Hacker News: scruffyherder

New comment by scruffyherder in "Q2DOS – Quake 2 backported to MS-DOS"

scruffyherder — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:14:06 +0000

when testing native builds I was using a Xeon E5v2.

why bother with anything slow as a p3?

New comment by scruffyherder in "Q2DOS – Quake 2 backported to MS-DOS"

scruffyherder — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:13:10 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "Compiling MS-DOS 4.0 from DOS 4.0, on a PS/2"

scruffyherder — Sun, 28 Apr 2024 12:35:31 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay"

scruffyherder — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:47:57 +0000

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!

New comment by scruffyherder in "Preview edition of Microsoft OS/2 2.0 sold on eBay"

scruffyherder — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 08:43:02 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "EmuWoW Beta 1 (AXP Preview1)"

scruffyherder — Sun, 18 Feb 2024 04:32:19 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086"

scruffyherder — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 22:08:50 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086"

scruffyherder — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 22:07:16 +0000

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.

New comment by scruffyherder in "86-DOS Version 0.11 Found"

scruffyherder — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:52:01 +0000

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!

New comment by scruffyherder in "86-DOS Version 0.11 Found"

scruffyherder — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:21:52 +0000

I'd only zapped the partition table...

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "86-DOS Version 0.11 Found"

scruffyherder — Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:19:32 +0000

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!

New comment by scruffyherder in "A modern $400 MIPS workstation for a modern (government) era (2020)"

scruffyherder — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 16:52:36 +0000

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.

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 00:45:47 +0000

I was able to cross compile from windows to BOW

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 15:35:47 +0000

Load it on arca

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

If be more interested if that runs ..

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:52:20 +0000

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!

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 12:48:52 +0000

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.

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:26:32 +0000

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.

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:21:28 +0000

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.

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 23:24:22 +0000

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

New comment by scruffyherder in "BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed"

scruffyherder — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 23:22:43 +0000

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.