All 100lb of it. It is HEAVY.
Anyways, long story short, after hauling it around Financial District, and Times Square, it’s now safe and installing Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server.
AlphaServer 800
It’s got a single 5/500 CPU, along with 256MB of ram, and 2x 36gig disks. I’ll have to check to see if I have any ram that’ll fit it. I may very well turn it into a public access thing too….. But we’ll see.
It seems that the ‘official’ updates for NT 4.0/Alpha on the Microsoft website are long gone… I know that Internet explorer 5.0 will be a part of that SUN vs Microsoft lawsuit which barred Microsoft from distributing any product containing the MS JVM… (like Office 97, IE5, J++ etc…)
However I found a stack of CD’s containing among other things the last updates that were provided for the DEC Alpha platform running NT 4.0.
For Windows NT 4.0 workstation & server users you’ll want Service pack 6a.
Terminal Server users will no doubt want Service pack 5. As far as I can tell, this was the last update to Terminal Server for Alpha users. Also there are MANY WTSALPHA.EXE’s out there, that are ALL corrupt… I was very lucky to have found this on a CD, and I can safely say that it runs perfectly fine on my Alpha.
Finally, on the Service pack 6a CD, there is a copy of Internet Explorer 5.0, and I’m pretty sure this was the last Alpha version of IE released. I’m sure its possible to run Firefox 1.5 or maybe even IE6 via !FX32, but native exe’s are so much the better. Internet Explorer 5.0 contains the standard accessories, namely outlook express, netmeeting, comic chat, and the media player…
I’ve been lucky enough to have a MSDN CD set from 1998, that included the MS Word, and Excel for the DEC Alpha… Back in 1997 when I used a DEC Multia, as a primary machine, I remember how ‘cool’ it was to run Office 97 through FX32, along with lotus notes to do work stuff… But I have to tell you, sure it’s 2010, but having a native version is way more cooler.
Also I have to say the C++ compiler for the DEC Alpha is the buggiest thing I’ve ever seen. The ‘hint’ should have been from the NT 3.5 SDK that builds all the Alpha stuff with the /Od flag turning off all optimizations. I had such a hard time with unzip it’s not even funny.
Luckily Visual C++ 6.0 for the Alpha is way more stable, even unzip will build with the /O2 flags. I can only wonder how much Microsoft went crazy fighting this compiler.. They seemed all to willing to give up on public releases of NT for the Alpha, but rumor is that the Itanium was so delayed for physical units, the 64bit version of Windows 2000 was started on the DEC Alphas… Then finally ‘tested’ with the Windows 2000 Data Center limited availability release…
For what it’s worth, here is the version strings of the compiler….
Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) Alpha C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 12.00.8217
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1998.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1998
Copyright (C) Compaq Computer Corporation 1998.
All rights reserved.
And the compiler that is on the NT 3.5 SDK…
Microsoft (R) & Digital (TM) AXP C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 8.03.JFa
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1994.
Copyright (C) Digital Equipment Corporation 1992-1994
All rights reserved.
It’s funny that there is almost *NO* mention of this 8.03.JFa version… But then I’m sure most people at the time, didn’t realize that the i386/MIPS compilers were on the 3.1 SDK, the Alpha on the 3.5 & the PowerPC on the 3.51… I never did figure out why they didn’t keep on providing these compilers…. But then MS works in mysterious ways at times.
Oh, and I finally benched quake on the console with a 32k video card.. It was just shy of 60FPS! Which for a 600Mhz machine circa 1996 is pretty dammed fast! The fastest intel cpu at the time would have been the 200Mhz Pentium PRO… I actually have one, and I’ll have to install NT 4.0 on that and do a comparison..
I forgot to mention this, but f2c built, although there is probably some error with the floating point… I’ve had issues building f2c on OSF/1 on Alphas a while ago….
Anyways it can be found here.
One day I’ll have to try to debug the floatlib on the Alpha to see why f2c freaks out….
But then again, who still uses DEC Alpha’s?
Ok, my friends say I’m insane to have bought this… but I couldn’t resist.
It’s a DEC Alpha 221164 machine, with 64MB of ram, and a 4GB disk!
It’s the best technology of 1996-1997!
So I’ve gone ahead and installed Windows NT 4.0 on the beast… at 600Mhz it’s pretty dammed fast… considering how old it is. Although I suspect a Pentium III I found in the garbage with a 1Ghz cpu is 2x faster…..
But at any rate, this is a DEC Alpha, the long time geek cpu of dreams etc…
What makes this slightly useful for me, is that I do have Visual C++ 4.0 & 6.0 for the Alpha. So at least I can build *SOME* stuff to run on the thing….
So I’ve been fighting the compiler, and it seems it’s default blended optimizations do *NOT* work on my machine.. I’m sure this will be fun down the road. However it seems setting the target cpu to the 21064 produces ok code.. I’ve got to bench the stuff, but at least my exe’s are not crashing.
So what have I manage to produce today so far?
Well…
unzip is a major one.. It’s hard to use a machine today without it.
The other thing I’ve manage to get running, is Quake! I’ve included my source & project trees as it was a feisty little thing to build..
I’m currently building & testing over terminal services so I don’t know what the speed is on the console… Also, this build does not include networking… I’m sure the winsock code will work just fine, I’m just not in a good position physically to test it, as Quake1 will *NOT NAT* correctly.. Also the SDL sound doesn’t actually output anything, so I’ve built it with the null sound driver..
I’d love to get that m68k->C build of frontier elite to go on the Alpha but I’m afraid my 64mb of ram will be a major constraint..
I know this isn’t much of an emulation thing, as the only emulator that possibly can run Windows NT for the Alpha costs upwards of $16,000 USD… It’s cheaper to score an alpha on ebay for $100 USD.
Well here is the screen shot…
Quake on the Dec Alpha
I know it’s not much to ‘look’ at, but the pallet is correct, because it’s a real Alpha!.. Unlike the MIPS thing.
This weekend has been kind of crappy as we had some cisco switches flake out, but nobody knew anything happened… I’d been pulled away on so many things over the last few years that monitoring them kind of fell by the waaaayside.
Well in this economic environment nobody is going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for some simple syslog/polling system that pages people. I needed one for free.
And years ago, I wrote a simple one that revolved around SQL Server 7/MSDE 1.0
Anyways I’ve made it as 2 CD images, and if you are bored, or in the need to poll devices with a basic TCP connect you can download it here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/simplemssqlnetw/
What may be useful for people is that I’ve put some impossible to find software on the prerequisite CD…
Namely:
NT 4.0 sp6a
MSDE 1.0
Option Pack (IIS4)
SQL 7 sp4
For some reason all the above stuff is getting dammed near impossible to find on Microsoft’s site. I guess it is end of the road for the NT 4.0 heyday. So at the least, this is my way to keep a location to download this software, as I’m sure someone will need it someday.
MSDE 1.0 for those who don’t know was a redistributable version of SQL Server 7.0 that had a 10 user limit, and a 2GB database size limit. Also there was no GUI management but it was great to use, because unlike SQL Express, it included the SQL Agent. The agent can run tasks at certain times, say like run a TSQL script that dumps a list of machines from a table into the hosts file, then tries to connect to each machine and record the state into a database…..
It was VERY useful stuff for the time.
There is no exciting screnshot, as I never did make an interface to the thing, instead I opted to configure everything through Access.
Other then that, I’ve been playing with a BackOffice 1.5 CD set I got on ebay… NT 3.51, MS Mail 3.5 & SQL 6.0!! It’s been so long, but MSSQL 6.0 was the first SQL server that I ever was payed to manage… It’s amazing how far we’ve come as an industry, and at the same point how things stay the same, although the installation of NT 3.51 is SO FAST!!!
Well I started this off hoping I could get Quake running on Windows NT 3.1 … I’m almost there I have the null version running just fine. However I’m not all that great with DIB programming so I was looking thru SDL and saw that it has a WINDIB driver!
So with a LOT of tweaking through SDL 1.2.13 I got it to compile with Visual C++ 1.0!! However it is lacking one critical call, the CreateDIBSection api call in GDI is not present in NT 3.1. So remembering all the MIPS stuff as of late, and that I have Visual C++ 4.0 which should easily support this call, I first got it running with Visual C++ 2.0 on the i386 (Under XP of all things). So it was just a matter of building the source, and making sure there is no errors, uploading it to the emulator, and rebuilding for the MIPS.
And after 30 minutes, I got my exe, and it ran!
Quake 1.06 on the MIPS/NT
I’ve included a link for any other MIPS people out there that want to play quake. I haven’t built the networking as I was having issues with my network earlier and couldn’t get it working…
The exe is available here.
And the source code with all the bits is right here.
In this build I’m not building SDL as a DLL or static library, but rather compiling Quake right into the source. Now that SDL is running on the MIPS, and possibly other Win32 OS’s (I have yet to test Win32s… I suspect the inherent threading in SDL will prevent it, but could the DBI calls be made directly stripping out SDL…?) but who knows, I think anything past 3.51 would work.
Ok, so I’ve been on this MIPS kick as of late.. Me & Antoni just split the cost of Visual C++ 4.0 for the MIPS… All being well it’ll arrive on Wednesday and we can do some more stuff. As I understand it, Visual C++ 4.0 was THE compiler for Windows 95 people at the time, and it will have all the controls & stuff that Visual C++ 2.0 simply does NOT have.
Anyways while I was playing with my virtual MIPS machine, I decided to try the MS-DOS emulation out.. I had heard that they had a pretty advanced emulator to run stuff. So I downloaded a new version of MSD, and was really surprised at the CPU that it was emulating… a 486! And this is on a MIPS machine, I had to wonder why they couldn’t have continued this for the x64 product…
486!
Anyways ok so it’s a 486, but can it play DOOM?
Much to my amazement, the answer is YES. Ok the pallet is all screwed up, and yes it is SLOW.. It reminds me of a 386, but it’s actually running!
Now I was interested, I opened up the ntvdm.exe in notepad to reveal it’s origin:
SoftPC-AT Version 3
(C)Copyright Insignia Solutions Inc. 1987-1992
@(#)sun4_a3cpu.c   1.2 5/24/91 Copyright Insignia Solutions Ltd.
Now what is really interested is this bit.. It only appears in the MIPS binary:
This version is subject to confidentiality provisions and should not be distributed. %s %s%s Copyright %s, an unpublished work by Insignia Solutions Inc.%s %s %s Copyright %s by Insignia Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.
Otherwise there is a LOT of mentions of D:\nt\private\mvdm\softpc.new I guess it’s about their build process since the DDK is nt\public.
Anyways I thought it was really interesting to see just how involved the NTVDM was on the RISC cpu’s. I think there is no doubt that the Connectix product was faster, and of course on Ghz+ machines its usable. Not to mention once Connectix made a native version of Virtual PC for Windows… It’s really not that surprising why Microsoft snatched the product up!
Somewhere around here I have SoftPC 3.0 for the Apple Macintosh… I wonder if it can load doom?
Well I’ve been looking for an IRC client for the MIPS and I’ve come up with nothing… And looking for source to much of anything win32 is LONG past something that will compile with Visual C++ 2.0 …
However I did find this simple library built by Andrew Cater: http://www.rohitab.com/discuss/index.php?showtopic=33056
So with very little understanding of how IRC actually works I was able to build a SUPER simple client. Please note that it’s so simple the / commands that you’ve come to love are not implemented…! You get one shot for your name/nick/server & channel.. But hey the exe is like 70kb for the MIPS/x64 and 35 for the i386.
sirc and roids MIPS in action
You can find it’s source & binaries right here.
Also Antoni Sawicki has given me a BUNCH of leads on old public source, and binaries, namely ROIDS the first real graphical game we seem to have now for the MIPS. The source was a part of a PDTools thing that Dec had put together, however a lot of it will build for both i386 & MIPS. I’ve extracted the source for roids here.
I don’t want to over promise but I’ll see if I can get quake to build some time in the next week.. I don’t know if I can get any graphics out of it, but it’d be fun for a server at least… Windows NT 4.0 sp1 should have DirectX 2.0 … The pinball game is quite playable (although the colors are all screwed up, due to a pallet glitch in the emulator) so we shall see.
Well a friend of mine pointed out some great archives of OLD Windows NT software.. Checking the list I noticed that there was a port of Nethack to Windows NT, namely Nethack 3.1.2 So using the nethack wiki I got the source code, and converted it to a zip file ( tar & gzip on SFU!)
The build was a little weird as it’s expecting the first compiler tools that shipped with the Win32 SDK “Final release†for Windows NT 3.1 While it may have been ‘easier’ to just install the old SDK, you can just copy cl.exe to mcl.exe & make a dummy ntdll.lib ….
Anyways with a little poking around I got it to build & run! It’s cool! Although to be honest I SUCK at nethack.
You can download it here. It’s lovingly hard coded to use c:\games\nethack … I’m sorry about that, as I’ve given up on having C/D/E drives like a ‘secure’ MIPS machine, and just have a giant (haha!) 2GB system partition.
nethack MIPS
It’s also worth noting that it’s easier to try to build stuff on a ‘native’ machine running MSVC 2.0/2.1 then copy the stuff over the the MIPS simulator as it is SLOW. But then that is to be expected.. It’s too bad the Qemu MIPS simulator cannot idle… as it runs one of my cores @ 100%.
WindowsNT 4.0 MIPS
Personally I’ve never used any MIPS workstations with Windows NT, I’ve been lucky to have used the PowerPC build for IIS (it was cool in that intel hacks wouldn’t work.. It’s too bad it didn’t live long from Microsoft’s end) and of course SQL server on the Dec Alpha. I also used a Dec Alpha as a workstation (the multia!) at the time I recall it was cool as it could decode MP3’s in realtime! Sadly my multia died the day Microsoft killed the port.
Anyways while I was searching around hoping the qemu forum had come alive (it is!) I came across this post:
Hello,
I wanted to let you know that I succeeded to run MS Windows NT/MIPS in the Qemu emulator.
As far as I know, Qemu is the first emulator to be able to run Windows NT non i386/x64.
Some screenshots:
http://hpoussineau.free.fr/qemu/arc20081202-nt350-4.png
http://hpoussineau.free.fr/qemu/arc20090315_nt4.png
Code needs to be cleaned up and will be contributed upstream.
Hervé
What is this? Well click the links! It is what it sounds like, Hervé got Windows NT running on the MIPS emulation for Qemu!!
I’ve tested a 3.51 workstation CD to no avail… It hangs checking the hard disk. I also have a 3.1 CD with the win32 sdk & it doesn’t work either. However 4.0 works fine! I should also add, this gave me a chance to install Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 for the MIPS, and to try SQL 4.21 for the MIPS out.
One of the first thing you’ll find out, is that the Dec Alpha was popular non intel machine to run because of FX!32. This program from Dec, allowed for dynamic translation of 32bit binaries on the Alpha. So that you could run Office 97 for the i386 on the Alpha. And on the 2nd run it was effectively a native copy as it had been translated at that point. Nothing like this existed for the MIPS. Thus native applications are RARE if any. Another thing contributing to the lack of MIPS stuff, is that right after sp1 for Windows NT 4.0 came out, a week later all support for the MIPS ended. Thus there is no internet explorer 3, and any of those resulting projects… Which is really sad. I *think* there may still be some copies floating out there for the PowerPC, but it was killed around the time of service pack 3.
Anyways if you want to run this, I did find thru a little digging around the win32 exe is available on Hervé’s site.
Download both of these files:
And go ahead and unzip them. In the setup.zip you will have found a file called NTPROM.RAW, rename it mipsel_bios.bin .
Now we are ready to go!
Create a 2GB disk like this:
qemu-img create –f qcow2 nt4.disk 2G
Then run the emulator
qemu-system-mips64el.exe -hda nt4.disk -M magnum -L . -net nic -net user-cdrom winnt40wks_sp1_en.iso
Your system will initialize and just run thru the quick setup… Keep the display at 800×600 as the mouse will actually work at that resolution! Also set the date to the correct date, and ensure the MAC address for your Ethernet is not all zeros. You can make up any address you want.
Then to install NT you have to run 2 programs…
cd:\mips\arcinst
This will install a system partition, and setup the ARC bootloader. A 5MB partition is all you need, it’ll format it, and just exit arcinst.
cd:\mips\setupldr
This will kick off the install. It will look & act like every other copy of Windows NT 4.0 that you have installed. Keep in mind that you will create a ‘d’ partition, and install in there. I’d recommend you skip the exhaustive disk scan as that seems to always screw up for me. The install is pretty straight forward, I’d recommend you select an easy password, and you will probably want to setup an automatic logon.
From there you are on your own. I’ve seen Exchange 4.0 available for the MIPS, and some old versions of SQL Server, SNA Server out there. I’ve never seen Microsoft Word for NT & Microsoft Excel for NT. They were 32bit versions released prior to Office 95, and I *THINK* they had i386/mips/powerpc/alpha versions.. But I’m really not that sure. I think internet explorer 2.0 is the ONLY web browser for the MIPS and no, Windows CE MIPS stuff will NOT run on the MIPS NT. So don’t be all that disappointed as this isn’t too useful, but it may be interesting to see what all those MIPS directories were all about!
