Found an old ad for 86-DOS

Seattle 86 Ad

GO 16-BIT NOW – WE HAVE MADE IT EASY
8086
8 Mhz. 2-card CPU Set
WITH 86-DOS®
ASSEMBLED,TESTED,GUARANTEED
With our 2-card 8086 CPU set you can upgrade your Z80 8-
bit S-100 system to run three times as fast by swapping the
CPUs. lf you use our 16-bit memory, it will run five times as
fast. Up to 64K of your static 8-bit memory may be used in the
8086’s 1-megabyte addressing range. A switch allows either 4
or 8 Mhz. operation. Memory access requirements at 4 Mhz.
exceed 500 nsec.
The EPROM monitor allows you to display, alter, and
search memory, do inputs and outputs, and boot your disk.
Debugging aids include register display and change, single
stepping, and execute with breakpoints.
The set includes a serial port with programmable baud rate,
four independent programmable 16-bit timers (two may be
combined for a time-of-day clock), a parallel in and parallel out
port, and an interrupt controller with 15 inputs. External power
may be applied to the timers to maintain the clock during
system power-off time. Total power: 2 amps at + 8V, less than
100 mao at + 16V and at -16V.
86-DOS@>, our $195 8086 single user disk operating
system, is provided without additional charge. It allows
functions such as console 1/0 of characters and strings, and
random or sequencial reading and writing to named disk files .
While it has a different format from CPIM, it performs similar
calls plus some extensions (CP/M is a registered trademark of
Digital Research Corporation). Its construction allows relatively
easy configuration of 1/0 to different hardware. Directly
supported are the Tarbell and Cromemco disk controllers.
The 86-D08@> package includes an 8086 resident assembler,
a Z80 to 8086 source code translator, a utility to read
files written in CPIM and convert them to the 86-DOS format, a
line editor, and disk maintenance utilities. Of significance to
Z80 users is the ability of the translator to accept Z80 source
code written for CPIM, translate this to 8086 source code,
assemble the source code, and then run the program on the
8086 processor under 86-D08. This allows the conversion of
any Z80 program, for which source code is available, to run on
the much higher performance 8086.
BASIC-86 by Microsoft is available for the 8086 at $350.
Several firms are working on application programs. Call for
current software status.
All software licensed for use on a single computer only.
Non-disclosure agreements required. Shipping from stock to
one week. Bank cards, personal checks, CODs okay. There is
a 10-day return privilege. All boards are guaranteed one year
– both parts and labor. Shipped prepaid by air in US and
Canada. Foreign purchases must be prepaid in US funds.
Also add $10 per board for overseas air shipment.
8/16 16-BIT MEMORY
This board was designed for the 1980s. It is configured as
16K by 8 bits when accessed by an 8-bit processor and
configured 8K by 16 bits when used with a 16-bit processor.
The configuration switching is automatic and is done by the
card sampling the “sixteen request” signal sent out by all S-
100 IEEE 16-bit CPU boards. The card has all the high noise
immunity features of our well known PLUS RAM cards as well
as “extended addressing”. Extended addressing is a replacement
for bank select. It makes use of a total of 24 address lines
to give a directly addressable range of over 16 megabytes.
(For older systems, a switch will cause the card to ignore the
top 8 address lines.) This card ensures that your memory
board purchase will not soon be obsolete. It is guaranteed to
run without wait states with our 8086 CPU set using an 8 Mhz.
clock. Shipped from stock. Prices: 1-4, $280; 5-9, $260; 10-up,
$240.

~Seattle (amputer Products, Inc. ~ 1114 Industry Drive, Seattle, WA. 98188
(206) 575-1830

 

The ad is from December of 1980, and of course the PC was released in August of 1981… Its interesting to see even back then there was some clear partnering with Microsoft!

So yeah I got DDOS’d …

I don’t think it was me specifically but my hosting company got hit hard.

Needless to say I’m finally up right now.  I had a monthly backup scheme going, clearly I’ve got to get something going daily ….

I’ve also found a company down the road from me that can colo for ~ $100 a month which I may jump on as I’d like to host a bunch of stuff in a semi reliable manner, and having an 8 core / 16GB machine to do it would be nice.

Qemu entering the 1.2 rc phase!

I just got word that Qemu is now aggressivly entering the 1.2 release phase.  Of interest to people who like old OS’s, namely Windows NT 3.1 this is going to be in the release:

  • Three new SCSI host bus adapter devices are available: am53c974 and dc390 emulate respectively an AMD PCI PCscsi and a Tekram DC-390 device, both of which are supported on older operating systems including MS DOS 6.2, MS Windows 3.11, 98 SE, NT 3.1 and NT 4.0. megasasemulated an LSI SAS1078 RAID controller. The next version of SeaBIOS will support booting from am53c974 and dc390 disks.

That’s right!  With the Tekram DC-390 you will be able to install Windows NT 3.1 with only a install floppy & CD-ROM.  I also hope this includes stability fixes for Novell Netware..

I’ve naturally added in my sdl update for a quick control-alt-delete & reset


case 0x13: /*r on US keyboard */
qemu_system_reset_request();
break;
case 0x20: /* 'd' key on US keyboard */
kbd_put_keycode(0x1d); /* left ctrl key */
kbd_put_keycode(0x38); /* left alt key */
kbd_put_keycode(0xd3); /* delete key */
kbd_put_keycode(56);
kbd_put_keycode(29);
kbd_put_keycode(157);
kbd_put_keycode(184);
kbd_put_keycode(29);
kbd_put_keycode(56);
kbd_put_keycode(224);
kbd_put_keycode(83);
kbd_put_keycode(224);
kbd_put_keycode(211);
break;

And to configure it with the parameters…

$ ./configure --audio-drv-list=dsound,sdl,fmod --audio-card-list=ac97,es1370,sb16,adlib,hda,gus --disable-curl --fmod-lib=/mingw/fmod/libfmod.a --fmod-inc=/mingw/fmod

I’m not too thrilled on the audio aspect, while I’ve managed to compile in Direct Sound & Fmod, fmod doesn’t produce any sound, and Direct Sound is very laggy.  Another thing I don’t “get” is that inside of mingw SDL displays Qemu with a normal aspect ratio and runs fine, but copying the same binaries  & DLLs out of Mingw gives me that weird and slow display.. So I’ve removed the full screen capability (did anyone use it? it never worked right anyways…) as I had done before, and it seems ok.

I haven’t gotten around to looking at the new SCSI adapters or how to configure them, but I hope to do that real soon! It will be cool for sure!

Doom on Qemu 1.2.0 rc1

Doom on Qemu 1.2.0 rc1

That said it is a *LOT* faster than 1.1.1 or 1.1.0 !

As always, my binary is here.

VM – CP/CMS – VM/SP is 40 years old…

Wow mainframe stuff is ‘getting up there’.. VM was released August 2nd 1972.

There is no doubt about the importance of this OS, as it brought virtualization and paravirtualization to the world 40 years ago.  And a lot of these concepts found their way to “minor” things like the 80386, OS/2, and even Windows/386 .

Ages ago I managed to get a copy of Dungeon/Zork running on CMS, but other than that I don’t have any other exciting mainframe software…

 

 

Final Fantasy VII re-released for the PC

Not to shill too hard for it, but it is for sale for 10 euros, or 8 pounds sterling..  I should hope that this 1997 classic should work on modern PCs.. Which has been a pain for anyone whos owned this when it originally came out for the PC.  Although as far as I can tell this doesn’t add anything from the original version … Other than some click to cheat thing but.. There you go.

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS on Qemu 1.1.1 (OS X)

I’ve got to find a way to build Qemu for Win64, it looks like the only way for it to produce anything other than trivial hello world applications is to cross compile on linux.. which no doubt will need a billion dependancies…

But in the interim the MIPS emulator in Qemu 1.1.1 has made a bunch of progress, and can install & run NT 4.0 without any issues!

There is a few things to look out for, the first is that you have to specify a NVRAM image file to keep it persistant across instances.  And you need to ‘expand’ it beyond the definition size to get things like the MAC address to be stored.

./qemu-system-mips64el  -L . -M magnum -hda MIPS.disk -net nic -net user  -global ds1225y.filename=nvram  -global ds1225y.size=8200

And by default the Qemu MAC address to configure within the Magnum BIOS is 525400123456 ..

Windows NT 4.0 MIPS on Qemu 1.1.1 on OS X

I’ve been able to download & install Internet Explorer 3, and Quake World.. And even connect up to quake.xs4all.nl and it worked!

One thing I’d advise is to copy the directory OS\WINNT40 on the system partition to OS\NT to make it that much easier to re-add the boot statement, if you have to go down that road.

ARC boot statement

 

As always, special thanks to Hervé Poussineau for making all of this possible.

I’ve removed the fullscreen/resizing on Qemu 1.1.1

And now it is *MUCH* faster…

Next I’ll have to investigate better audio libraries, as winwave seems to leave a lot to be desired.

Basically the changes in ui/sdl.c were:


case 0x21: /* 'f' key on US keyboard */
// toggle_full_screen(ds);
// gui_keysym = 1;
break;
case 0x16: /* 'u' key on US keyboard */
// if (scaling_active) {
// scaling_active = 0;
// sdl_resize(ds);
vga_hw_invalidate();
vga_hw_update();
// }
// gui_keysym = 1;
break;

And


case SDL_VIDEORESIZE:
// sdl_scale(ds, ev->resize.w, ev->resize.h);
vga_hw_invalidate();
vga_hw_update();
break;

So now it keeps the correct video display size, so it isn’t going like crazy trying to scale the screen 30 times a second..

Doom now looks normal!

As you can see stuff like Doom now looks normal.  As mode changes are initiated by the video card, it keeps the scale to where it was in prior versions.  At least its not going 1:1 native as looking at a 320×200 window on a 1280×768 desk would be a tad hard..

And yes, even things like Windows 3.0 look correct when the screen changes resolution:

Windows 3.0 in 386 enhanced mode

Also I should add that if you are going to try to use disk images that are *NOT* 1.44 MB they will not work.  You’ll have add this flag to Qemu:

-global isa-fdc.check_media_rate=off

I’ve been told the new handling of disks is better in this version so I’ve left this setting where it was..

I have just updated the download link, but for those who missed it, you can download the i386  win32 version here.