu execution:

-serial tcp:127.0.0.1:4445,server,nowait

Then I installed MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, a terminal program, and some tcp/ip programs to test into another Qemu virtual machine. I then connected the two Qemu instances like a null modem like this:

-serial tcp:127.0.0.1:4445

This way COM1 on both machines now talk together. The only major downside I’ve seen is that if the client VM is killed re-starting it doesn’t get the serial connection working, both VM’s have to be restarted from the command line.

The cool thing was I was able to use a dos terminal program and zmodem to transfer the source to 386BSD to build. Surprisingly this part went pretty smooth on all the versions of Twinsock that I tested, but version 1.3 and higher was the version that actually worked.

So with the executable built on the Unix machine, you launch the windows program, which included a minimal terminal program. And from there you can dial up, login to your Unix account, then launch the twinsock Unix component and the window minimizes and now you are ‘connected’.

Launching Twinsock

WinVN

One of the most popular programs & protocols of the “early” internet was NNTP or Net News. Net News transitioned the world from BBS’s and Forum Software. The topics were incredibly diverse, and the system was distributed by nature. And news traversed the internet in a semiquick fashion. Especially the nodes that had T1 or faster access at the time. Unlike down stream UUCP BBS’s that may only take a small feed once a day, now with Twinsock you could get whatever groups and feeds you wanted, and as fast as your little modem could download it.

So for this fun experiment, I downloaded a suitably old version of WinVN, 0.92.1. The first thing I went looking around for was a public NNTP server. A great resource for locating various news servers that have certain groups is newzbot.

So with a suitable server in hand, I was able to connect up and check a news group. It was slow and clunky like it was in the old days, but it was neat in that client server feel to know that it was running on my desktop.

MS Telnet

Naturally it wouldn’t be the internet if you still telneted all over the world for MUD’s, and even access to compilers, different systems, and school work. I had a chore of a time finding a ‘good’ telnet client, so I ended up settling with the one that Microsoft had released their own stack, ‘Wolverine’ as part of a TCP/IP protocol update for Windows for Workgroups. This stack was also significant in that this was the first time a ‘full’ and ‘real’ TCP/IP stack had been released for free. As mentioned above with Trumpet winsock, and the rest, you had to buy the network stack. This free stack was only meant for LAN access, though I’ve heard of people trying to hack PPP/SLIP stuff at the dos level, but again it wouldn’t help me, since I couldn’t SLiRP. But this was the forshadowing of how the internet was going to finally take off, and the short thriving window of 3rd party TCP/IP stacks for Windows was about to slam shut in the next release of Windows.

Mosaic 0.7

And finally we come the program that basically changed the way we do everything – Mosaic. The first web browser only worked on the NeXTSTEP, and I don’t think that Mosaic was the first PC browser, but at the time it certainly was the best. I loaded up an old version to see if it could at least hit a site by IP address, and it worked. Sadly downloading files causes the browser to crash. Mosaic was rather touchy back in the day too. Because Mosaic came from the Unix world of browsers it was a 32bit program, and needed large amounts of memory. It also was a large exe too, around 2MB! Which is far larger then doom & the dos extender! So Mosaic was the first program I can recall that needed the magical Win32s add on. I’ve mentioned Win32s before so I won’t go on and on, but like the TCP/IP from Microsoft, this also basically killed the DOS Extender market.

The first time I saw Mosaic, I was blown away, we left the world of terminals and archie/gopher/veronica to something you could use a mouse with, and enter in your own URL! It was amazing, but at the same time I thought the internet was doomed to failure as you had to READ. Oh how wrong I was to be shown later. But in the time between Windows NT 3.1 and Windows 95, there was a lot of reading expected to be done. Much like everyone at the time would reply with RTFM in the news groups for stupid questions, why there even was the “Big Dummies Guide to the Internet“, thankfully made available online, put on various shovelware CD’s and saved thanks to cd.textfiles.com.

I couldn’t get MiRC to work.. I forget what other IRC programs would actually work with Twinsock. But I didn’t spend that much time on IRC.

Oh well, that is how the internet stood in that pre Windows 95, pre wide scale PPP world. It really was amazing how fast things changed.

A quick Neko x64 update!

Oh no!

Oh no!

For anyone who’s been using neko x64 on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and seeing something like the above, it turns out the fix was really easy and really simple. As mentioned by mikesword221, all you have to do is make it ‘always on top’.

Just right click on the cat in the task bar (he may be hiding, check under the up arrow…)

And make your settings something like this:

Configure Neko

Configure Neko

Then hit ok and Neko will now look normal, with no more ghosting.

Later on I’ll have to make an installer, and fix it so that neko is always on top.

Glorious Neko returned!

Glorious Neko returned!