Previous 1.4 features NeXTdimension emulation!

NeXTdimention!

NeXTdimention!

It’s really cool!  And as an added bonus, it can now run in ‘Variable’ speed, meaning as fast as your machine can emulate the 68040.

OS X version here, and Windows version here.  For me, at least a bunch of DLL’s are missing, so I put together a quick package containing the Windows version with all of the missing DLLs here.

From the announcement:

Hello all,

I am happy to annouce the release of Previous v1.4! Simon did lots of work on emulating the NeXTdimension and he considerably improved timings and efficiency of Previous. Furthermore there is now a mode to accelerate the emulation beyond the performance of real systems. Other improvements and bugfixes are listed in the readme.

Emulating the NeXTdimension board was something i thought would not be feasible. But thanks to the i860 emulator from Jason Eckhardt and the work of Simon, who improved and completed parts of it, it finally came true. I hope you enjoy it!

Previous 0.52 (trunk 391) + slirp

So I got this request to add in some SLiRP to Previous, the NeXT computer emulator.  Sadly work got in the way, and I trashed my windows dev machine.  To make it worse I also trashed my MacBook Air, but with a bit of screwing around I got X-code removed, and re-installed.

So Here is my wonderful work, some 50 lines of code + the SLiRP from Cockatrice all hacked up.

ICMP to 10.0.2.2 seems to work fine, UDP seems to not work, so no DNS.  I don’t know why either.  I can telnet to my BBS just fine, which is about all the testing I’ve done.

Previous to the BBS

Previous to the BBS

Inbound TCP seems to be broken too, but I could be initializing slirp_redirect incorrectly too.

In case you want to follow up on this the NeXT computer forums is the place to be.  Networking with NeXTSTEP is involved.

And for anyone who want’s my files, the source is here, and an OS X 10.10.3 binary is here.  Be sure to install the SDL2 framework ahead of time!

I just played with NeXTSTEP 0.8

NeXTSTEP 0.8

NeXTSTEP 0.8

And I have to say, it’s pretty impressive!  Previous flies on my system, having owned a cube, I can say that the 68030 on this is WAY faster.  And I’ve always read about 0.8, and kind of figured it was basically lost to the winds of time.  It’s really cool to see it boot up!  And the emulated disks are so much faster than the magnetic optical drives of the day.

It’s amazing to think that in 1988, the current world of iThings had just started.

Previous boots NeXTSTEP!

So first we got AMIX, then A/UX now NeXTSTEP!

x

(I lost the original image, so here is OPENSTEP on 0.4)

 

NeXTSTEP 3.2 in single user mode

You have to grab the source from sourceforge, and build it yourself.  I haven’t attempted it yet, but wow!  Apparently the latest snap is capable of running 0.9 – OpenSTEP 4.0!