While it’s been … quite some time, I used to use an early beta of VMware 1.0 back in the day early 00’s I believe for Linux, where I could run Lotus notes and some other apps that just of course were not available for Linux. And it was neat but a bit pricey. And as I’d tout the benefits of having desktop virtual computers, getting rid of the need of having a stack of random junk PCs from your desk.
The retail box of Virtual PC for Windows
Connectix was trying new things, and yeah, the Mac was a dying platform, and bringing their tech to the PC was a winning move that would have lasting ramifications for the industry for decades. Well that and getting bought out by Microsoft.
Virtual PC for the PC, was another great, but short-lived solution for those few of us that got the ‘pc virtualization’ bug early on, before the tidal wave of bare metal hypervisors, and the serious business it’d create.
For me, it was the ability to use server class hardware with multiple PSU’s lots of RAM, redundant disks as firewalls that I could easily setup with multiple network cards, and instances allowing full isolation, and hide the mess of wires with something that looked pretty elegant.
Booting PC-DOS 7.01
I’d recently come across a copy of Virtual PC 4.0 for Windows, the system requirements are pretty log, Windows ME (98 is reported to work), NT 4.0 & Windows 2000. As a bonus it includes PC DOS 7.01. Just like the Mac minimal versions.
Running VPC on NT under Qemu is dooable, even under OS X, although you’ll want sound, of course which is a bit tricky now.
Although this is a bit involved, I have issues with the later QEMU’s sound blaster emulation and found it best to specify IRQ 7, which means removing the parallel port (who prints anyways?!). I also used the vbempj driver for that full colour experence.
Return to Zork
Although games like Links386, Return to Zork, DooM should have had retail Windows versions IMHO, but I know that getting 32bit games up and running on Windows 3.1 had so many dependancies and hardware requirements that made it quite the ordeal (as mentioned when running DooM on Windows 3.1)
For a long while your options for playing ‘old’ circa mid 90’s MS-DOS games was going all in on NT4/2000/XP with a fast machine and VirtualPC (there was a time when DOSBox wasn’t a thing) or the NTVDM emulated sound blaster driver. At least XP 32bit had one built in (and hidden sadly). But as machines pulled away from ISA and got faster, dual booting to MS-DOS for games with sound became a thing of the past, very quickly.
As shown above, of course I had to run DooM. even on the glorious 16 colour display, but yeah. And yeah it’s great!
I should add, that also for a long while this was my preferred way to play DOS games like DooM, or a multitude of things, also like running OS/2, this was my go-to way to get things done. You can check in the history that I was also a super big fan of Virtual PC 2004 on XP. It’s kind of crazy that Virtual PC for Windows is some 24 years ago now!
I had to limit the CPU to pentium level for the installation, then Virtual PC requires a Pentium II or higher. But luckily that’s a simple switch for Qemu.
So, while on this path, I thought it’d be fun to try the next evolution, Virtual Server 2005 on Windows Server 2003. Because I love old stuff, I ran Qemu 0.15.1 because yeah it’s so ancient. bonus!
The good news is that Windows Server installed okay, and so did Virtual Server. However running was a different story:
Changing the CPU flag to any combination got the same result that a Pentium II or greater is required. Bummer.
I have a copy of VMWare Workstation handy, and thought I could just mount the VMDK, and good to go. No. Nooooo. Or at least I failed. Use the install template for 2003, and just deal with it. I know. dissapoint.
However, the best part is that it runs fine on VMware. Although it is SLOW. so slow. I updated the VM to 4 core, single processor, 512Mb of ram, and installed Service Pack 1 for the 2003 server. It helped a bit too!
The big fun of Virtual Server is of course being able to manage it remotely, although the remote console is an ActiveX control, so you need to enable IE mode on Edge. It’s under settings and ‘compatibility’ , turn on the 11 mode, and add the admin site and blamo good to go!
And yeah!
You can kinda use the server remotely from a modern machine. Many menu options don’t render correctly, and I had to copy/paste some of the URL’s directly. I think I had this issue with FireFox 20 years ago, although I don’t feel like digging that far deep. It may have been chrome too, but does it matter? I need that ActiveX hook.
With the control loaded, and DooM set to low resolution and drop the render window and..
Well yeah, it’s almost okay.
I’ll have to dig out a P4 and try it native, as emulation in emulation is of course a finicky thing. But I’m all too happy to run this on my laptop without getting my hands dirty dealing with old hardware.
Kind of what got me into this in the first place, running it all, virtually.
(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)
It appears that up until just now we did not have archived copy of MS Word 6.0 for PPC. There were copies floating for Alpha and MIPS, for example https://archive.org/details/ms-word60-nt. However PPC version was nowhere to be found…
Until Term24 pointed me to this eBay auction:
Since it clearly said PowerPC on the box I got it… and here it is:
MS Word 6.0 on Windows NT 4.0 PowerPC / PPC
Now thanks to Rairii you can enjoy it on a PowerMac or WII!
Granted this isn’t fun. But it’s virtual. We live in an era of exciting expandable disks!
first off start with a full disk. That’s great. In this case the host was proxmox. It doesn’t matter. You apparently have to shut down the VM to expand the disk. Other virtualizers don’t need that. But whatever.
now for the predictable fun. That recovery partition is in the way. Not sure why NTFS needs to be contiguous but here we are.
So now we are stuck. You Google how to expand NTFS drive, how to move recovery partition, how to make disk bigger!! All in vain as everyone is pushing these nifty partition mover programs that don’t run on server. Do you just nuke the partition and hope for the best?
No, we can back it up, delete it, expand our disk and recreate it!
Capture the partition
Dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:C:\my-system-partition.wim /CaptureDir:S:\ /Name:"My system partition"
Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.19041.3636
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: KOMPUTER
DISKPART> list disk
Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
-------- ------------- ------- ------- --- ---
Disk 0 Online 250 GB 200 GB
DISKPART> select disk 0
Disk 0 is now the selected disk.
DISKPART> list partition
Partition ### Type Size Offset
------------- ---------------- ------- -------
Partition 1 Primary 50 MB 1024 KB
Partition 2 Primary 49 GB 51 MB
Partition 3 Recovery 522 MB 49 GB
DISKPART> select partition 3
Partition 3 is now the selected partition.
DISKPART> delete partition OVERRIDE
DiskPart successfully deleted the selected partition.
While doom scrolling on eBay I always seem to stop and look at the upgrade version of Windows 3.1. It has to be the most clearly marked “why bother upgrading” version of Windows, and at the same time the ugliest. Fitting for the season’s ugly sweater theme!
The ugliest Windows ever
It’s amazing how terrible this thing has always looked to me. As far as ‘proof’ I remember being able to fake it out by doing a ‘copy con win.com ^Z’ type thing to create a fake windows directory with win.com & kernel286.exe … I think. But back when this was a NEW! product, I had to install Windows 3.0 anyways to get the CGA driver.
Windows 3.1 in CGA
I don’t know how I used Windows with CGA either.
Speaking of impossible, back in the dark ages of Windows/286 2.1 this thing snuck out:
Microsoft Windows/286 – Italian
One day I’d love to get this Italian Windows 2.1 and frame it? I don’t know who snuck in the Buone Fest onto the box art, but I’d like to think it was subversive, as I hadn’t seen anything like that on any of the other retail Operating System packaging?
It’s been a real struggle this year from the relocation, losing just about everything that I’d tried to do, then losing my job, that brief absolute terror of being unemployed with zero callbacks trying to job hunt to now spending nearly every waking hour at work.
Alcatel – Lucent saves the day
Speaking of stress, I haven’t had to build a physical network in ages, and this was news to me that all the SFP connectors are now vendor locked. Thinking I could just buy some cheap SFP DAC cables and plug away and I was greeted with the fact that neither the Dell, nor Cisco switches would recognize them. Oddly enough, Linux/Windows didn’t care at all. I had ordered some RJ45 10 gig SFPs to run across the data centre, and found out as well that I’d ordered Cisco keyed generic ones, and yes of course they don’t work in the Fortigate firewalls, nor the Dell switches. Those needed their own special ones. Luckily for me I had been pulling out all the old SFPs from decommissioned equipment as I had figured that the single mode fiber optics may be useful if I ever need anything, and there was a couple of these Alcatel-Lucent SFP-GIG-T (1gig) modules that at least saved the day in that I could connect stuff, while waiting for the trial and error of needing 2 weeks to get the appropriate 10 gig interfaces.
Also with mentioning is that Dell switches configure in cluster groups and the 25 gig clusters have to be configured down to 10gig mode to recognize and work with 10/1gig modules.
port-group 1/1/5
mode Eth 25g-4x
!
port-group 1/1/6
mode Eth 10g-4x
For example.
Speaking of, setting up a LACP bundle on the Dell switch was a snap! Just remember your port-groups!
interface ethernet1/1/1
description "WIN-HVN-100 port 0"
no shutdown
channel-group 1 mode active
no switchport
flowcontrol receive off
There isn’t all that much to do in the individual ethernet ports, but you get the idea. Since I’m short on cables, I’ve only got the first two ports populated, but I’m aiming for 4×25 per server!
I did find that by explicitly allowing the VLANs onto the port helped a lot. And by default, the switches do LACP so there isn’t all that much to do.
And checking the LACP status is a snap as well:
hyperv-lan-core-01# show interface port-channel 1 summary
LAG Mode Status Uptime Ports
1 L2-HYBRID up 1 day 21:45:26 Eth 1/1/1 (Up)
Eth 1/1/2 (Up)
Eth 1/1/3 (Down)
Eth 1/1/4 (Down)
Needless to say, I was happy as ‘it just worked’!
AMD Epyc 9454 48-Core Processor
Speaking of which, I deployed Hyper-V 2019 Server. Shame VMware had to go get Broadcomm’ed as there won’t be any more free Hyper-V servers, but for now it’s fine.
I had meant to write more on setting up Hyper-V as doing it through PowerShell is a bit daunting at first.
First setup your load balancing network team. In this case I’m using a 4 port 25gig card:
New-NetlbfoTeam -Name "Converged Network Team" -TeamMembers "Integrated NIC 1 Port 1-1","Integrated NIC 1 Port 2-1","Integrated NIC 1 Port 3-1","Integrated NIC 1 Port 4-1" -TeamingMode lacp
The port names are 100% system dependent, but you can get the idea. And setting the LACP was surprisingly easy.
I just load everything onto the same switch as I’m old, and trust my VLANs. And the servers are 1u so they don’t exactly have a lot of NIC’s for splitting stuff out but as always do what works for you.
The next step is to add the virtual network card onto my management VLAN in this case it’s 75
From there you can now use the ‘sconfig’ and setup your management IP address, load up Windows patches, load more drivers, and manage the server using the remote RSAT tools. Be sure to enable the remote desktop, unless you really love to type.
I went ahead and installed these services to get my servers onto an existing Hyper-V cluster. I’m sure some can be removed, but YMMV as always:
And of course, don’t forget your shared storage, in this case my servers have that 4x25gig card, and a smaller custom 2×25 gig card that I used to storage A/B. Fun times!
From there I could use sconfig to join my machines to the domain, and then finally add them into the cluster, and start moving my workload over to the new servers, which is what I’ll be doing throughout the Christmas break.
Speaking of work:
A very Christmas Vacation like tree
They ordered this very Clark Griswald like Christmas tree. They had to cut it down to get the base to fit the lobby area with it reaching into the 2nd floor. It’d been so long since I’d seen something like this at work. But thats me working remotely for nearly 20 years.
Something awe inspiring about it.
real life Snoopy
Which reminds me of this Snoopy I saw on twitter. As terrible as life feels from time to time, there is a bit of hope, and fun here and there as my muse is always quick to point out when I’m feeling down.
And sometimes it’s better to just get it out, as who knows, maybe this could be useful in the future somehow.
Thanks for everyone’s ongoing support over on Patron and here. It really means the world to me.
After seeing the spotlight on twitter from WinWorld, on NetManage Chameleon, an old TCP/IP stack that supported Windows 3.0! With more details over on the forum. I was inspired to set it up myself.
I did go a bit overboard showing how to install MS-DOS & Windows 3.0 on Qemu. Maybe it’ll help someone who wants to try to use Qemu, but is too scared? Maybe I moved too quickly.
One thing I did do differently in this run, is launching the monitor and a serial port as tcp servers so I could telnet into the VM, effectively having a way to share text like a clipboard back and forth. I’m kind of surprised I hadn’t really started using Qemu in this manner much earlier.
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we were denied that, enter Hiroshi Oota with BSD on Windows.
It was a late night browsing yahoo auctions Japan as one does, laughing at the absurd Famicom/Super Famicom games, and I went ahead and looked for BSD CD-ROMS, where I first came across BSD on Windows. And then I’d forgotten about it and went to work on some Darwin projects.
Fast forward 3 weeks, and vic485 had bought it, had it shipped, and uploaded on archive.org. So a big super thanks to vic485 for making this all possible!
So what is it? It’s not quite BSD, its a bunch of 16bit DLL’s that broke the kernel down into subsystems, that each rely on winmem32.dll to give access to flat/32bit address space. BSD on Windows (BOW) being a hybrid 16/32bit app is originally for Windows 3.1, with the later 1.5 update for Windows 95, which includes support for long filenames. I’m not sure if it’ll run on Windows NT or OS/2, as I don’t think
So what do you get?
The key media contents are the install floppy and the CD-ROM. Yes the setup program IS only on the floppy. Hope you get that disk image. I’m unsure what the manual is like, other than of course it is in Japanese.
compiling
It’s very much a single user mode BSD like environment complete with vi/gcc/csh/perl just to name a few. I’ve been able to test job control, and building some simple programs like Hack 1.03. I found a few issues however.
I haven’t tested enough with FreeBSD 1/2 but I can verify that from my ‘Ancient Linux on Windows‘ packages, the object format is the same, which is that early era when everything was a.out, although all different the reliance on GNU GAS & LD did make the object format the same. And it was nice to compile a hello world from my Linux cross compiler, link it on BOW, and get a running executable.
The memory is weird, in that you can add hundreds of megabytes to Windows and BOW will always run exhausted. In the bow.ini file you can set the heap for each program, and I found out from some silly trial and error that the maximum heap you can effectively give is 13 megabytes. It seems that winmem32 has a single chunk of memory where all processes run out of, hence the sub 16mb ram zone. Maybe there is a way to allocate it, but I’m unsure, maybe it’s in the book. CC1 was frequently having issues, so setting it’s heap to 13M sure helped, the linker ‘ld’ of course was running out of memory as well so setting it to 8M got me linking.
Filenames, especially on Windows 3.1 are a huge problem. All the LFN TSR’s I tried to load just resulted in a full crash. I had to point the linker to the CD-ROM live filesystem, which maybe would be tedious on a real machine, but under emulation it’s fine.
BOW does NOT like Qemu. At all. It won’t under otvdm either. I suspect NT is a no go but I haven’t tried. Oddly enough it’s not a timing issue, as it does run under VMware. There is an advantage to running it under Windows 95, is that it supports long filenames. 86Box works as well, I even was using the Pentium II Xeon at 400Mhz and that ran fine.
Probably the most annoying and silly thing is that the GCC C compiler doesn’t have C++ style comments turned on. Not being able to use ‘//’ is quite annoying.
Hack 1.03 running on my PS/2 model 80
Hack ran fine on my 386, which was a pleasant surprise!. It was really cool to have Word+Excel and Hack running at the same time.
Had I known about this, it would have been an incredible bridge product. Not to mention cross compiling to even Win32, or Linux. Not to mention at the time being able to run BSD with no real pain, just install and go
simple IRC test
There is generic TCP/IP Winsock support in BOW 1.5 as it simply calls winsock. This also includes the ability to run daemons, however limitations in BOW are quickly exposed, such as missing setuid/setgid sno there is no ability to impersonate lower privileged users. MMAP stuff also doesn’t seem to work, although I was able to build a super simple port of Apache 1.3.1 to BSD on Windows (BOW).
While BOW may appear to be very BSD like, there is a lack of a the mmap Apache needs, along with user mapping & impersonation. I ended up using the EMX – OS/2 system code, since it’s very POSIX like without relying on the Unix like OS actually working.
I’ve been able to serve pages to myself, however BOW crashing out many emulators and hypervisors kind of stops me from putting it on the internet. BOW enthusiasts can download it from archive.org
Today, there is really no point to BOW, it’s an interesting oddity, but back in the day, for a jr network administrator being able to run the Unix version of the snmp tools, even if it’s only client side would have been great. If tftpd could be built to run this would have been beyond amazing, as you not only get BSD, but full Windows apps at the same time, much like MachTen.
It’s a shame I never knew this was a thing, I certainly would have been evangelizing BOW! Who knows what other treasures are in the parallel societies of Japan/Asia/Europe?
Back in the olden days of when Microsoft had pivoted out of OS/2 in a hurry, I’ve always felt that the common ‘OMF’ objects ought to link for OS/2. But for some reason I never tried. But for some reason I thought I’d try it today.
I first installed Microsoft C 6.0, and set it up for a native OS/2 to OS/2 1.2 setup. This way I get a pure OS/2 include/library directory set. In retrospect, I don’t know why I didn’t just use 2 include / library directory sets to far easier target stuff, without dealing with changing the default names, and making linking an all around living hell.
So the first thing to do is to tell QuickC for Windows to default to the OS/2 include directory (turns out it wont link anyways). Compiling is nothing special. When setting up the project you’ll need a DEF file, I use this simple one:
NAME QCO2 WINDOWAPI
PROTMODE
CODE PRELOAD
Nothing to it!
I tried to fight the Windows linker, but it figures out what you are doing and won’t do it. But can you manually link? Well QuickC for Windows does include a DOS linker, and it’s oddly enough newer than the one for Microsoft C 6.0!
C:\proj\o2>msdos \WIN16APP\QCWIN\bin\link hi.obj
Microsoft (R) Segmented-Executable Linker Version 5.15
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1984-1991. All rights reserved.
Run File [hi.exe]:
List File [NUL.MAP]:
Libraries [.LIB]: doscalls SLIBCE
Definitions File [NUL.DEF]: qco2.def
C:\proj\o2>msdos hi.exe
This program cannot be run in DOS mode.
Manually invoking the linker wasn’t all too hard, just answer the 30 questions. I did set the LIB environment variable so it picked up the libraries just fine. And yes, it created my OS/2 binary no problem!
And as you saw from above, yes it does run!
I do suppose the graphical editors would have been nice some 30 years ago, but in today’s era, sadly it doesn’t matter. QuickC for Windows won’t run under WLO, so this prevents it being a backdoor GUI/Protected mode compiler for OS/2. It’s a shame too as at least running under Windows 3.0, QuickC for Windows is WAY faster than using Microsoft C 6.00 in either read mode, protected mode with smartdrive.. I’m not sure what the deal is. Even with the advanced caching SCSI controller.
A talk from Dave Probert on the design of the NTOS kernel. Shame Microsoft didn’t put this anywhere people could have found this 20+ years ago, just as a shame they never opened up NTOS like they did that even tepid Windows Research Kernel. It goes without saying this is the ‘Linux is a cancer’ generation, with the crazed idea that looking at Linux would contaminate Windows.
So I had gotten this Boca Ram/2 card with 2MB of RAM, with space for an additional 6MB. Unfortunately trying to find matching memory has been a lost cause. Since the existing memory is 9 chip modules, I take that to mean it’s parity RAM, so I went shopping for much more available 3 chip modules.
2MB!
I picked up 2x 1MB modules for ยฃ10.
Slotting them carefully into the ram card, taking great care as the clips are plastic!
4MB of ram slotted, made in the USA!
Now from what I can remember being told is to never ever ever mix memory types like this. But logically I have to think that 9×1 = 4+4+1, right? RIGHT?!
I copied the @7A7A.ADF onto the reference disk image, slotted the card and booted up to the config, and toggled the card to 4M
4M (4 SIMM modules)
I didn’t trust the auto-config, plus I just wanted to see what was there. Also I’ve always wondered if the PS/2 model 60 (or 30? 50z?) can slot higher density than the 256kb SIMM’s that IBM had used. I guess one day I’ll give it a shot.
Anyways thinking that this is about done, I save the config and reboot and now It’s Bocaram/2 issues.
Immediately, on reboot I get error 164.
164 POST detected a base memory or extended memory size mismatch error.
1. Run F1 Setup. Check System Summary menu for memory size change. 2. Run the Extended Memory Diagnostic tests.
Booting from the reference disk just crashes the PC.
Fantastic.
Pressing F1 however does let you boot, ignoring the issue.
After a bunch of digging I found this zip file with some utils. And just guessing br2pmems ‘fixes’ the CMOS settings allowing the machine to boot normally.
So now it’ll recognize the 5MB of RAM, and just boot normally. GREAT. But booting the reference disk still hangs the machine.
Which then brings me to the next upgrade:
The IBM SCSI with Cache
The IBM SCSI with Cache aka the SPOCK. Since I ruined the one SCSI card, and ended up picking up a second card, but this time with the appropriate cable I’ve caused a massive market panic on Microchannel SCSI cards. Seriously check eBay, and you will see that the pricing has collapsed with many now selling in the ยฃ20-30 range. You’re welcome!
Not really wanting a 3rd SCSI card, but my eye saw this one with the cache RAM, and I figured if I wanted the ultimate PS/2 of course I’d want a caching controller. This looks to be the first rev of the PCB, but with the ‘hot fixes’ in place from the second rev. While the ROMs are stepping back to 1990, I don’t care much about the 1GB disk limit, as the BlueSCSI can emulate all the available devices in the chain, so I’m not losing anything in the way of capacity. This is a 286 after all.
Since the RAM card screws up the setup program, I have to remove it, and the old SCSI controller, re-configure the system with all the RAM and disks removed first. Then put in the new controller, and re-run setup.
I just accept the defaults, and reboot to check what happened. So far it looks good, slot 8 being near the middle of the PCB, and closer to the disk cage where the blue SCSI rests.
placehold all the drives!
Remembering that the IBM controllers inventory the disks backwards, the 380MB disk image on SCSI ID 6, is the primary boot disk. I didn’t set it to the full 1GB as I want to later see how older versions of DOS/OS2 work with this, and I know they have issues with disks bigger than 512MB, but I figured matching a disk that did exist in 1988 would be more realistic.
With the SCSI setup, I could put the troublesome Boca board back with the RAM, and get my system booting up with the new “faster” SCSI controller, and all that new RAM.
Old SCSI controller
Of course I did a few benchmarks on the old SCSI controller so I would know how much more awesome the new one is.
As you can see this is booted with my normal config.sys with a himem.sys and smartdrv from Windows 3.1 on a MS-DOS 5.1 install.
2,345.8 KB/sec With himem.sys & smartdrv
2,347.5 KB/sec with no himem.sys
2,316.6 KB/sec with runtime xmsmmgr & smartdrv
2,334.0 KB/sec with Windows 3.1 himem.sys no smartdrv
So, with these scores in hand, you can see that the penalty for various XMS memory access being turned on is there, but it’s nowhere near as massive as I’d have thought for performance. Even with it just being there, although again it’s so minimal.
Now for the real shocker:
2,079.2 KB/Sec
That’s right, the advanced card is slower. A good 11% slower. Well, that was disappointing. I’m still keeping it in the machine, as having a hardware caching controller was all the rage, just like Mach microkernels. Maybe it’d make more of a difference in a 32bit system, but it’s performance is very underwhelming. For anyone wondering, the WDC AC2340, is an EIDE 340MB hard disk, with a 64kb cache. Im sure it was considered very fancy, and fast for the era, and it’s nice to know that no matter the SCSI controller, the BlueSCSI blows it out of the water. Also keeping in mind that MFM data transfers are usually sub 400KB/sec, so this is much more faster.
Okay you have all this XMS what are you going to do with it?
Well, after I did manage to get this original copy of Word for Windows 1.0, I thought that it would be a good test. One fun thing is that it includes the ‘runtime’ version of Windows 2.11, which can also upgrade an existing install of Windows 2 if detected. Running Windows 2 on MS-DOS 5, does involve loading the setver command in the config.sys, and rebooting. Windows 2 cannot use XMS (more on that) but instead uses the older LIM EMS standard that allows a 64kb page to be viewed from a far larger card. Since the 8086/80286 still use 64kb segments it’s not all that crazy to use.
And that brings me to this great program EMM286!
It allocates a 64kb page in low ROM, and backfills it from XMS. So I give it 3MB, and now I have 1.3MB of XMS left, and 3MB of LIM EMS ready for Windows!
So now I have EMS & XMS! And didn’t have to get some pesky EMS board either. I am pretty sure you need device drivers to use EMS, so how do you use LIM EMS under OS/2 1.x? I have no idea. Probably not I guess?
Anyways I run word, everything is great, it sees extra ram. I exit windows, and unload EMM286, and ..
3.4MB of XMS available? Somehow I lost a megabyte of RAM from Windows 2?! I’m not sure what is going on, or why or how Windows even touched it. Needless to say if you want it back, you need to reboot.
DOS 10.21494KB free!
That’s right 494KB free! I thought MS-DOS under OS/2 just used some stubs in real mode, and called back to protected mode. No doubt this is totally wrong, there has to be some weird version of DOS+OS2 that actually runs in real mode going on here. I know that ‘bimodal drivers’ were a thing, but it sure seems like there really is a ‘real mode OS/2’ kernel with MS-DOS tacked onto the side.
Windows 3.0 standard mode, 286 + 5MB of RAM
It’s annoying OS/2 can’t tell you how much ram it sees and what is in use, but at least Windows 3.0 can. It’s more than enough to run Sim City, clearly making this one of the more expensive machines to run the game as intended. With the added RAM it doesn’t thrash as hard, but having emulated disks probably doesn’t matter as much as access time is always zero, and it’ll stream data as fast as it can. You can feel the difference moving between tasks, but things like the OS/2 file manager that loads a view into every directory is still incredibly slow. What were they thinking?!
Thouhts?
Back in the day this would have been an incredibly expensive upgrade. And is it worth it? The machine is still locked at 10Mhz. The FPU is also locked at 10Mhz, and you can feel it. The lightening fast disk access, despite it being some 11% slower is really hard to tell. Does the caching help at all? Applications don’t have to page in/out like crazy before as there is enough RAM to actually run them, but that is where the 10Mhz processor just isn’t there.
Just like the caching SCSI controller, I’m sure we’ve all heard how having that magical EMS memory would help out games like Wing Commander.
XMS/DOS High + EMM286 on the left, and just XMS + DOS High on the right
Well, I had to put them side by side, as I couldn’t believe it, but adding EMS made it noticeably slower. I was *NOT* expecting that. I should add that I used Vegas & this quick tutorial, on how to pan & resize one video to get them side by side. No doubt it’s not perfect but it’s enough to see that once the ship explodes, the performance on the EMS configuration is greatly throttled. It’s moments like this that makes me wonder is this something the caching SCSI card would do better implicitly? Or is it snake oil as well?
3MB is enough to load OS/2, and one application, just as Word v1 or Excel v2/v3 load just fine, but swapping between them is basically unloading one from memory, and loading the other back out to disk. It’s a shame RAM cost so much 1987-1992 as people really could have benefited from it. It’s just utterly bizarre that on such an outrageously expensive system that you even need RAM upgrade cards, it really should have been baked into the main logic board.
I’m not sure if I covered the Windows NT 3.1 build 196 before. First the most obvious is that as of this moment it’s the earliest version of Windows NT available.
So let’s do some obligatory scratch of the surface. Like all the other 1991 pre-releases there really is just a text mode setup install script. Choosing the lesser amount of pain, I went with a MS-DOS hosted install. However, using MS-DOS 6.22 resulted in a broken dual boot system. But we live in the era of virtual machines, so it really doesn’t matter. I’m using Qemu 0.14-rc2, something that is ‘era correct’ for when the first avalanche broke on early Windows NT pre-releases. I’ve had issues with more modern versions of Qemu, and I felt that if we’re using vintage software may as well go in all the way.
The boot loader identifies itself as being 1990 vintage. Pretty sure it doesn’t mean anything, but we haven’t been blessed with the “blue screen” of ARC yet.
The login screen and desktop have a very strong Windows 3.1 beta feel to them. And that would land this where it was, Windows was such a big seller that Maritz had been trying to convince Gates & Balmer to ‘switch to the Windows horse’ in the spring/summer of 1990, culminating in Gate’s July decision to walk away from NT/OS2 and rebrand the new OS as Windows NT. Oddly enough it was Balmer who was in favour of OS/2 & IBM. (Showstopper 89-90)
At first glance the opening window isn’t all that interesting. It’s just very. Windows.
Rest assured Reversi, of course made the this Win32 cut. And it’s full of weird easter eggs, oddly enough in the OS/2 surviving bits.
type OS2LDR.DOS
OS2LDR 01.00.01
by KeithMo 01/08/91
On the Discord there had been a big discussion about early NT executable formats, and the whole COFF vs ECOFF vs PE/PEI. I had tried to hunt down the specific version of GCC I used ages to to build a so called Dec Alpha GCC cross compiler, but the short version is that it didn’t work as we don’t have any assembler/linker for anything GNU targets. There had been a cygwin port andanOpenNT on Alpha, but all that is lost to the winds, minus what few scraps I had saved. I did try building some cross tools to elf hoping to just objcopy out the data and get linkable objects, but that didn’t work either.
So I though this was a perfect opportunity to take a look at this early pre-release version of NT, and although I do know that you have to convert your objects into something the ‘COFF’ linker will accept:
And I never really paid that much attention to the object files. I do know that you can link them with Link386 for OS/2, but the NT object files themselves report:
wsl file SIMPLE.OBJ
SIMPLE.OBJ: Intel 80386 COFF object file, not stripped, 4 sections, symbol offset=0x102, 20 symbols, created Thu Jun 1 14:13:50 2023, 1st section name ".text"
Well, now that is interesting. And of course the COFF thing reminded me of Xenix! And sure enough ages ago I had found the source to a modified version of GNU GAS that outputs COFF. Once more again this is an indication that all 386 roads in Microsoft really did originate with Xenix. It’s too bad there never was a Windows/386 on Xenix/386. What an incredible OS that would have been! There must be some incredible stories from the tool teams that worked on Microsoft C/386 along with other projects. Oddly enough they never get anywhere near as much exposure as Office or OS.
Now this is fun, but nothing takes in these ancient COFF objects, do they? I tried to run LINK 1.0 from Win32s SDK and surprisingly it didn’t complain about the object, rather, it auto converted it in memory:
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Executable Linker Version 1.00
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-93. All rights reserved.
SIMPLE.OBJ : warning LNK4016: unresolved external symbol "__chkstk"
LINK : warning LNK4016: unresolved external symbol "_mainCRTStartup"
SIMPLE.OBJ : warning LNK4016: unresolved external symbol "_printf"
SIMPLE.exe : error LNK1120: 3 unresolved externals
Does this mean that if I give it some libraries it will actually link?
LINK.EXE SIMPLE.OBJ /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE /MACHINE:i386 -entry:mainCRTStartup -out:simple.exe libc.lib kernel32.lib
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Executable Linker Version 1.00
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-93. All rights reserved.
C:\temp\nt196\x\dec\x>simple
Win32, it's happenin'!
This was. VERY unexpected.
So I had this crazy idea, what if the Xenix assembler could in fact build objects that are also compaible in this manner? I used the a.out GCC / Linux porting tools I had built so I could compile Linux on Windows NT using the vintage tools as a starting point. I guess I should also add that when people always say ‘use newer version of THING’ this is how you miss out on old stuff like this. If I had been obsessed with using modern tools and modern operating systems, I’d have missed out on this Xenix filled window.
I took the gcc driver & the cc1 compiler from 1.40 and the c pre-processor from 2.5.8 as it can understand C++ comments. First I manually compiled the ‘simple’ example to assembly:
gcc -v -nostdinc -I/xenixnt/h -S SIMPLE.c -O simple.S
gcc version 1.40
cpp -nostdinc -v -I/xenixnt/h -undef -D__GNUC__ -Dunix -Di386 -D__unix__ -D__i386__ -D__OPTIMIZE__ SIMPLE.c C:/Users/jsteve/AppData/Local/Temp/cca2_048.cpp
GNU CPP version 2.5.8 (80386, BSD syntax)
#include "..." search starts here:
#include <...> search starts here:
/xenixnt/h
End of search list.
cc1 C:/Users/jsteve/AppData/Local/Temp/cca2_048.cpp -quiet -dumpbase SIMPLE.c -O -version -o SIMPLE.s
GNU C version 1.40 (80386, BSD syntax) compiled by GNU C version 5.1.0.
default target switches: -m80387
cpp -nostdinc -v -I/xenixnt/h -undef -D__GNUC__ -$ -Dunix -Di386 -D__unix__ -D__i386__ -D__OPTIMIZE__ simple.S C:/Users/jsteve/AppData/Local/Temp/cca2_048.s
GNU CPP version 2.5.8 (80386, BSD syntax)
#include "..." search starts here:
#include <...> search starts here:
/xenixnt/h
End of search list.
C:\temp\nt196\files\MSTOOLS\SAMPLES\SIMPLE>ax386 SIMPLE.s -o SIMPLE.obj
C:\temp\nt196\files\MSTOOLS\SAMPLES\SIMPLE>wsl file SIMPLE.obj
SIMPLE.obj: 8086 relocatable (Microsoft), "SIMPLE.c", 1st record data length 10, 2nd record type 0x88, 2nd record data length 11
Not quite the same. But it does closer resemble the output from the OS/2 bound versions of the Pre-Rease compilers:
file EMPTY.OBJ
EMPTY.OBJ: 8086 relocatable (Microsoft), "empty.c", 1st record data length 9, 2nd record type 0x88, 2nd record data length 7
So will it link?!
C:\temp\nt196\files\MSTOOLS\SAMPLES\SIMPLE>LINK.EXE SIMPLE.OBJ /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE /MACHINE:i386 -entry:mainCRTStartup -out:simple.exe libc.lib kernel32.lib
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Incremental Linker Version 2.50
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-94. All rights reserved.
SIMPLE.OBJ : warning LNK4033: converting object format from OMF to COFF
C:\temp\nt196\files\MSTOOLS\SAMPLES\SIMPLE>simple
Win32, it's happenin'!
Well now this is interesting! LONG before MinGW, or the GCC port to Windows NT, it turns out that in fact GCC could target Windows NT the entire time!
So the next thing to do is something not as trivial, like phoon.
I setup some quick script to pre-process, compile, assemble and then try to link, but as this one uses floating point, disaster struck:
Now ages ago while messgin with old GCC & DooM I also had weird math calls not working. In the end I ended up extracting them from libgcc builds, so I thought I’d try the libgcc built during the GCC 2.6.3 on NT adventure.
link /NODEFAULTLIB:libc.lib /NODEFAULTLIB:OLDNAMES.LIB -out:phoon.exe astro.obj date_p.obj phoon.obj -entry:mainCRTStartup libgcc1.lib LIBC.LIB KERNEL32.LIB
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Incremental Linker Version 2.50
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-94. All rights reserved.
And of course:
To try to make the steps make a little more sense, and to allow for some higher level of automation I made a Makefile:
I’m sure there is better ways to do this, but it breaks the compile up to it’s individual parts:
Run the pre-processor to allow // in the comments, C++ hadn’t been the default thing back when GCC 1.40 was a thing. Also path it to the headers, in this case I’m using the ones from NT 196. Trying to link with the 196 libraries gave me this:
C:\xenixnt\demos\phoon>link /NODEFAULTLIB:LIBC.LIB /NODEFAULTLIB:OLDNAMES.LIB -out:phoon.exe astro.obj date_p.obj phoon.obj -entry:mainCRTStartup base.lib wincrt.lib ntdll.lib \xenixnt\lib\libgcc1.lib
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Incremental Linker Version 2.50
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-94. All rights reserved.
wincrt.lib(maincrt0.obj) : warning LNK4078: multiple ".data" sections found with different attributes (40000040)
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_asin"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_atan"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_atan2"
phoon.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_cos"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_cos"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_floor"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_sin"
phoon.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_sqrt"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_sqrt"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "_tan"
phoon.exe : error LNK1120: 8 unresolved externals
Which is not surprising as there is no FPU/Floating point math support in 196. I tried the December 1991 Pre-Release, but it failed for other reasons:
I did copy over BASE.DLL BASERTL.DLL CSR.DLL DBGDLL.DLL as it wanted, but despite the symbol being in the DLL it didn’t load.
So that’s why I’m using the libraries from the Win32s SDK.
Okay, so far now we have GCC 1.40 compiling to an old Xenix GAS assembler, and linking with Microsoft link from Visual C++ 1.0/2.0 era. The next step is to see if we can just link the objects under 196, and get a running EXE!
I have this tiny fibonacci example program, so with it compiled & assembled by GCC & GAS, I did the final link under 196, and YES it runs!
Possible things to do? GCC should be able to build itself, so it should be possible to build GCC and link that on 196 or December 1991, and get a native version of GCC on NT. The other possibility is to get newer versions of GCC (cc1 drop in replacements) to build for Xenix and / or OS/2. Obviously this Xenix linker is the gateway to older 386 Microsoft based products!
