The new dynamic recompiler appears to be much more faster, although if you want maximum performance, make sure to set your video card to the fastest possible performance.
I was doing my typical DooM thing, and the performance was abysmal. But I did have an 8bit VGA card selected, so what would I really expect? Interestingly enough in ‘low resolution’ mode it performed quite well, but setting it to the artificial ‘fastest PCI/VLB’ speed it was performing just great.
New machines added – Zenith Data SupersPort, Bull Micral 45, Tulip AT Compact, Amstrad PPC512/640, Packard Bell PB410A, ASUS P/I-P55TVP4, ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, Epox P55-VA, FIC VA-503+
New graphics cards added – Image Manager 1024, Sigma Designs Color 400, Trigem Korean VGA
Added emulation of AMD K6 family and IDT Winchip 2
New CPU recompiler. This provides several optimisations, and the new design allows for greater portability and more scope for optimisation in the future
Experimental ARM and ARM64 host support
Read-only cassette emulation for IBM PC and PCjr
Numerous bug fixes
Thanks to dns2kv2, Greatpsycho, Greg V, John Elliott, Koutakun, leilei, Martin_Riarte, rene, Tale and Tux for contributions towards this release.
I ran across this, and thought it was cool. These CD’s are getting harder and harder to find, and unless you want the old physical disks, getting ISO images is, of course the next best thing.
Granted these disks replaced the much older Microsoft Programmer’s Library. The new CD’s use a Windows based search & interface program removing the clunky old MS-DOS program that made it feel like trying to view the world through a straw. (Although the up side of the MS-DOS version is that you could easily dump the video RAM and save the contents to plain text).
And in this brave new post Windows 3.0 centric world of Microsoft just about everything regarding OS/2 was dumped, and the seeding of Win32 via Windows NT had started.
Naturally after winning this war, Microsoft withdrew many low end products and just couldn’t compete with the tidalwave that was GNU/Linux.
At any rate for the curious kids down the road that want to see what all the fuss was with Win16, and how Windows 3.0 had changed the landscape removing the force of IBM it’s worth a look.
I was just alerted to this playthrough of Quake 2 for MS-DOS by TheSlipGateUser which showcases the game play under DOSBox.
Honestly I’m terrible at Quake, QuakeWorld and Quake 2, but it’s great to see someone who knows that they are doing, and more so that under emulation the game is holding up.
I know the MS-DOS port isn’t exactly the most popular in the world, although I suspect if it had been a thing in 1997 there would have been an audience with people that didn’t want to have Windows in the background as a distraction.
That said, any new people will of course want to check out the excellent (if I do say so myself!) series “Porting Quake II to MS-DOS“.
I found this online a while ago, although it’s taken about half a year to pick it up, but here we are.
What is kind of cool about this, is that being from 1991 this is not for Windows, that this reference library instead targets MS-DOS using the MSL/Microsoft Library from the Programmer’s Library. So the same advantage holds true, that the content can be scraped from the text mode video RAM.
Factbook: Hong Kong
So yeah, back in the day this was some really amazing stuff, the ability to search a few books in some incredibly fast and convenient, although as always lacking super depth.
Back then online services were crazy expensive, charging by the minute, and of course just like the stock MS-DOS client preventing you from being able to easily copy the text. Outside of anything beyond gradeschool I couldn’t imagine the ‘encyclopedia’ being of all that much worth but the dictionary/thesaurus & quotations is okay enough, although in 2018 it really is showing it’s age.
Having your own private reference back then was a big deal, something like this would have been more apt in a library, but you’d have to wait in line, no doubt as the ability to look up stuff just by typing would have been great. While using this online would have cost quite a bit quickly justifying the cost of a CD-ROM drive along with the program.
The common carrier and lower costs of delivering content over the internet has really made something like this an oddity of time, but for anyone that needs to work 100% offline, these are a real gem.
Another great use of extracting the books from the CD-ROM, is that you can take, say the “American Heritage Dictionary“, a 30MB file, and compress it with 7zip, yielding a file just under 4MB, or an 87%, or a 7.76:1 compression ratio. So unlike other ‘dictionary’ test compression sets, this is using an actual dictionary.
For anyone wanting to take a dive, I put it on archive.org
This repo contains the original source-code and compiled binaries for MS-DOS 1.25 and MS-DOS 2.0.
These are the same files originally shared at the Computer History Museum on March 25th 2014 and are being (re)published in this repo to make them easier to find, reference-to in external writing and works, and to allow exploration and experimentation for those interested in early PC Operating Systems.
License
All files within this repo are released under the MIT (OSI) License as per the LICENSE file stored in the root of this repo.
At first I just thought it was simply just another mirror of the original source that had been released that had some incredible restrictions.
Original license: To access this material, you must agree to the terms of the license displayed here, which permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web.
However the restrictions have been lifted, and MS-DOS 1.25 & 2.0 are now available under a MIT license.
I picked this 20 disc set recently and ugh the cringe is just… insane. And yes, that is Bill Nye…
STUDS from Microsoft . (Video in MPEG-1/Audio MPEG-2 care of JSMpeg).
I had this ages ago, although I couldn't remember if the NT 3.5 SDK/DDK had shown up at this point, but it's only the Japanese version in this set. Since I'm having such a PITA in tracking down a 3.5 set, and I'm not sitting on this, I may as well archive it.
Yes, I had to rip 20 of these!
So you too can find the early Video for Windows, and all kinds of other things from the mid '90's on archive.org.
Or Wallpapers like this 'puppy' from the Japanese version of Windows 3.1
I stumbled onto these three disks, seemingly out of place in history. Windows/386 version 2.0 is a strange one in that it shipped to OEM’s in late 1987, making it & Xenix part of the initial 386 wave of Operating Systems/Environments and beating out not only the OS/2 launch in 1988, but taking advantage of the 80386’s v86 mode, something that OS/2 wouldn’t be able to do in a shipping product until 1992.Â
This version itself appears to be a retail version of Windows/386 lacking any clear OEM identification that was so prevalent for the era. Indeed setting it up it offers a few interesting platforms:
Getting this to run was a little bit of a challenge as much as I prefer Qemu, these older 2.0x versions of Windows/386 have a BIOS/disk incompatibility with the hypervisor resulting in errors reading the hard disk. Although PCem/86Box have no such issues. I think it’ll run off floppy/CD-ROM/Network without any issue though.
Windows/386 v2.03
Once installed it reveals itself to be version 2.03 of all things. While I was hoping for some kind of retail version of 2.00/2.01 this appears as close as it may get as it has more in common with the PCjs version of 2.01 (which you can try live on his site!)
The PCjs version of 2.03 has 138 setup files (not counting the PIFs), compared to the eBay’s 141, while the PCjs 2.01 has 59 files.
That said, well it’s Windows/386 mostly from 1987 with slightly updated EGA/CGA VMM drivers from early 1988 that just didn’t quite make the cut. To me what is confusing, is that it identifies as 2.03 while it’s closer to 2.01 in file count and functionality, unlike 2.03 it really ought to have been a 2.02, if there even was such a thing.
Windows/386 2.03 in CGA
Otherwise it’s really not all that interesting short of the timestamp. It’ll run on CGA/EGA *IF* you have the proper adapter in place, although VGA is compatible, the environment will detect that it’s not actually the proper card and refuse to run. I tried to put in the 2.01 CGA/EGA drivers, but that resulted in an OS version mismatch (I didn’t check if 2.01 was locked to the Compaq OEM of MS-DOS)
No mixing drivers!
I installed the infamous pair Word & Excel. Despite Word 1.1a demanding at least Windows 2.11, it appears to run okay. Excel 2.1d loaded without complaining. There isn’t very much convential memory for either, but they both can use expanded memory, which the hypervisor can create and share out without any emm386 or any equivalent driver. I can only imagine the incompatibles of trying to balance these drivers at the time, and how much the coming DPMI specification was needed.
Memory trouble in Windows 2.x
 And as the old saying goes the three top problems in Windows version 2 is memory, memory and memory. Trying to run anything graphical will exhaust convential ram, forcing you to single task anything graphical which kind of defeats the whole point of Windows. You go from this:
BattleTech CGA in a Window
To this:
Windows is out of memory!
Oh well it’s 1987, and users were kind of used to being disappointed as such. It’s really no wonder why Windows 3.0 became the smash it it was.
And of course you can't talk about Windows/386 without this gem. (Video in MPEG-1/Audio MPEG-2 care of JSMpeg).
The source code is, naturally, in the process of being ported to Linux, and the makefiles reflect this. I used my MinGW to DJGPP cross compiler toolchain that is close to era specific.
I had a single issue with the code, d_copy.s the following line was giving me trouble:
movl $2,%al
changing it to the following however, let my version of GAS happily assemble it.
movb $2,%al
After a while of messing with the Makefile, and adding in the DOS components, it was easy enough to get an executable. And even better it’ll run with the data/music from the demo disc!
I used Daemon tools to mount the MDS/MDF image, and just pointed DOSBox to the CD drive letter with a simple:
mount d: f:\ -t cdrom
And now when I fired up Quake, it’ll play the music tracks from the CD.
Quake 101 on DOSBox
One thing that caught my interest was that when you exit the game, I get the “couldn’t load endscreen.” message.
Well it turns out that someone was naughty and had modified common.c on January 20th 1997, and made the following addition:
if (h == -1)
{
Con_Printf ("Playing shareware version.\n");
// if (com_modified)
// Sys_Error ("You must have the registered version to use modified games");
// /*return;*/
}
So yeah, since they had double commented out that return statement, it’ll fall out the logic, and set the game to registered, which is why the endscreen message is missing. Uncommenting them all will restore the default execution behavior. Speaking of registered, on the CD there is a file QUAKE.MJ3, which is 25MB, which looks like an encrypted version of the registered game. I guess it’d be ‘neat’ to have version 1.01, although the Steam version I have is 1.06 and I don’t know how much difference it’d really make.  Although I guess 22 years later it doesn’t matter much.
On the one hand I’m really impressed that it works. For anyone who is slightly interested I guess, you can find my re-build of the source here:
So as promised, a while back I had built a GCC 2.7.2.3 / Binutils 2.8.1 cross compiler toolchain suitable for building old Allegro based programs, such as MAME. Of course the #1 reason why I’d want such a thing is that being able to do native builds on modern machines means that things compile in seconds, rather than an hour + compiling inside of DOSBox.
Why not use a more up to date version of both GCC/Binutils? Well the problem is that the pre EGCS tools ended up with macro and inline assembly directives that were dumped along the way so that later versions simply will not assemble any of the later video code in Allegro, and a lot of the C needs updating too. And it was easier to just get the older tool chain working.
It took a bit of messing around building certain portions inside of each step of the tools, but after a while I had a satisfactory chain capable of building what I had needed.
Lib Allegro is already pre-built in my cross compiler tool chain, all that I needed to add was SEAL, with only one change, 1.0.7 is expecting an EGCS compiler, which this is not, so the -mpentium flag won’t work, however -m486 will work fine.
Otherwise, in MAME all I did was alter some include paths to pickup both Allegro and SEAL, and in no time I had an executable. And the best part is checking via DOSBox, it runs, with sound!
MAME 0.1 on DOSBox PACMAN hiding
Thankfully MAME has been really good about preserving prior releases, along with their source tree, and it’s pretty cool to be able to rebuild this using the era correct vintage tools, and I can’t stress how much more tolerable it is to build on faster equipment.
While cruising around at doomworld.com looking for something else, I saw this thread: ‘Recovered’ DOSDoom 0.2.
So I quickly built it with my MinGW32-DJGPP using GCC 3.4.5. And this version needs the Allegro library as it has sound effects audio! Although building Allegro needed GCC 2.7.2.1 and Binutils 2.8.1. Using other versions just led to nothing but trouble. I ended up just installing DJGPP on DOSBox to build Allegro which took … a whlie to build. Although being able to cross compile dosdoom from Windows was far far far quicker.
So yeah, it runs. With sound. It’s great. Allegro integration isn’t anywhere as near complete at this point it’s just the sound files. I took a much later version of dosdoom’s MIDI code, which required the Allegro timer, which interfered with my older timer IRQ hook. Converting the whole thing to use the Allegro timer, and keyboard wasn’t too difficult, and that gives my DooM source fork a really full feeling when using DJGPP v2.
Although I’m having issues uploading from China at the moment.
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