iBCS2 & NetBSD

I know that there is some people out there that seem to be all into Xenix, and old binaries… So I thought I’d share this little gem I found before I head out for the day… I came across this post, talking about how ibcs2 has fallen apart in the latest version of NetBSD. But the gem in there is that version 4.0.1 works perfectly fine!

So I copied in the old gcc, filled in some bits and….

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running Xenix gcc

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running Xenix gcc

It works!

Robots is so perfect you’d never know!

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running robots

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running robots

And it runs Xenix Dungeon/Zork without missing a beat!

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running dungeon

Qemu 0.14.0 NetBSD 4.0.1 running dungeon

So this may be yet another avenue for some people… I’d suspect that you could even build the 32v userland under the Xenix tools…? Since all the default stuff is keyed to licensing, but you could roll your own Unix v7 32bit userland which basically is Xenix and go from there…. Maybe even some of the OpenSolaris SYSVR4 stuff as well but that sounds too ambitious!