Announcing EmuWoW Beta 1 (AXP Preview1)

Freecell & Winver

This is a guest post by CaptainWillStarblazer

Hello, everyone. This is a continuation of my previous blogpost on EmuWoW (formerly win32emu) found here, but to summarize, I’m the 18-year-old developer behind a project that allows running applications compiled for the MIPS/Alpha version of Windows NT on standard x86 PCs through emulation, but without requiring a full system emulator. Since that last post, the project has made some substantial strides.

Since then, I’ve adapted the MIPS emulator from MAME, which is both more accurate and faster than my own (writing my own was a fun exercise but to the end of running applications, borrowing an emulator was a better decision). This alone enabled WinMine to function, which can be seen below.

Winmine for MIPS!

Around the same time, another VirtuallyFun member named x86matthew entered the scene. His prior credits include a similar project, for Win16. He was inspired by the initial win32emu blog post, created his own similar project called WoWMIPS, which quickly started running a few simple apps, such as WinMine, Solitaire, and Notepad. Be sure to check out WoWMIPS – MIPS Emulator for Windows, Part 1: Introduction, and parts 2,3,4,5,6!

This had actually been what I was hoping for from the beginning; I always saw win32emu as a proof of concept for a smarter person (either myself in the future or someone else altogether) to come back later and do it better, and this is a massive undertaking for a single individual. What makes x86matthew’s WoWMIPS so incredible is its clean design. For one, there’s no thunk DLLs required. When an application tries to import a DLL, the host x86 DLL is first loaded, and then any attempts to get the address of an exported procedure from it are then redirected to an auto-generated stub of MIPS code which invokes the emulator to call the function. In other words, the thunk DLLs are generated at load time. Additionally, there’s no window procedure thunks required either. Instead, MIPS code pages are marked as non-executable, causing an access violation when Windows attempts to call them. Using an exception handler implemented via Windows XP’s Vectored Exception Handling feature, one can detect this and then invoke the emulator to execute the callback. Storing the CPU state in thread-local-storage allowed proper support for multithreading. I duplicated these design choices into EmuWoW, and the results largely speak for themselves. Unlike WoWMIPS (at time of writing), EmuWoW is still capable of loading MIPS DLLs (and will prefer to do so if possible), however.

Various MIPS Windows NT applications running

To aid the process of fixing faults in the emulator, I hacked up a quick, minimal debugger into EmuWoW. First of all, there’s a “crash screen” which will indicate the type of error and dump registers and the current instruction if there’s a fault, and a running disassembly can be printed as you go, but most crucially, there’s a limited degree of interactive debugging functionality.

The built in debugger to EmuWow

The main capabilities contained herein are dumping registers and memory to the screen, disassembling regions of memory, listing loaded modules, getting import entry points, setting breakpoints, and single-stepping, along with printing functions. It’s no gdb (especially for the lack of PDB symbol support), but it’s something.

MIPS is all well and good, however, but we can already emulate Windows NT for MIPS. MIPS is a fairly clean, simple architecture, often used for teaching, and short of weirdness like delay slots, is dead simple to emulate. And it fits the bill for what I’m trying to do here – a RISC architecture Microsoft abandoned, fixed-length 32-bit instructions, the works. However, adding support for the DEC Alpha AXP will finally get this project to where it was intended to be from the beginning, and I hope for it to eventually be able to run the Visual C++ compiler toolchain under EmuWoW. Being able to compile (and even test!) Alpha apps on readily available modern PCs will be a game-changer, and I intentionally wrote EmuWoW to be CPU-agnostic, so adding rudimentary support for the Alpha wasn’t difficult. Like with MIPS, I lifted the emulator from MAME. This admittedly did pose some challenges, due to MAME’s use of C++ features such as

  • Classes (which I had to substitute for passing pointers to structs)
  • Templates (which I had to substitute for macros)
  • Function-style casts (which I had to change into C-style casts)

There was a lot of weirdness in how Alpha function calls, but it was my misunderstanding of the calling convention, and when to consider values to be 32-bit vs 64-bit posed a modest issue, but I got it to the point where some very simple DEC Alpha programs started to run, though many of them have various issues.

Various Dec Alpha Windows NT applications running

This is the first time this has ever been possible; emulation of AXP NT programs on standard PCs has just become possible now. I’m hoping to see EmuWoW continue to evolve, and I welcome contributions, whether that be improving support for the CPUs I already have, adding support for another (such as PowerPC) or anything else. To take a look at the code, go to github.com/bhty/emuwow and to download EmuWoW and try it out for yourself, click here.

Targeting OS/2 with Visual Studio 2003

Sydney’s idea of what Visual C++ for OS/2 should look like

No, it’s not a typo.

This is a long-winded post, but the short version is that I found a working combination to get the C compiler from Visual Studio 2003 targeting OS/2.

Once I’d learned how C compilers are a collection of programs working in concert, I’d always wanted to force Microsoft C to work in that fashion, however it is born to be a compiler that integrates everything but linking. There has been a “/Fa” or output assembly option, but I’ve never gotten it to do anything useful. I’m not that much into assembly but it seemed insurmountable.

But for some reason this time things were different.

This time I used:

Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 6.11

After the great divorce and the rise of Windows NT, Microsoft had shifted from the OMF format to COFF. However somewhere buried in their old tools it still supports it, namely MASM. For example, if I try to run LINK386 (the OS/2 Linker) against output from Visual C++ 2003 I get his

abandon.obj :  fatal error L1101: invalid object module
 Object file offset: 1  Record type: 4c

However if I output to assembly and then have MASM assemble that, and try the linker, I’m bombarded with errors like this:

warp.obj(warp.asm) :  error L2025: __real@4059000000000000 : symbol defined more than once
warp.obj(warp.asm) :  error L2029: '__ftol2' : unresolved external

If I was smart I’d have given up, there is pages and pages of this stuff. But I’m not smart, so instead I decided to something different, and use SED, the stream editor, and try to patch out the errors.

The ftol2 call is for newer CPU’s and any OS/2 library won’t have it. But instead of binary editing symbols we can replace the ftol2 with ftol with this simple line:

 sed -e 's/_ftol2/_ftol/g'

For some reason Visual C++ likes to make all it’s reals “public” meaning there can only be one, but yet there is so many. Why not comment them all out?

sed -e 's/PUBLIC\t__real@/;PUBLIC\t__real@/g'

And there are various other annoying things, but again they can be all patched out. Just as the older Windows 1991 Pre-release compilers also have weird syntax that MASM doesn’t understand.

astro.asm(59): error A2138: invalid data initializer

which goes into how Microsoft C used to initialize floating point constants:

CONST   SEGMENT  DWORD USE32 PUBLIC 'CONST'
$T20000         DQ      0a0ce51293ee845c8r    ; 1.157407407407407E-05
$T20001         DQ      0bffffd3441429ec5r    ; 2440587.499999667
CONST      ENDS

while I found that the C compiler in Xenix 386 initialises them like this:

$T20000         DQ      0a0ce51293ee845c8h    ; 1.157407407407407E-05
$T20001         DQ      0bffffd3441429ec5h    ; 2440587.499999667

This one was a little hard for me as I’m not a sed expert, but I did figure out how to mark the section, and then to replace it

sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $.a1 |  sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g"

And so on. At the moment my ‘mangle’ script is now this:

.c.obj:
        $(CC) $(INC) $(OPT) $(DEBUG) /c /Fa$*.a $*.c
        wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' $*.a > $*.a1
        wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $*.a1 \
        | wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" \
        | wsl sed -e 's/call \t\[/call DWORD PTR\[/g' \
        | wsl sed -e 's/PUBLIC\t__real@/;PUBLIC\t__real@/g' \
        | wsl sed -e 's/_ftol2/_ftol/g' > $*.asm
        ml /c $*.asm
        del $*.a $*.a1 $*.asm

This allows me to plug it into a Makefile, so I only have to edit it in one place.

Not surprisingly, this allows the LINK from Visual C++ 1.0 to link the MASM generated object files and get a native Win32 executable. Even from the oldest compiler I have from the Microsoft OS/2 2.00 Beta 2 SDK from 1989!

But now that we have the C compilers being able to output to something we can edit and force into a Win32, there is a few more things and suddenly:

        C:\cl386-research\bin\13.10.6030\cl386 /u /w /G3 /O  /c /Faphoon.a phoon.c
C:\cl386-research\bin\13.10.6030\CL386.EXE: warning: invoking C:\cl386-research\bin\13.10.6030\CL.EXE
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.6030 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

phoon.c
        wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' phoon.a > phoon.a1
        wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" phoon.a1  | wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g"  | wsl sed -e 's/call \t\[/call DWORD PTR\[/g'  | wsl sed -e 's/PUBLIC\t__real@/;PUBLIC\t__real@/g'  | wsl sed -e 's/_ftol2/_ftol/g' > phoon.asm
        ml /c phoon.asm
Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 6.11
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981-1993.  All rights reserved.

 Assembling: phoon.asm
        del phoon.a phoon.a1 phoon.asm
        msdos286 run286 C:\cl386-research\bin\ddk12\LINK386.EXE @phoon.lnk

Operating System/2 Linear Executable Linker
Version 2.01.012 Nov 02 1993
Copyright (C) IBM Corporation 1988-1993.
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. 1988-1993.
 All rights reserved.

Object Modules [.obj]: astro.obj date_p.obj phoon.obj
Run File [astro.exe]: phoon2 /NOE /NOI /NOD:OLDNAMES
List File [nul.map]: nul.map
Libraries [.lib]: ..\..\lib2\libc.lib +
Libraries [.lib]: ..\..\lib2\os2386.lib
Definitions File [nul.def]: nul.def;
LINK386 :  warning L4071: application type not specified; assuming WINDOWCOMPAT

I know it’s a bit of a word salad, but the key thing here is that using Visual C++ 2003’s compiler (version 13.10.6030), and outputting to assembly that we can edit, we can then use MASM to build objects that surprisingly LINK386 version 2.01.012 will link with. I suspect this has to do with device drivers, and probably the majority of the OS/2 operating system.

Anways, we’ve done the incredible, using the same object files, we made both a Win32 application, and an OS/2 application!

phoon-13.10.6030.exe: PE32 executable (console) Intel 80386, for MS Windows
phoon2.exe: MS-DOS executable, LX for OS/2 (console) i80386
Phoon compiled by Visual C++ 2003 on OS/2 2.00

Incidentally Happy CNY!

Obviously, this is VERY cool stuff.

I know the next question is do we have to rely on a 16bit linker? How about Watcom?

C:\cl386-research\proj\trek>wlink @trek.wlk
WATCOM Linker Version 10.0
Copyright by WATCOM International Corp. 1985, 1994. All rights reserved.
WATCOM is a trademark of WATCOM International Corp.
loading object files
searching libraries
Warning(1008): cannot open LIBC.lib : No such file or directory
Warning(1008): cannot open OLDNAMES.lib : No such file or directory
creating an OS/2 32-bit executable

Ignore the warnings and YES we can Link from something much newer & 32bit! In this example I linked the old TREK game, also built with Visual C++ 2003. The response file looks lke:

SYS os2v2
NAME trek2w
FILE abandon.obj,attack.obj,autover.obj,capture.obj,cgetc.obj,checkcond.obj
FILE check_out.obj,compkl.obj,computer.obj,damage.obj,damaged.obj,dcrept.obj
FILE destruct.obj,dock.obj,dumpgame.obj,dumpme.obj,dumpssradio.obj,events.obj
FILE externs.obj,getcodi.obj,getpar.obj,help.obj,impulse.obj,initquad.obj
FILE kill.obj,klmove.obj,lose.obj,lrscan.obj,main.OBJ,move.obj
FILE nova.obj,nullsleep.obj,out.obj,phaser.obj,play.obj,ram.obj
FILE ranf.obj,rest.obj,schedule.obj,score.obj,setup.obj,setwarp.obj
FILE shield.obj,snova.obj,srscan.obj,systemname.obj,torped.obj,utility.obj
FILE visual.obj,warp.obj,win.obj
LIBR ..\..\lib2\LIBC.LIB
LIBR ..\..\lib2\OS2386.LIB

It’s probably needing additional stack space, maybe some other stuff, or resources, maybe how to flag it’s windowing compatible.

TREK built by Visual C++ 2003, and Linked using Watcom C/C++ 10.0

How do I get started, if I dare?! First download and unpack cl386-research-v2. Ideally on the root of your C: drive, because why not?

run the ‘env’ command to set your environment up. Its pretty complicated but in the proj directly there is currently:

*NOTE that I do use SED scripts, I have it set to use Linux in the WSL package.
I tried some Win32 sed but it didn’t work. So you need WSL or a working sed!

you can then go into each directory and run

make os2

and it’ll compile populate a floppy and launch the emulator

Its all good fun.

Read the Makefiles to configure a compiler, how to run it, and if you need to mangle the assembly. The 32bit new stuff needs to be mangled, the older stuff almost always works with just compile.

# Version 6.00.054      1989
# https://archive.org/details/os-2-cd-rom_202401
PLATFORM = ddksrc

In this case it’ll select the platform from the ‘ddksdk’ release. The next is if the compiler is OS/2 based or native win32. Basically 73g / windows 95 & below are native Win32.

In the above example we comment out the dos extended cross

# dos exteded cross
CC =  $(EMU) $(DOSX) $(CL386ROOT)\$(PLATFORM)\cl386
# native CC
# CC =  $(CL386ROOT)\$(PLATFORM)\cl386

Next is the mangle strategy. In this case it’s an ancient OS/2 (like) compile so
try un commenting the ‘just compile’ line

# must include ONLY ONE strategey..
# for OS/2 it must have been assembled my MASM 6.11

include ..\-justcompile.mak
#include ..\-mangleassembly.mak
#include ..\-plainassembly.mak

save the makefile, and run

nmake os2

You can just close the emulator as after each run it’ll unpack a hard disk image, so nothing will be lost. or saved. It’s just for testing. You may need to periodically clean the floppy drive, as that is the only way to transfer stuff in and out of the VM.

What versions of CL386 have I found? Well, it’s quite a few, although I know I’m missing quite a few.

== c386 ============================
Microsoft C 5 386 Compiler

Microsoft C 5.2 286/386 Compiler -- Driver

@(#)C Compiler Apr 19 1990 11:48:30

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1989. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
1.00.075

== ddk12 ============================

C 6.00 (Alpha) Aug 24 1990 19:12:31

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1989. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.054
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.054

== ddk20 ============================

C 6.00 (Alpha) Aug 16 1990 23:04:06

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1989. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.054
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.054

== ddksrc ============================

C 6.00 (Alpha) Aug 24 1990 19:21:49

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1989. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.054
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.054

== nt-sep ============================

@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Feb 06 1991 17:15:19
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 May 13 1991 23:54:12
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Jun 03 1991 15:16:22


Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1991. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.077
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.077

== nt-oct ============================

@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Jun 03 1991 15:16:22
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Jun 13 1991 22:07:23
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Oct 10 1991 00:42:24

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1991. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.080
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.080

== nt-dec ============================
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Jun 03 1991 15:16:22
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Jun 13 1991 22:07:23
@(#)C Compiler 6.00 Oct 10 1991 00:42:24

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
1984-1991. All rights reserved.
  (press <return> to continue)
Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 6.00.081
Quick C Compiler Version 2.00.000
6.00.081

== 73g  ============================
1984-1993. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp
8.00.3200
32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version
Microsoft (R)


== msvc32s ============================

Microsoft 8.00.0000 - Copyright (C) 1986-1993 Microsoft Corp.
Microsoft 8.00.0000 - Copyright (C) 1986-1993 Microsoft Corp.
@(#) Microsoft C/C++ 32 bits x86 Compiler Version 8.00.XXXX

8.00.000

== 13.10.6030 ============================

Microsoft (R) C/C++ Compiler Version 13.10.6030
From my install of Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise

As you can see many of these earlier OS/2 compilers report the same versions but are in fact different builds on the inside. I suspect Microsoft had to support one version, and an Alpha version of version 6 is as good as it got. I would have imagined there were internal 32bit versions of 6 or 7, but I haven’t seen them.

Compiling and running TREK

Hopefully this gives some idea of how I tried to made a probably too modular build system to try all kinds of different compilers. I might have to see if it’s possible to run the tools from the 1992 versions of Windows NT in this setup, perhaps they are interesting as well.

One thing in my porting GCC to OS/2 experience is that the usability of the C compilers from 1991 were dramatically better than what Microsoft had given IBM at the time of the divorce. No doubt the upcoming NTOS/2 project was placing a bigger demand on the tools team.

If anyone has any access to other ‘cl386’ compilers, or early OS/2 2.00 stuff, please let me know! I’d love to do build/tests and see if my idea of distributing objects ‘just works’!

Totally unfair comparison of Microsoft C

Because I hate myself, I tried to get the Microsoft OS/2 Beta 2 SDK’s C compiler building simple stuff for text mode NT. Because, why not?!

Since the object files won’t link, we have to go in with assembly. And that of course doesn’t directly assemble, but it just needs a little hand holding:

Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility   Version 1.40
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1988-93. All rights reserved.

        cl386 /Ih /Ox /Zi /c /Fadhyrst.a dhyrst.c
Microsoft (R) Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1984-1989. All rights reserved.

dhyrst.c
        wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' dhyrst.a > dhyrst.a1
        wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" dhyrst.a1  | wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > dhyrst.asm
        ml /c dhyrst.asm
Microsoft (R) Macro Assembler Version 6.11
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981-1993.  All rights reserved.

 Assembling: dhyrst.asm
        del dhyrst.a dhyrst.a1 dhyrst.asm
        link -debug:full -out:dhyrst.exe dhyrst.obj libc.lib
Microsoft (R) 32-Bit Executable Linker Version 1.00
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1992-93. All rights reserved.

I use sed to remove the FLAT: directives which makes everything upset. Also there is some weird confusion on how to pad float constants and encode them.

CONST   SEGMENT  DWORD USE32 PUBLIC 'CONST'
$T20001         DQ      0040f51800r    ;        86400.00000000000
CONST      ENDS

MASM 6.11 is very update with this. I just padded it with more zeros, but it just hung. I suspect DQ isn’t the right size? I’m not 386 MASM junkie. I’m at least getting the assembler to shut-up but it doesn’t work right. I’ll have to look more into it.

Xenix 386 also includes an earlier version of Microsoft C / 386, and it formats the float like this:

CONST   SEGMENT  DWORD USE32 PUBLIC 'CONST'
$T20000         DQ      0040f51800H    ;        86400.00000000000
CONST      ENDS

So I had thought maybe if I replace the ‘r’ with a ‘H’ that might be enough? The only annoying thing about the Xenix compiler is that it was K&R so I spent a few minutes porting phoon to K&R, dumped the assembly and came up with this sed string to find the pattern, mark it, and replace it (Im not that good at this stuff)

wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $.a1 \
| wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > $*.asm

While it compiles with no issues, and runs, it just hangs. I tried the transplanted Xenix assembly and it just hangs as well. Clearly there is something to do with how to use floats.

I then looked at whetstone, and after building it noticed this is the output compiling with Visual C++ 8.0

      0       0       0  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
  12000   14000   12000 -1.3190e-001 -1.8218e-001 -4.3145e-001 -4.8173e-001
  14000   12000   12000  2.2103e-002 -2.7271e-002 -3.7914e-002 -8.7290e-002
 345000       1       1  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
 210000       1       2  6.0000e+000  6.0000e+000 -3.7914e-002 -8.7290e-002
  32000       1       2  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001  5.0000e-001
 899000       1       2  1.0000e+000  1.0000e+000  9.9994e-001  9.9994e-001
 616000       1       2  3.0000e+000  2.0000e+000  3.0000e+000 -8.7290e-002
      0       2       3  1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000 -1.0000e+000
  93000       2       3  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001  7.5000e-001

However this is the output from C/386:

      0       0       0  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
  12000   14000   12000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
  14000   12000   12000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
 345000       1       1  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
 210000       1       2  6.0000e+000  6.0000e+000  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
  32000       1       2  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315  5.2946e-315
 899000       1       2  5.2998e-315  5.2998e-315  0.0000e+000  0.0000e+000
 616000       1       2  5.3076e-315  5.3050e-315  5.3076e-315  0.0000e+000
      0       2       3  5.2998e-315  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314  1.5910e-314
  93000       2       3  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315  5.2972e-315

Great they look nothing alike. So something it totally broken. I guess the real question is, does it even work on OS/2?

Since I should post the NMAKE Makefile so I can remember how it can do custom steps so I can edit the intermediary files. Isn’t C fun?!

INC = /Ih
OPT = /Ox
DEBUG = /Zi
CC = cl386

OBJ = dhyrst.obj

.c.obj:
	$(CC) $(INC) $(OPT) $(DEBUG) /c /Fa$*.a $*.c
	wsl sed -e 's/FLAT://g' $*.a > $*.a1
	wsl sed -e "s/DQ\t[0-9a-f]*r/&XMMMMMMX/g" $*.a1 \
	| wsl sed -e "s/rXMMMMMMX/H/g" > $*.asm
	ml /c $*.asm
	del $*.a $*.a1 $*.asm

dhyrst.exe: $(OBJ)
        link -debug:full -out:dhyrst.exe $(OBJ) libc.lib

clean:
        del $(OBJ)
        del dhyrst.exe
        del *.asm *.a *.a1

As you can see, I’m using /Ox or maximum speed! So how does it compare?

Dhrystone(1.1) time for 180000000 passes = 20
This machine benchmarks at 9000000 dhrystones/second

And for the heck of it, how does Visual C++ 1.0’s performance compare?

Dhrystone(1.1) time for 180000000 passes = 7
This machine benchmarks at 25714285 dhrystones/second

That’s right the 1989 compiler is 35% the speed of the 1993 compiler. wow. Also it turns out that MASM 6.11 actually can (mostly) assemble the output of this ancient compiler. It’s nice when something kind of work. I can also add that the Infocom ’87 interpreter works as well.

YAY!

So it turns out GCC could have been available on Windows NT the entire time!

This is going to be a bit convoluted but here goes.. GCC isn’t a monolithic compiler, instead it’s various parts are separate programs. This lets us tackle it one part at a time. And/Or bypass a lot of it until I want to tackle it.

Flow of GCC

I’m sure many people have explained this far better than I ever could but in C you write source files (obviously), the pre-processor reads those and ‘header’ files that describe interfaces to libraries, other objects, various macros and definitions (magical numbers) and the pre-processor will read those files, and do simple macro expansion and test insert/replacements to generate a single .i file at the end of it’s run.

The C compiler (cc1) now reads that single .i file and translates it into native assembly. This allows for ‘mid/high level’ aspects of C to be machine independent (portable) but now will be written into a very system dependant assembly file, the single .S file. One thing of note is that so far everything is text files. You can edit the assembly file as you would any document, or even further ‘process’ it if needed/wanted.

The assembler ax386 (GAS) will then read the single assembly file and write a a binary object file hi.OBJ. There typically isn’t all that much to be said about assemblers although fancier ones allow for really strong Macro capabilities like Microsoft MASM.

From here on, it’s all binary objects!

The linker then takes your object files, and links them together with other system objects and system libraries into an executable, in this case. Linkers can build all kinds of other things, but for now we’re just pretending its static C compilation like it’s the 1970’s.

At it’s heart GCC processes text files.

The first part in this insane experiment, is to build GCC 1.40 with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0. Surprisingly it didn’t take an insane amount of messing with stuff, and I got an executable! But everything it compiled failed to assemble. Looking at this fragment, even if you don’t know i386 assembly you might spot the error:

main:
        pushl %ebp
        a b,c
        pushl %esi
        pushl %ebx

Yeah, it’s the “a b,c” part. Those are NOT valid i386 opcodes!

Just because it compiled didn’t mean it actually worked.

I used MinGW to build the same source, same Makefile, and I got a working executable. Annoyed I started compiling random files with Microsoft C, and finally found the file that broke it all, it turned out to be insn-output.c needing to be compiled with the “/D__STDC__” flags. A quick modification of the Makefile and now I have a working CC1!

Okay, great, it’s well known back in the early dangerous ages of the 1980’s/1990’s that everyone wasn’t running Linux, nor were binary distributions of GCC that far spread, rather I think to re-enforce the source was available it was expected that you’d use your system compiler. Systems like DJGPP/EMX take the path of binding a.out object files into something that MS-DOS can run via a dos extender, or the bind utility to allow you to run the a.out on OS/2. What I wan’t to do is verify that in fact Windows NT was a viable host for GCC back in the public pre-releases of 1991.

I’m sticking with the December build 239 version as it has working floating point. Something that GCC has intrinsic support of, and I don’t feel like trying to work out emulation.

The next step is to try to build it with the family mode-OS/2 version of the C compiler, which of course lead to the real issue of this 16bit hosted cross compiler:

        cl386 /u /Od /Ic:\MSVC32S\C386\INCLUDE /I. /Iconfig /c combine.c
Microsoft (R) Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075
Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1984-1989. All rights reserved.

combine.c
combine.c(1734) : fatal error C1002: compiler is out of heap space in Pass 2
NMAKE : fatal error U1077: 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe' : return code '0x2'
Stop.

Very frustrating. I tried mixing and matching from Visual C++ 1.0 & this old compiler, and while it did compile, it doesn’t run. does it mean anything?!

GCC 1.40 compiled by Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075

I should point out that this should be an expected working configuration as GCC does build on Xenix using the 32bit Microsoft C 5.1/386 compiler. Furthered again that Xenix and these 1991 versions of NT use the same 32bit OMF object format. And expanding on the Xenixnt experiment using the Xenix’ified GAS assembler with old Visual C++ includes & libraries to produce a possible retro-early port of GCC to NT, the next move is to bulid GAS on NT.

Xenix GAS 1.38 compiled by by Microsoft 386 C Compiler. Version 1.00.075

GAS gave me some weird issues with ctype.h where it runs fine with the one from Visual C++ 1.0 but the OS/2 & NT pre-release both fail. However the old Pre-release compiler cannot deal with the much newer ctype include file. So after much hammering I amputated whatever was bothering it, and it’s just enough to build & run. Great!

Going back to the phases, I used a simple hello world program:

void main() {
 printf("Hello World!\n");
}

While not being a good program, it doesn’t include stdio.h, nor does it return anything. It’s terrible. But in this case it allows me to be lazy and sidestep the pre-processor cpp.exe. This way I can just directly run it through cc1 and get my assembler file hi.S

Next I pass it to ax386 (GAS) and get the resulting object file hi.OBJ

And finally link it with link.exe in this case.

Hello World from GCC 1.40 on NT!

And with all the drama I’ve now compiled a simple hello world program on Windows NT.

If it were 1991, I would hollow out gcc.c so it doesn’t use signals or forks to invoke the needed phases, and of course build the pre-processor. In addition, libgcc needs to be compiled to allow for floating point operations to work correctly. None of which is impossible, although I’m not sure it’s all that needed as it isn’t 1991.

phoon

With a little bit more work, I got the floating point support to compile, which relies on both a working ‘native’ compiler, and a working GCC to compile the 2nd half. I usually use phoon, or Phases of the Moon, to test floating point, and as you can see, it’s working!

I’m not sure if there was a 32bit version of Microsoft C/386 available for Microsoft OS/2 2.00 betas. Also, I don’t know if the Microsoft link386 for OS/2 can also link Xenix 386 object files? Would it have been possible to bootstrap GCC/GAS on Microsoft OS/2 2.00? I really don’t know, and as of this writing no versions of the old Microsoft OS/2 2.00 betas have surfaced.

** update from the future, turns out that I found a way to convince the cl386 compilers from the NT Pre-Releases in 1991 to re-build an existing GCC that was built for NT. The catch is the linker, LINK386 of course, as the format was constantly changing. However the object files are fine, and I was able to just copy them over on diskette and re-link the compiler. It even ran. It’s not tested at all, so it turns out the 1989 compiler wasn’t good enough, but the 1991 was.

GCC 1.40 on OS/2 2.00 beta 6.123

It’s interesting to me to see that even before GCC 2.6, that vintage versions from 1991 would compile and run directly on Windows NT.

I uploaded the source on github, along with some binaries.

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall. / A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

It’s not mine, rather it’s Asianometry‘s. It’s a nice overview of the rise of Unix. I’d recommend checking it out, it’s pretty good. And of course, as I’m referenced!

The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall.

And part 2: A Chronicle of the Unix Wars

A Chronicle of the Unix Wars (youtube.com)

Years ago I had tried to make these old OS’s accessible to the masses with a simple windows installer where you could click & run these ancient artifacts. Say 4.2BSD.

Download BSD4.2-install-0.3.exe (Ancient UNIX/BSD emulation on Windows) (sourceforge.net)

Installing should be pretty straight forward, I just put the license as a click through and accept defaults.

Starting BSD via ‘RUN BSD42’ and the emulator will fire up, and being up a console program (Tera Term) giving you the console access. Windows will probably warn you that it requested network access. This will allow you to access the VAX over the network, including being able to telnet into the VAX via ‘Attach a PTY’ which will spawn another Tera Term, prompting you to login.

telnettting into the VAX

You can login as root, there is no password, and now you are up and running your virtual VAX with 4.2BSD!

All the items

I converted many of the old documents into PDF’s so you may want to start with the Beginners guide to Unix. I thought this was a great way to bring a complex system to the masses, but I’m not sure if I succeded.

776 downloads

As it sits now, since 2007 it’s had 776 downloads. I’d never really gotten any feedback so I’d hoped it got at least a few people launched into the bewildering world of ancient Unix. Of course I tried to make many more packages but I’d been unsure if any of them went anywhere. It’s why I found these videos so interesting as at least the image artifacts got used for something!

But in the off hand, maybe this can encourage some Unix curious into a larger world.

Other downloads in the same scope are:

Enjoy!

Win32Emu / DIY WOW

This is a guest post by CaptainWillStarblazer

When the AXP64 build tools for Windows 2000 were discovered back in May 2023, there was a crucial problem. Not only was it difficult to test the compiled applications since you needed an exotic and rare DEC Alpha machine running a leaked version of Windows, it was also difficult to even compile the programs, since you needed the same DEC Alpha machine to run the compiler; there was no cross-compiler.

As a result, I began writing a program conceptually similar to WOW64 on Itanium (or WX86, or FX-32), only in reverse, to allow RISC Win32 programs to run on x86.

The PE/COFF file format is surprisingly simple once you get the hang of it, so loading a basic Win32 EXE that I assembled with NASM  was pretty simple – just map the appropriate sections to the appropriate areas, fix up import tables, and start executing.

To start, I wrote a basic 386 emulator core. To complement it, I wrote my own set of Windows NT system DLLs (USER32, KERNEL32, GDI32) that execute inside of the emulator and then use an interrupt to signal a system call  which is trapped by the emulator and thunked up to execute the API call on the host.

For example, up above, you can see that the emulated app calls MessageBoxA inside of the emulated USER32, which puts 0 in EAX (the API call number for MessageBoxA) and then does the syscall interrupt (int 0x80 in my case), which causes the emulator to grab the arguments off of the stack and call MessageBoxA.

To ease communication between the host’s Win32 environment and the emulated Win32 environment, I ran the emulated CPU inside of the host’s memory space, which means that to run applications written for a 32-bit version of Windows NT, you need a 32-bit version of win32emu (or a 64-bit version with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO passed to the linker) to avoid pointer truncation issues, to prevent Windows from mapping memory addresses inaccessible by the emulated CPU.

To get “real” apps working, a lot of single-stepping through the CRT was required, but eventually I did get Reversi – one of the basic Win32 SDK samples – to work, albeit with some bugs at first. Calling a window procedure essentially requires a thunk in reverse, so I inserted a thunk window procedure on the host side that calls the emulated window procedure and returns the result.

It’s amazing, it’s reversi!

After this, I got to work on getting more complicated applications to work. Several failed due to lack of floating-point support, some failed due to unsupported DLLs, but I was able to get FreeCell and WinMine to work (with some bugs) after adding SHELL32. I was able to run the real SHELL32.DLL from Windows NT 3.51 under this environment.

Freecell
Minesweeper

One might wonder why I put all this work into running x86 programs on x86, but the reason is that there’s the most information about, and I’m most proficient with, Windows on the 386. Not only does Windows on other CPUs use other CPUs, but also there’s different calling conventions and a lot of other stuff I didn’t want to mess with at first. But this was at least a proof-of-concept to build a framework where I could swap the CPU core for an emulator for MIPS or PPC or Alpha or whatever I wanted and get stuff running.

Astute readers might be wondering why I didn’t take the approach taken by WOW64. For those who don’t know, most system DLLs on WOW64 are the same as those in 32-bit Windows, the only ones that are different are ones with system call stubs that call down to the kernel (NTDLL, GDI32, and USER32, the first of which calls to NTOSKRNL and the latter two calling to WIN32K.SYS). WOW64 instead calls a function with a system call dispatch number, which does essentially the same thing. The reason for this is that the system call numbers are undocumented and change between versions of Windows. WOW64, being an integrated component of Windows, can stay up to date. If I took this approach, I’d either have to stay locked to one emulated set of DLLs (i.e. from NT 4.0) and use their system call numbers on the emulated side, or write my own emulated DLLs and stick to a fixed set of numbers, but either way I’d somehow have to map them to whatever syscall numbers are being used on the host.

As I went on, I should probably also mention that what I said earlier about loading Win32 apps being easy was wrong. Loading a PE image is pretty straightforward, but once you get into populating the TEB and PEB (many of whose fields are undocumented), it quickly gets gnarly, and my PEB emulation is incomplete.

Adding MIPS support wasn’t too much of a hassle, since the MIPS ISA (ignoring delay slots, which gave me no shortage of trouble) is pretty clean and writing  an emulator wasn’t difficult. The VirtuallyFun Discord pointed me to Embedded Visual C++ 4.0, which was invaluable to me during development, since it included a MIPS assembler and disassembler, which I haven’t seen elsewhere. After writing a set of MIPS thunk DLLs and doing some more debugging, I finally got Reversi working.

There’s still some DLL relocation/rebasing issues, but Reversi is finally working in this homebrewed WOW!

I’d encourage someone to write a CPU module for the DEC Alpha AXP (or even PowerPC if anyone for some reason wants that). The API isn’t too complicated, and the i386 emulator is available for reference to see how the CPU emulator interfaces with the Win32 thunking side. An Alpha backend for the thunk compiler can definitely be written without too much trouble. Obviously, the AXP presents the challenge that fewer people are familiar with its instruction set than MIPS or 386, but this approach does free one from having to emulate all of the intricate hardware connections in actual Alpha applications while still running applications designed for it, and I’ve heard the Alpha is actually quite nice and clean. MAME’s Digital Alpha core could be a good place to start, but it’ll need some adaptation to work in this codebase. Remember that while being a 64-bit CPU with 64-bit registers and operations, the Alpha still runs Windows with 32-bit pointers, so it should run in a 32-bit address space (i.e. pass /LARGEADDRESSAWARE:NO to the linker).

Theoretically, recompiling the application to support the full address space should enable emulation of AXP64 applications, since the Alpha’s 64-bit pointers will allow it to address the host’s 64-bit address space, but I’m not sure if my emulator is totally 64-bit clean, or if the AXP64’s calling convention is materially different from that on the AXP32 in such a way that would require substantial changes. In either case, most of the code should still be transferable.

I also want to get more “useful” applications running, like development tools (i.e. the MSVC command line utilities – CL, MAKE, LINK, etc.) and CMD. Most of that probably involves implementing more thunks and potentially fixing CPU bugs.

This project is obviously still in a quite early stage, but I’m hoping to see it grow and become something useful for those in the hobby.

For those who want to play along at home, you can download the binary snapshot here: w32emu.zip

A more complete version of the writeup is available here: https://bhty.github.io/og/win32emu_VirtuallyFun_Post.htm and you can find the project here https://github.com/BHTY/Win32Emu/.

Installing Windows XP on a Lenovo S20

This was a silly side project that got out of hand, building an XP physical machine to run some old software. Over in the UK, there is this fantastical store, CeX that sells all kinds of retro crap, often for cheap. Normally I wouldn’t care but with pc titles going from £0.50 to £3 it seemed like some fun 1990’s computing value right there!

I had been slowly amassing a collection of bargain bin, garbage tier games ‘from back in the day’ and while I had been running a few on VMware on Windows 10, with that sub £5 copy of Windows XP home, it sadly didn’t help with so many games being copy protected.

I would need a physical machine, and that is where this hunk of junk the S20 fell into place.

S20 is way overkill!

When it comes to Windows XP, the S20 is no slouch. With 12GB of RAM, a Nehalem 3Ghz Xeon W3550 @3Ghz, 2x 120GB SSD drives, and a functional optical disk, this makes for a great system. Rounding out the absurdity is a Nvidia Quadro 4000 with 2GB of VRAM. I’m pretty sure when XP was new I was still using a PII 233Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. So yeah, this is way overkill.

Since all the disks are SATA, the default install CD won’t work. As a matter of fact, not much works on the retail CD-ROM. I tried to use rufus but…

Setup cannot find the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA).

I got this strange error from the USB stick. It appears after some searching it’s seeing the CD-ROM and trying to load the rest of the installer from there. Further searches said don’t use Rufus, instead use “WinSetupFromUSB-1-10“. I figured if I was going to use something like this, that I’d want some crazy pirated/hacked up to date version of XP to compliment the whole hacked up experience, so I went with the seemingly reputable “Windows XP SP3 Integral Edition 2022-6-16“.

WinSetupFromUSB 1.10

Options seemed to be somewhat straightforward, make sure it targets your USB drive! not any external backups. It does recommend you reformat with NTFS & set the alignment for a much needed speed improvement. Other than checking a few boxes to make sure it’s got the BTS driver pack & it’s a 2000/XP/2003 from USB install it pretty much worked.

After rebooting to the USB, be sure to select the

By selecting this option it’ll inject the needed ‘modern’ disk drivers. Otherwise it just wont work (EULA error or inaccessible boot device).

If everything goes well it’ll have injected a tonne of drivers, allowing the install to work.

Once the text part of setup is completed, be sure to boot off the USB again, again choosing option 1 to Auto-detect and use SATA/RAID/SCSI, but then choose option 4 for the Second part of the Windows XP setup.

Windows PE?

From here the setup feels very Windows PE. I suspect it is, but it’ll continue basically unattended and on it’s own. From here you can just boot directly from the hard disk, once it’s finished installing. It will prompt for the USB stick again to add all the additional options

Optional options!

I didn’t know what to exclude or pick, So I just chose them all.

It did take about 20 minutes, but at least by the end I did have a very usable XP install.

Trying the first Quadro Driver I could find, and I got knocked down to 640×480 in 4bit colour. It sucked. I don’t know what the deal was.

320.92 is the version that worked for me!

Working Video

With video working, the next step is all the reaming device drivers. Ohver on Phils Computer Lab, he had mentioned snappy driver installer, but the first link I hit on google was some virus loaded thing. Luckily since this is a fresh install it wasn’t at all painful to shove the USB back in and format the machine. I think I was also spared a lot of damage as it was constantly failing with a “bcrypt.dll missing” error. Saved by being obsolete!

Instead, I found the one on sourceforge.net, and it was working as expected.

Adding the audio drivers took a few attempts at installing stuff, rebooting, trying the windows auto-detect, rebooting, re-running snappy driver, and a few more reboots, and I got the NVIDIA audio and the built in audio working.

Overkill XP

One thing is that some games fail entirely on XP. While GTA: Vice City had been running on Windows 10, it fails to do anything on XP. Older games with Win16 setup programs do run but Games like Links LS 1999 fail completely to run. I think the system has both too many cores, too much RAM, and it’s just plain too fast.

With all the talk of abandoning 8086/286/386 modes of operation, I thought it’d be a good time to build a box explicitly for 32bit gaming out of cast aside parts. The Lenovo S20 list price was an eye watering $3,645 USD, and the Quadro 4000 clocking in at $1,199 USD. This was not a casual machine for playing Mahjong Escape: Ancient China. But it’s kind of funny to know it does.

I have to throw some more stuff at it, but one could have only wished for a PC this fast in 2002.

Fun with Windows ePDK NT 3.1 build 196 & Some Xenix fun!

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 and an OpenNT 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.

Which gave me the following assembly:

        .file   "SIMPLE.c"
gcc_compiled.:
.text
LC0:
        .ascii "Win32, it's happenin'!\0"
        .align 2
.globl _main
_main:
        pushl %ebp
        movl %esp,%ebp
        pushl $LC0
        call _printf
        leave
        ret

Now to assemble with the GAS Xenix assembler

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:

phoon.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "___fixdfsi"
astro.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol "___fixdfsi"
phoon.exe : error LNK1120: 1 unresolved externals

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:

CC=gcc
CC1=cc1
AS=ax386
CPP=cpp


CFLAGS= -O
CPPFLAGS= -lang-c-c++-comments -nostdinc -I/xenixnt/h

OBJ =   astro.obj \
date_p.obj \
phoon.obj

LIBS = libgcc1.lib LIBC.LIB KERNEL32.LIB

phoon.exe: $(OBJ)
        link -out:phoon.exe $(OBJ) -entry:mainCRTStartup $(LIBS)

%.obj: %.c
        $(CPP) $(CPPFLAGS) $< $*.i
        $(CC1) $*.i -quiet $(CFLAGS) -version -o $*.S
        $(AS) $*.S -o $*.obj


clean:
        del $(OBJ) *.i *.S phoon.exe

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!

I then built the ’87 InfoTaskForce, Infocom interpreter, and it was just a simple link, and it’s running!

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!

For those interested in such things, I’ve uploaded all of this to archive.org here: windows-nt-196-linking-and-running-gcc

Everyone seems to be losing their minds over the Windows XP Professional Key

algorithm being cracked.

But of course, how does that help me?

Unironically, I had purchased this for a whopping £4.68

No, really here’s the receipt. What a bargain!

Of course this is a legit copy with a legit key. But the online activation servers are all gone, and it looks like I’d have to call someone asking about my 22 year old copy of Windows, that I’ll load up and quickly forget.

Since I’m going to use QEMU, 0.90 with pcap support I thought I’d share the startup options:

set loopback=\Device\NPF_{3DF0EC5D-7FBE-46DF-ACF8-EF5D8679A473}
set vmnet1=\Device\NPF_{3BC364F4-5A15-405D-926C-C594383F0323}
qemu -m 512 -L pc-bios ^
-hda xphome.vmdk ^
-soundhw es1370 ^
-net nic,model=pcnet,macaddr=52:24:00:33:00:01 ^
-net pcap,devicename=%loopback% ^
%1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6

I had high hopes for this thing. Clearly misplaced ambitions.

First up, it’s an upgrade version. So that means instead of installing XP I had to waste my time installing NT Workstation 3.51, then installing XP. Yuck. And of course it just want small FAT disks of the 2/4 gigabyte boundary type as it’s 1994. Not the bright future of 2002’s Windows XP.

I don’t know why Qemu 0.90 has issues with XP detecting the CD-ROM drive, but yeah that sucked. I wanted to load up some more insane SNA experiments, but there is no DLC / 802.2 driver for XP Home. wow.

At least once it’s satisfied, we can format the disk as one big happy partition, and we can get on with our lives.

Installation is rather uneventful, however we are instantly reminded that we have only 30 days to go. Since we have that nasty CD-ROM issue that means shutting down, and booting back up, but with this fun program on an ISO image, xp_activate.

I did try to make a call, to activate my Windows, but the connection was terrible and I’m not even sure if these numbers were right. No I mean I know they didn’t work.

So I did what all legit users end up doing, using the crack for my 21 year old copy of Windows.

And just a few clicks later, it was done.

Windows XP Home is activated.

I don’t know if it’s even really going to last, I didn’t try anything else, actually I already deleted it. And the XP folio is back on the bookshelf.

Not only is there no DLC, did you know you can’t uninstall TCP/IP? At least you can unbind it from your NIC. While it does have IPX/SPX there is no built in Netware client. When they said HOME they meant it!

GNU Chess ’87

I am not much of a chess player. That said one thing that has annoyed me to no end is GNU Chess 1.2. Over on bitsavers is this fun directory:

And despite being a treasure trove of ancient GNU software, I have never been able to get GNU Chess to do much of anything. At best it’ll give the Chess prompt, and then it’ll either crash (good!) or worst case it just exits silently with no reason given.

I have put only minimal effort into debugging it, and really got nowhere. I don’t know why this is such a tough beast to deal with, or why I even care. As I mentioned above, I’m not much of a chess player.

But for some reason this time around I thought I’d try the earliest release quality Visual C++ to build it. I wasn’t expecting much, however for some reason this ancient version seems to run.

I had to enable a few things such as the RANDOM & HASH to make it look like it wants to play. I ended up having to make some changes after a draw or victory as the ‘self playing mode’would keep going. Not sure what’s going on there, and I added a line at the end of the logic loop to always print the board, so at least you can see what is going on if you have it playing itself.

With that said this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen:

  White Black Depth  Nodes  Score    Cpu     Rate
1. e2e4 e7e5      4   5793      0   0.00      1
2. d2d4 b8c6      4      0      0   0.00      0
3. d4e5 c6e5      4  17966      0   0.00      1
4. g1f3 b7b6      4      0      0   0.00      0
5. f3e5 f8c5      4 487931   -325   0.00      1
6. d1d5 c5b4      4 2079943   -425   1.00      2079943
7. e1d1 a7a6      4      0    775   0.00      0
8. d5f7           4 161840   4525   0.00      1
Averages:  4.00 ply, 550695 nodes,  0.20 cpu, 2753473 nodes/sec

Given I don’t have any good rusage emulation going on (I know its in MinGW at some point, and I probably can find it, and get it running on MSVC but I don’t see that as important) an 8 move victory seems pretty… unlikely?

Maybe it’s a good test of other C compilers to see if they produce anything. Or maybe it’s all a red herring? I haven’t tested with much but GCC 1.40 can’t even run it on x86. Watcom 10 can build, but it crashes during a self game.

It’s one of those mysteries, that I’m sure there is some fundamental lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.

Other than it’s a long way down, standing on the shoulders of giants.

I put the source & exe over on github. Not that I expect any takers.