Rubénerd!

I had feedback from a reader of my QEMU Ad Lib MIDI in Windows 3.1x post asking how I got Sound Blaster working in it. I give people what they want! ^_^

Execution Summary

Creative and Sound Blaster are from Singapore, I've been to their offices! I always liked their 1990s-tech logo :). But I digress.

QEMU has Sound Blaster support in its default configuration, and Windows 3.1 has drivers that can be used by default, which makes our lives much easier.

You can download drivers from the Sound Blaster support website which will give you a mixer, but I'm a fan of minimalism and I didn't notice any real performance or quality benefit from doing so. If you elect to use these drivers instead, remember the installer needs to be run from DOS BEFORE you launch Windows.

As a caveat, as I mentioned in my Ad Lib post, I've yet to find a way to allow both emulated sound cards to coexist in Windows 3.1. When Sound Blaster drivers are installed before or after Ad Lib, Sound Blaster assumes the roll of MIDI, which isn't supported in QEMU (hence the use of Ad Lib in the first place). As soon as I know a solution to this, I'll post about it.

Windows 3.1

1. Fire up your QEMU DOS VM and start Windows 3.1. Launch Control Panel and choose Drivers. Have a sudden urge to play Wii golf. No wait, it would have to be Microsoft Golf 2.0 MME ;). Why do I bother blogging about anything else other than retro stuff? I missed my calling.

2. Click Add..., choose Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.5, and hit OK. You'll be prompted for your Windows 3.1 setup files.

3. In the Sound Blaster Setup window, choose Port 220 and Interrupt 5.

4. Windows will tell you the driver is installed, however we should "contact Creative Labs for a driver specific to your card". Just hit OK. How did people live without the WWW?! I suppose one could have got drivers from a BBS, right?

Now you can go into Sound in Control Panel or launch Sound Recorder and play all the chiming chord dings that you want! :)

After much head scratching, I finally got retro MIDI sound working in Windows 3.11 and PC DOS 7 in QEMU! Wow, that was a mouthful. Here's how you do it, with a caveat.

Execution Summary

In its default ./configure-ation, QEMU emulates a Sound Blaster 16 card which can be detected and used in Windows 3.1 with the bundled Windows Sound Blaster 1.5 drivers. Unfortunately, with MPU401 disabled this means no MIDI support, on any guest OS. As of writing this post, there's no way around this.

Fortunately, QEMU also emulates Ad Lib, that early generation sound system that pre-dated SoundBlaster and has rudimentary MIDI support. Like SoundBlaster, Windows 3.11 can also use it out of the box without additional drivers.

As a caveat: if you install any drivers for Sound Blaster before or after doing this, Ad Lib apparently loses control of MIDI and subsequently you don't hear anything. I've yet to find a workaround for this, but as soon as I do, I'll post it here.

Building QEMU with Ad Lib support

For what I've been told are performance reasons, QEMU doesn't include Ad Lib support by default. Browsing the hundreds of pages of duplicated documentation online, I was told the solution to this was to build QEMU with the following option:

./configure --with-adlib

This no longer works. This does:

./configure --audio-card-list=sb16,adlib

I use QEMU exclusively for older OSs and have no need for the other sound cards it supports; if you want others you'll want to add them there.

Windows 3.1

This should be a blast from the past for those of you who did this back in 1992... I was 6 at the time! My earliest memories of our first home computer were with a Sound Blaster card, so this was new to me :).

1. Fire up your QEMU DOS VM (that's a lot of acronyms), then launch Windows 3.1. If you needed to be told that, how did you build your own custom version of QEMU?

2. Go to Control Panel, then Drivers.

3. Click Add..., choose Ad Lib from the List of Drivers, and hit OK. You'll be prompted for a Windows 3.1 install disk, or you can put in a different path. I tend to keep setup files on the virtual drive C for this purpose; it's not like I don't have space for it!

4. Quit Windows, then launch it again. Ah the days when rebooting your "OS" was that simple!

5. Go back to Control Panel and choose MIDI Mapper. Choose Ad Lib general from the Name list box, then hit Close.

All done! Now you can launch Media Player and play CANYON.MID in all its electronic, MIDI glory!

Why are you running Windows 3.1?

While its come in incredibly handy for a few paid jobs (spur of the moment things that earn some serious brownie points, then later more seriously!), our first family home computer ran Windows 3.0 and later 3.1.

My ultimate goal is to recreate that first system with all our classic software and games on my modern hardware. I've got all the original disks, made images of them, and am ready to go! I'm a sucker for nostalgia :')

Barely had I finished that previous whimsical post about DOS nostalgia than something arrived in the mail that I just have to ramble on about here now too! I'll pretend it was intentional. Yeah, that works :).

In 1994 or 1995 after we'd had our original DOS machine for a while, my dad invested a small fortune upgrading it with a Creative Hex Speed CD-ROM drive and SoundBlaster card. By that point we'd long since upgraded from Windows 3.0 MME to Windows 3.1 which meant we could now finally run some of the Microsoft Home multimedia titles we'd been using at school and at my grandfather's place.

Since then I've long since moved over to the Mac and FreeBSD and don't run Windows any more, but I've been really impressed by how DOSBox has been able to cope under the stress of running Windows 3.1, then running these old CD-ROM titles! So far we have:

• Dangerous Creatures
• Dinosaurs
• Explorapedia: The World of People
• Explorapedia: The World of Nature
• Musical Instruments
• Oceans

It's surprising the company responsible for the tacky and clumsy Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Office 2007 interfaces were able to come up with such polished, cool software before. While the idea of the multimedia CD-ROM has long since been eclipsed by the web, these were fantastic products when they came out.

Anyway I can now add Dinosaurs to our collection (well look at that, I already did!) having picked it up on eBay for $8 including shipping!

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.

In my spare time for the last couple of years I've been collecting legitimate copies of some of the software we used to have on that 486SX tower so I could recreate it in some form of virtual machine on my MacBook Pro or FreeBSD machines for silly, irrelevant, nostalgic purposes. So far I've found DOSBox has been the easiest, lightest and most portable solution to use, even if it is a little slower. I consider slower a feature though, makes it feel more authentic :).

In the same manner as our original DOS machine we dubbed the "Melbourne Computer" because my dad's job had us living there at the time we bought it, I have DOSBox set up to load PowerMenu upon booting, with our DOS apps available from the menus and Windows configured to launch if we want it. At the time this meant we didn't have too much of our precious 4.0MiB of RAM being used by Windows when we only wanted to run DOS apps like XTreeGold or WordPerfect, and games like Commander Keen, Lemmings and SimCity Classic! I was born in the 1980s, but I grew up in the 90s :).

Anyway I had a point for this post, but I long since lost sight of it and rambled on for a few paragraphs about silly nostalgia. Perhaps I'll get back to what I was supposed to be posting about some other time.

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 ^_^.

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!

It's official, the first images and details of Microsoft's up and coming Windows 7 operating system have been released to the press. The always interesting PC Pro in the UK has the inside scoop:

Microsoft has released the first pre-beta code of Windows 7, writes Barry Collins at the Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The next-generation operating system includes a bevy of new features, including a revamped Windows desktop, support for multitouch, USB drive encryption and improved boot times and performance.

While all this does sound promising for people still using Windows, the preliminary screenshot definitely failed to impress. I'm hoping that Microsoft's history of refining and modifying the interface to the point where it barely resembles the betas repeats itself, because this is just awful:

Screenshot of the first preview of Windows 7

Not only that, but I feel as though they've blatantly and unabashedly ripped off my beloved K Desktop Environment. The panel is pixel-for-pixel the same size. The layout is the same. The widgets look the same. Though for what it's worth, you've got to hand it to them for taking such a gorgeous interface and making it look terrible!

I think it does make a strong statement though that a software company that has been so desperate to label free and open source software as a movement that largely can't be taken seriously, then turns around and attempts to emulate the fruits borne from such projects.

Screenshot of the current release of the KDE Unix (Linux, FreeBSD etc) desktop

I continually find it amazing how Microsoft's user interface standards have so dramatically slipped over the years. Our first home computer came loaded with Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions which we later upgraded to 3.1. It was by no means perfect, but I'd argue in many ways it was superior to anything outside Amiga Workbench at the time. Windows 95 was clean and organised and personally I thought it was much slicker than System 7.x and all the other classic Mac OS's. Windows 98 was marginally worse, XP's cheap graphics looked childish, and Vista of course was an abomination.

With the bar now set so low, let's hope for the sake of people who still must use Windows that this latest version gets some serious cosmetic changes before it ships in 2049.

Windows 3.1 in all it's glory!