scruffyherder

I know it's a shame it'll never get up streamed.

Es40 gets more attention at the moment and is the current king of Windows on Alpha emulation.

https://github.com/ES40-Emu/es40

You'll need to get a firmware update to flash the system as ARC is compressed and not on the bare system.

when testing native builds I was using a Xeon E5v2.

why bother with anything slow as a p3?

DLL's were the most involved part of the port.

I've no idea why so many people struggle with this.

I have to admit, that I was surprised when they all came back good! We already had the SDK on 3 1/2" disks, so we could compare the contents. Oddly enough all the executables, libraries and headders are a match but the helpfiles have a different CRC, despite being the same timestamp, and size.

I've installed it on 86box, and then converted the boot disk from 5 1/2" to 3 1/2" inch so I could install it on VMware and my IBM PS/2 model 80. That's another surprise I thought for sure the PS/2 drivers would be missing from the 5 1/4" disk version, but they were there!

On VMware the AT version of the PS/2 mouse driver locks the system up, but I copied the one from 6.123 and it works fine. Although there is no MS-DOS sessions working.

Also as a follow up on my 'dont waste money on a math co-processor' if you have the 'passthrough math' on 86box the dos sessions misbehave big time. Using the softfloat option for more accuate floats results in working MS-DOS. - Turns out OS/2 betas really did rely on a FPU!

It's the full OS + SDK and the networking bits & kernel debugger as well!

It’s really cool to run dec alpha binaries on x86!

Pharlap 386 is mentioned on Links386, although its flies on by, and special->about

Pharlap's TNT was way more exciting to be honest.

I'm still trying to find the first early extenders though from 1987/88 no leads though.

Wow that's pretty cool! I first found out I had some virus when I was hex editing my boot/root floppy disks for Linux back in 92? I'd just compiled a kernel and forgot to set the root to the hard disk, swapped disks around and found some bootsector thing that I can't remember at the time. It was initially mystifying how it read okay in DOS, as the virus could hide, but on Linux is where it was laid bare.

Pretty cool how you made such a massive leap! Talk about making lemonade!

I'd only zapped the partition table...

https://virtuallyfun.com/2009/12/03/partitioning-with-debug/

Nah, it was wp-mail-smtp. It completely crashed out on me.

> PHP Fatal error: Uncaught TypeError: ActionScheduler_Action::set_schedule(): Argument #1 ($schedule) must be of type ActionScheduler_Schedule, ActionScheduler_NullSchedule given

I've been able to take 2 million hits a day, so it's not that!

I'm hoping to pull it out of storage and give it an update. There is newer processors, although they are still about the same price, and I'm not sure it's all that worth it.

I was able to cross compile from windows to BOW

https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/12/12/cross-compiling-to-bsd-o...

Load it on arca

https://archive.org/details/bsd-on-windows

If be more interested if that runs ..

you clearly havent tried it on real hardware, BOW is pretty awesome.

Yes I too was doing IT in the mid 90's and did far more than my share of widnows 3.1 with win32s.

If you'd looked into bow it hooks all the timers from dos, and can happily run more than one thing at a time, and preempt them.

It's a winning combination for sure, even on my lowly 386 DX 16, I can run word, excel & bow at the same time. It's great!

yes I was hoping to do an update after I had help finding the author, and to see if there was any potential of an update. It's late breaking & live. And it seems all the engagement is here not on the blog so I didn't see this as I was sleeping.

I'd like to think it'd have had some subtantial tracktion back in the day, being able to overlay your work windows 3.1 machine with BSD. It has some DDE exchange I haven't tried to use yet, but it'll talk to Excel, so imagine having snmpwalk scripts to poll networks and do real-time excel graphs!? It'd have been awesome.

You're looking too close to the trees gcc/vi instead of the BSD forest.

BOW's only weakness is its single user mode, more so a limitation of being a Win16. If it'd been pushed harder to a NT service/client/server DLL it'd have been a much bigger player.

It's all moot, Pink/taligent died, Virtual Machines is where everyone runs their stuff these days, OS/2 had the driver/disk/filesystem stuff done right.

I just cobbled together IRC 2.9. I don't see why anything else more useful could build. Ive also built Apache 1.3.1 and gotten it to run.

https://archive.org/details/apache131_for_BOW

It's really cool how BOW can totally use winsock, and bridge that gap of Unix networking tools on Windows 3.1

SFU replaced the posix subsystem with an OpenBSD port and more capable thing for NT/2000 etc.

SFU was so much later to the game, while BOW ran on Windows 3.1 which would have been great had it had far bigger appeal as you could just run it on such lesser machines. The best part being no formatting, no device drivers, or changes to the OS at all. I just copied over to my PS/2, and was playing hack 1.03 in no time.

not really, the exe's are a.out so it's more like EMX. It's broken up like services more like HURD, and extended to 32bit on Win16.

It's far more cooler being able to run on Windows 3.1

I dont suppose you have coherent 8086/80286 at all? I should have ordered it as a kid but I'd been told so many times to never trust mailorder. It still bugs me I didn't send in the $99.99

probably too mainstream, there was other hacked ways of running linux on windows using debuggers and other memory map hacks...

Indeed! What makes this version interesting is that it brings the retail interpreter to the PDP-11 to give access to not only Zork1/2/3 but planet fall, and a host of the rest of the z3 adventures across the Infocom Universe!

I should make some videos on how to use it as it is daunting.

But I’m glad you got it to run! Totally cool!!!

You can go one step further on Windows and compile the games from source!

You'll want to use ZILF https://virtuallyfun.com/2019/04/17/so-the-infocom-source-co...

This site has a far more extensive and interesting list of the Infocom games https://eblong.com/infocom/

As for simh I did keep binaries on the old sourceforge page ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/simh/ ) although it's not the aggressive new one on github. I know people cry about sourceforge but they went under new management years ago and fired everyone responsible for that piggyback fiasco.

I got the PDP-11/RT-11 version to build & run!

It's the real deal!

https://virtuallyfun.com/2023/11/21/zork-for-the-pdp-11-rt-1...

I’m sure it’d beat a 386 running it in v86 mode emulating a CGA display on an VGA window. Something an Amiga cannot do.

Rest assured it’s significantly faster full screen under OS/2. And faster again on native MS-DOS.

I replaced the 386 today with one from 1990. I was able to boot a disk I keep around that has MS-DOS 3.30a and Windows/386 2.11 on it. I also have Battletech on there and yes it ran with no issues! It didn’t work at all on the older processor.

When I pushed it into the socket it made such a loud “ker chunk” noise that I wouldn’t want to constantly pull out and reseat these chips. Especially since I don’t have the Intel “rake” like puller I had to use a pair of card edge blanks to gently rock it out of the socket.

Although I do appreciate the 10x humor of it.

It’s weird that so many people focus on the software, which runs perfectly fine in emulation, but seem to lose their minds that an $8,000 machine from 1987 shipped with a buggy CPU…

Hopefully this tbh t will encourage someone out there with a 386 to try to replicate this.