[GXemul-users] Is there a guide on installing OS/F 1.0 on Gxemul? Also I did a super basic Win32 port

[Jason S. <jas...@li...>]

With a lot of messing around, and using ed, I did manage to fake out the installer enough to restore the root dump and get into phase 2 booting.

The readme in the OS/F dump says to ‘make a fake cd-rom’ and change some hidden text file which seems to do nothing as the installer scripts are dead set on tape.  The problem I have with the tape is that it doesn’t advance positions.

I guess I need to try 0.3?

Anyways I wrote about my terrible port here:

https://virtuallyfun.com/wordpress/2019/08/05/gxemul-for-win32/

And the binary/source is here:

https://vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com/install/Win32/gxemul-0.6.2-ultra-primative.zip

The download will give you a 404, the username/password is on that page.  It changes automatically all the time, so me giving it out won’t be good possibly a few hours from now.

I had a lot of issues where various user types are not being defined.  I didn’t see any ‘central user type’ header file anywhere so I just inlined as I went.

I also used some termios macro file to take care of the bulk, and some super simple Win32 (well really MS-DOS emulated calls) of kbhit/getch to fake out the console enough where you can type things.  Even the Control-C/Control-B works!  .. much to my amazement.

I setup a simple thread & timer to do the timers, I think they work as things get further along then without this thread.

So at least I’ve tested the OpenBSD 5.4 Luna m88k ramdisk, and the OS/F 1.0 sas kernel (Stand Alone Shell) and minimal root dump.  My efforts of just untarring everything just leads to the dynamic linker not working and things like login breaking, thus preventing going fully multi-user.

I guess the next thing to look at is the X-11 and see how hard it will be to move that to SDL.  As I’m hoping it’s just a simple framebuffer…

Lately I’ve been messing with a bunch of Mach stuff I’ve found.  It’s so much easier to build stuff with native environments, I’ve managed to get the version 1.x stuff building on SIMH’s VAX-11/780 okay, and with the MtXinu Mach386 I’ve been able to build 2.5 & a version of 2.6 I’ve also found with the 2.5’s i386 support.  There was a serious bug in the i386 code that prevented booting on anything post 386 (it may work on the 486 too, I don’t know) but I wouldn’t be surprised if those kinds of errors exist in other platforms.  That said I haven’t seen any BSDSS code with anything but i386 or PC523 code.  I don’t know if anyone has this 32v encumbered code, or lol if it’s even worth trying to get a Mach 3.0 + BSDSS type thing even going.  I haven’t found the 4.3 for 3.0 code at all, and I don’t think it’d be a trivial port from 2.5/2.6 although again all it seems to have is SUN-3 & VAX support.

Anyways I thought a Win32 version ought to be useful to at least get more people playing with gxemul!