Rubénerd :)

Having dabbled in a ton of different languages lately, I felt the overwhelming urge this week just to get back to some good ol’ C, and what better and more productive way to do so that to mess around with ncurses!

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Earlier this month I detailed how I was able to use DOSBox to run Windows 3.1 versions of software for someone in Singapore, and how what started as a silly nostalgic hobby was getting me some work! Well I figured why stop there, and over the weekend with a few spare hours I looked into running Windows 3.0! In other news, I really should publish posts instead of hitting the draft button.

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I wasn’t born when the DEC PDP-8 computer came out and was only a few months old when the Commodore 128D did with it’s Zilog Z80 awesomeness, so the earliest nostalgic computer memories I have are of our old DOS machine from the early 90s. As I’ve said here many times before we ran DOS with PowerMenu and originally Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, then Windows 3.1.

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I’ve been doing so much work in DOSBox for other people and myself over the last few weeks again I thought I’d do some more posts about it. I know you’re all intensely fascinated by my DOS nostalgia! Unfortunately I’ve finally come across an application that DOSBox doesn’t tango with: XTreeGold.

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This weekend I was helping a guy in Singapore who needed to use some an ancient version of Quicken for Windows and Lotus Agenda on his shiny new Mac. I instinctively reached for VMware Fusion to create a virtual machine, but it dawned on me there might be an easier way. A few hours later I had him using his software with only a tiny amount of overhead thanks to DOSBox!

If you haven’t read my raving about DOSBox by now, its a beautiful little cross-platform application that emulates a 486 class DOS computer complete with a fully usable command line, sound, input devices and graphics. Unlike other VM software you don’t need to install a guest OS, and instead of using disk images you merely mount a directory from your existing hard drive. Too easy.

Because it emulates DOS its capable of running most DOS software, including graphical environments such as Gem and early versions of Windows! In this case all I had to do was copy the setup files for Windows 3.11 into a directory on my hard drive, mount the directory in DOSBox and install it. From there I had a fully working Windows 3.11 install which I was able to install and run his old software in, and more importantly export his old data from.

I think it’s funny that what started as a hobby to recreate our old home computer from the early 1990s here has ended up getting me work on a few dozen occasions! Ruben Schade: Retro Software Consultant. I like the sound of that ^_^.

It may come as complete shock to you to find out our first home computer from the early 1990s was a DOS machine. Certainly I’ve never mentioned this ever before on my blog here (cough!), and I certainly have never blogged about running DOS on modern hardware for nostalgic fun.

Turns out one of the unintended positives of procuring a ThinkPad X40 dating back to before IBM’s hardware division was purchased by Lenovo is that IBM were themselves a DOS vendor (an oversimplification of history but it’ll suffice) and supported running DOS well after everyone else jumped on the Windows bandwagon.

What this means is even for a 2004 vintage notebook computer from their download page they have complete DOS software for updating the BIOS and diagnosing problems along with drivers for networking, external optical drives, sound and their obscure, limited run USB grilled cheese sandwich waffle irons that came bundled with I’m so full of crap.

I’m stretched for time as is and probably won’t be able to test any of this out for a while, but I do have a licenced copy of IBM PC DOS 7 and a ThinkPad with drivers… it might be time to get my nostalgia freak on :).

Given I’ve done pointless milestone posts celebrating 1960 and 1980 posts, it seems only fitting to now do one about the 1990s now that I’m inching closer to 2000. Wonder if my blog will have a Y2K like explosion when it reaches that?

Yes so I was born in the 1980s, but I think it’s safe to say I "grew up" in the 1990s. The decade was about a ton of change for us as a family, we moved interstate three times and finally moved to our de facto home in Singapore, then moved apartment buildings twice. My sister and I changed schools three times, our schools changed campuses twice. About the only constant in that decade was the knowledge we had that it was useless to become too attached to a particular place because we weren’t going to be there that long. It was a hell of a ride, and I wouldn’t have traded it for anything… most of the time!

Of course the 1990s was when I first got interested in this little field called computing. Our first home computer that we bought ourselves instead of my dad bringing it home from work was a 486SX tower with a huge 4MiB of RAM, a 100MiB hard drive and MS-DOS with PowerMenu and XTree Gold, later Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions, later Windows 3.1. We had Commander Keen 1-3 and Monopoly Deluxe 1.0 both of which my sister, dad and I play now! After that I got a Pentium MMX machine with a spiffy Zip drive (I escaped the click of death problem), we got Pacific dialup internet in 1997 and we got our first broadband connection with SingTel Magix in 1999.

On the entertainment front my sister and I grew up watching Agro’s Cartoon Connection in the mornings when we lived in Melbourne and Brisbane, and cartoons on Premier 12 and Channel 5 in Singapore. Much of what we watched was British TV from Fireman Sam and Postman Pat to Banana Man and SuperTed. We also had really weird shows like LiftOff which I can still hear the guy complaining about all the silly things you’re not supposed to do in the Foyer even now! Then there was Gumby which my mum hated but tolerated when it came on and we had to see.

Then there was the Japanese pop culture invasion. We all had Tamagotchis (my sister had a dozen!), we watched DragonBall Z and Sailor Moon (we both still do!). We had yo-yos upon yo-yos upon yo-yos which neither of us were very good at but they were nonsensical fun! We had Pokemon Red and Blue, I can remember a school camp to Thailand where the jocks got fed up trying to tease all us nerds because we were ignoring them as we were glued to our Gameboys trading Pokemon with those purple cables!

What else? Oh yeah the Beanie Baby shop in Wheelock Place in Singapore which closed down and is now a Japanese pasta shop. I didn’t have too many of them but my sister collected them religiously, even when we went to Europe she’d get my parents to buy her bags full of them! Ah the blatent consumerism, that was the real hallmark of the 1990s, you gotta love it!

Ever since I was a little kid I never really liked pop music, one of the first CD sets I ever got for my birthday was a complete works of Ravel and another set of the Rat Pack! In the 1990s though we had the blasted Macarena and Mambo No. 5, we had Britney Spears back before she became a symbol for all that’s wrong with the music industry, we had Oasis, Alanis Morissette and Robbie Williams, we had Ricky Martin who seemed to literally come out of nowhere.

Unfortunately the 1990s also marked the last time my late mum was healthy before she got cancer and spent most of my sister’s and my living memory going to oncology wards and not having the energy to do anything. I can still vaguely remember when I was very little her painting and stitching all those stunningly beautiful pictures for our bedrooms with all the bright colours as well as her drawings and paintings of angels and views outside windows. Her favourite thing to draw was eyes. She also had a calligraphy business for place cards at formal events and weddings. She fought the f*cking Big C for over 12 years when most people give up after only a few because she said she wanted us to have memories of her. We do, and there isn’t a day that goes by where we don’t miss her.

Anyway what else about the 1990s? Oh yeah, my dad drove me up to Malaysia to see my first Formula 1 race! And while waiting for my mum at the hospital at weird times of night I unwittingly started my love affair with the coffee bean, later going to the then-new Starbucks and the surprisingly titled Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs that were popping up all over the island. We’d occasionaly make trips back to Australia to see relatives and I’d feel surprised at how little I rememberd about my birthplace and how disconnected I’d become. I’d feel weird walking around with my parents and seeing caucasian people everywhere! Where are the MRT stops? Why is there litter on the street? Why do people smile at me at shops even when I don’t know them?

If you grew up in the 1990s what memories do you have? I’m sure I’ve left out a ton of stuff!

Sending birthday wishes to Tetris which turns 25 today. It’s two years older than I am!

I was born slightly too late to have been a part of this amazing early computer game revolution, but that’s not to say I didn’t partake of many early DOS games on our IBM machines, then our 486SX clone. While I always have a special place in my heart for Commander Keen as the greatest game of all time I used to rush home from school excited to play, we did have a DOS clone of Tetris too.

What strikes me about Tetris (and to a certain extend Commander Keen) was the design and premise were so beautifully elegant they didn’t need flashy 3D graphics to become immersive, addictive and a real pleasure to play. The people who developed games like this were geniuses, plain and simple.

Aside from the Sim City and The Sims franchises, I don’t really play many games any more. In fact my current obsession is still Bejeweled on my iTelephone because it’s simple, addictive and fun. More games need to be made like Tetris!

Like the way it turned out, but guess I should have cleaned the fingerprints off the screen first!

After I had decided to replace Arch Linux with the latest version of FreeBSD on my Armada M300 (reasons for another post), I decided during the partitioning stage to save 512MiB of space. Why? So that instead of relegating my DOS nostalgia to virtual machines on my MacBook Pro I could dual boot this subnotebook with it! Genius right? Don’t answer that.

When I first bought Connectix Virtual PC (Wikipedia) for my first iMac back in the day it came with a fully licenced ISO disc image of IBM PC DOS 2000 which essentially was PC DOS 7 with Y2K and Euro character support, so this morning I burned a copy of it to disc and loaded it up!

Even 2002 era, 600MHz hardware with 320MiB of RAM is still ridiculously high for DOS so it loads instantly. I’m also pleasantly surprised by how much of it works right out of the box! The generic drivers for the CD-ROM let me access the optical drive in the docking station; the bundled MOUSE.COM detects and lets me use the touchpad; and the bundled HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE can assign high memory without any the problems I had when running PC DOS in VirtualBox. When I’ve had more time to play around with it (and when I swap in UMBPCI, Cute Mouse etc) I’ll post my experiences here. Suffice to say preliminary results are extremely encouraging.

Before anyone comments here asking why, I decided not to use FreeDOS because their Windows 3.x support is still in the experimental stage and it’s still has some issues with some old games. Even though we also still have a valid licence for MS-DOS 6.22 I also chose not to use it because PC DOS 7 has some really nice features that can save much more conventional memory, plus it comes with all the tools Microsoft omitted from MS-DOS 5 like the DOSSHELL and I prefer the IBM E Editor to MS-DOS EDIT. I’m also intrigued by REXX having never used it before.

I think it was my good friend Felix Tanjono who said on Twitter that no amount of virtualisation is good enough, sometimes you just have to go all the way and dual boot! I agree. There’s something cool about being asked whether you want to boot PC DOS or FreeBSD… the first OS I used versus the latest. I’m a sucker for symbolic crap like that.

So what’d you do on your Sunday? ^_^

FreeBSD 7.1 with Xfce, MS-DOS with XTreeGold and Windows 2000

In my quest to find the most useful virtualisation software for Mac I’ve so far used Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion and Q.app in various capacities. Today I decided to take a closer look at VirtualBox, the free and open source virtualisation software by Sun Microsystems.

Firstly the good news: VirtualBox is fast. Because it can take advantage of VT-x in the Intel processors of modern Macs the performance is in an entirely different league to QEMU based applications and much closer in performance to expensive (at least in the eyes of a university student!) commercial products from VMware and Parallels.

Because of it’s higher performance, VirtualBox can run all current flavours of BSD, Linux and Windows that I’ve thrown at it just beautifully. Creating machines is a snap, and the shortcut keys for commands such as hard reset (command-R) are the best of any Mac virtualisation product I’ve used.

Unfortunately for me there have been some problems. For starters, considering it’s a Sun product I found it disheartening to find OpenSolaris 08.11 can’t pass the initial boot stage to install without giving an error which is a shame. FreeBSD has difficulty using the emulated optical drive which in practical usage is fine but it means you need to initally install over a network, no easy install of an ISO is possible. And for my electronic nostalgia, VirtualBox crashes whenever I attempt to load either the EMM386 or UMBCPI upper memory managers in MS-DOS 6.22 or PC DOS 2000 despite exhaustive attempts to map the correct memory addresses.

As I said on my Q.app review, my first generation Core Duo MacBook Pro seems to be a very quirky machine for virtualisation: it seems to have troubles than most Apple people don’t seem to have! Keeping this in mind I’m ready to chalk these problems up to my eccentric machine, but it’s still a bit disheartening.

VirtualBox has the potential to be an amazing product, and certainly for Windows and Linux it does the job beautifully — especially for the price! Unfortunately for my own current needs though I’m going to have to give it a pass; while it does run Windows 2000 amazingly well I’d prefer not to have to use several higher end virtualisation products for different things.