A House of Cards

Posted on December 30, 2022 by Michal Necasek

As one step in the development of the Windows 3.x/2.x display driver, I needed to replace a BIOS INT 10h call to set the video mode with a “native” mode set code going directly to the (virtual) hardware registers. One big reason is that the (VBE 2.0) BIOS is limited to a predefined set of resolutions, whereas native mode set code can set more or less any resolution, enabling widescreen resolutions and such.

Replacing the code was not hard (I already had a working and tested mode set code) and it worked in Windows 3.1 and 3.0 straight away. When I got around to testing Windows 2.11, I noticed that although Windows looked fine and mouse worked, the keyboard didn’t seem to be working. Windows was just completely ignoring all keyboard input.

No keyboard input for you!

Curiously, the letters I fruitlessly typed in Windows popped up on the DOS command prompt as soon as I quit Windows (which was not hard using a mouse). This indicated that the keyboard input was not exactly lost, but it was not ending up in the right place somehow.

After double and triple checking, I assured myself that yes, using native display mode setting code instead of the BIOS broke the keyboard in Windows 2.11 (but not in Windows 3.x). That was, to put it mildly, not an anticipated side effect. How is that even possible?!

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Posted in Bugs, Development, Microsoft, Windows | 49 Comments

Win16 Retro Development

Posted on December 20, 2022 by Michal Necasek

Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development.

Windws 3.1 running Word in a usable resolution

Source Code and Development Environment

I took the Video 7 (V7) 256-color SuperVGA sample driver from the Windows 3.1 DDK as the starting point. The driver is written entirely in assembler (yay!), consisting dozens of source files, over 1.5MB in total size. This driver was not an ideal starting point, but it was probably the best one available.

The first order of business was establishing a development environment. While I could have done everything in a VM, I really wanted to avoid that. Developing a display driver obviously requires many restarts of Windows and inevitably also reboots, so at least two VMs would have been needed for a sane setup.

Instead I decided to set everything up on my host system running 64-bit Windows 10. Running the original 16-bit development tools was out, but that was only a minor hurdle. The critical piece was MASM 5.NT.02, a 32-bit version of MASM 5.1 rescued from an old Windows NT SDK. The Windows 3.1 DDK source code is very heavily geared towards MASM 5.1 and converting to another assembler would have been a major effort, likely resulting in many bugs .

Fortunately MASM 5.NT.02 works just fine and assembles the source code without trouble. For the rest, I used Open Watcom 1.9 tools: wmake, wlink, and wrc (make utility, linker, and resource compiler). I used a floppy image to get the driver binary from the host system to a VM, a simpler and faster method than any sort of networking.

With everything building, the real fun started: Modifying the Video 7 driver to actually work on different “hardware”.

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Posted in Debugging, Development, Microsoft, Windows | 27 Comments

Undefined Isn’t Unpredictable

Posted on November 7, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The other day I discovered that 32-bit FreeBSD 11.2 has strange trouble running in an emulated environment. Utilities like ping or top would just hang when trying to print floating-point numbers through printf(). The dtoa() library routine was getting stuck in an endless loop (FreeBSD has excellent support for debugging the binaries shipped with the OS, so finding out where things were going wrong was unexpectedly easy).

Closer inspection identified the following instruction sequence:

    fldz
    fxch   st(1)
    fucom  st(1)
    fstp   st(1)
    fnstsw ax 
    sahf
    jne ...
    jnp ...

This code relies on “undefined” behavior. The FUCOM instruction compares two floating-point values and sets the FPU condition code bits. The FNSTSW instruction stores the bits into the AX register, where they can be tested directly, or the SAHF instruction first copies them into the flags register where the bits can be conveniently tested by conditional jump instructions.

The problem is the FSTP instruction in between. According to Intel and AMD documentation, the FSTP instruction leaves the FPU condition codes in undefined state. So the FreeBSD library is testing undefined bits… but it just happens to work on all commonly available CPUs, in a very predictable and completely deterministic manner, because the FSTP instruction in reality leaves the condition bits alone. What is going on?

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Posted in AMD, Development, Documentation, Intel | 22 Comments

Does (E)IP Wrap Around in 16-bit Segments?

Posted on October 29, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The 8086/8088 is a 16-bit processor and offsets within a 64K segment always wrap around. If a one-byte instruction at offset FFFFh is executed on an 8086, execution will continue at offset 0. This is simply a consequence of the Instruction Pointer (IP) being a 16-bit register.

Funny things happen when an access crosses a segment boundary. On an 8086, it will also wrap around; accessing a word at offset FFFFh will access one byte at offset FFFFh and one byte at offset 0 in a segment. Again, that is a consequence of 16-bit address calculations.

The 80286 got a lot smarter about this. Segment protection prevents accesses that wrap around the end of a segment, for both data and instructions. The 80386 continued using the same logic.

The 286 and 386 support one special case, stack wraparound. When the 16-bit Stack Pointer (SP) is zero, pushing (say) a word on the stack will wrap around and the new SP will be FFFEh. This feature was required for 8086 compatibility, because a full size 64K stack needs to start with SP=0 (the pushes and pops must be aligned for the wraparound to occur; unaligned accesses will cause protection faults).

Does the instruction pointer also wrap around in a way similar to the stack segment?

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Posted in 386, 8086/8088, Intel, x86 | 9 Comments

PC Disk Sector Sizes and Booting

Posted on October 26, 2022 by Michal Necasek

Everyone knows that the IBM PC established 512-byte sectors on floppies and hard disks as the standard, which survived for several decades until the advent of “native” 4K-sector drives.

Of course what “everyone knows” is not necessarily the whole story.

PC Floppy Sector Sizes

The original 1981 IBM PC Technical Reference says: The [IBM PC floppy] drives are soft sectored, single sided, with 40 tracks. They are Modified Frequency Modulation (MFM) coded in 512 byte sectors, giving a formatted capacity of 163,840 bytes per drive.

But that was never really true; while PC DOS 1.0 indeed used 8 sectors per track, resulting in 163,840 bytes (512 × 8 × 40 bytes) on a floppy disk, PC DOS 2.0 supported 9 sectors per track on the same hardware, with increased 184,320 bytes disk capacity. This was possible in large part because the BIOS in the IBM PC was fairly flexible when it came to floppy disk formats.

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Posted in BIOS, DOS, IBM, PC history, Storage | 15 Comments

IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey Runs Again!

Posted on October 3, 2022 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Project Monterey was an attempt to unify the fragmented Unix market of the 90s in to a single, cross vendor Unix OS that would run on the upcoming Intel Itanium (and others) CPU. The main collaborators were: IBM, who brought its AIX, SCO brought UnixWare, HP was supposed to bring parts of HP-UX and Sequent DYNIX/ptx. Ironically the project shared fate of the Itanium CPU—it totally failed. In the end Linux took spot of the “single Unix OS”. IBM donated AIX pieces to Linux instead and the main legacy of Project Monterey was the famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit.

IBM did however produce AIX version for the Itanium architecture! According to Wikipedia, some 30+ licenses were sold in 2001-2002. For years a dedicated group of individuals was trying to locate a copy of the legendary OS. It seemed that the OS was lost forever…

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Posted in IBM, Intel, SCO, UNIX | Tagged , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Slovenian OS/2 Warp 4

Posted on September 11, 2022 by Michal Necasek

This is a guest post written by Marko Štamcar from the Slovenian Computer Museum in Ljubljana. Additional context and commentary from the OS/2 Museum can be found at the end of the article.

Slovenia being a tiny country with a population of just 2 million, IBM OS/2 Warp 4 was one of the few non-Microsoft operating systems to be localized to Slovenian in the mid-90s and a big deal for the local IT community back then. But nearly 3 decades later, when OS/2 disappeared from the last ATMs in the country, the even rarer Slovenian version was as good as completely gone. Or was it?

The Slovenian Computer Museum

Cue the Slovenian Computer Museum and our software heritage/conservancy activities. I have been part of the museum for the last 5 years and am the head of the laboratory (responsible for getting old machines to work for them to be shown off) and vice president of our non-profit organization. Our museum was founded in 2004 as part of the local hackerspace Kiberpipa/Cyberpipe but has since outgrown its humble beginnings and is now located in a dedicated space with 700 square meters of useful room on three levels dedicated to museum storage, exhibition and event space, and two classrooms. (More info on the museum’s website.)

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Posted in IBM, OS/2, PC history | 23 Comments

Antique Display Driving

Posted on July 29, 2022 by Michal Necasek

Here’s a preview of something I’ve been slowly working on, bit by bit:

Windows 1.04 Reversi

That screenshot surely looks a little funny. That’s because it is Windows 1.04 running with a heavily modified 256-color Windows 3.x display driver, using resources from a Windows 2.0 VGA driver.

This is mostly the same driver, running real-mode Windows 3.0:

High-res Real Mode Windows 3.0
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Posted in Development, Microsoft, Windows | 36 Comments

Learn Something Old Every Day, Part VI: Backward Buffer Overwrite

Posted on July 13, 2022 by Michal Necasek

A few days ago I spent far too much time debugging a largish piece of 16-bit Windows code written in assembler. I found a scenario where (fortunately fairly reproducibly) Windows crashed because the internal state of a DLL got corrupted.

I could see that the state made no sense and a supposedly small rectangle was suddenly tens of thousands of pixels large, causing segment overruns when it was copied. The internal state of the DLL was corrupted, and it very much looked like a buffer overflow.

I added size checks to make sure nearby buffers weren’t being overwritten, but the checks never fired. Or rather they only fired when the state was already corrupted.

Then I tried reshuffling the data so that the buffer which I suspected of overflowing was at the very end of the data segment, hoping that it would cause a protection fault when the buffer overrun happened. But the fault never happened, and the state was still getting corrupted.

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Posted in Bugs, Development, Windows | 24 Comments

Windows 9x Video Minidriver Source Code

Posted on June 24, 2022 by Michal Necasek

As promised, here is the source code for the Windows 9x VirtualBox display minidriver. For discussion of the source code, see the included readdev.txt file.

The code was developed on a Windows 10 host system. For extra credit, I attempted to build the minidriver on Windows 9x. Ideally with source code control… but is that even possible?

I could not find any clear information on whether Mercurial ever worked on Windows 9x. After a longish software archaeology session, I concluded that it did, at least somewhat. Here’s the proof:

Developing with Mercurial on Windows 98

I used a Mercurial 1.1.2 installer downloaded from here. As far as I can tell, none of the downloads from the official site (Mercurial 1.4 and later) work on Win9x—Mercurial installs without complaints, but fails to do anything useful, possibly because of Python incompatibility with Windows 9x.

But Mercurial 1.1.2 works, least on Windows 98 SE and Windows Me. It fails to clone over HTTP on plain Windows 95 because the Python socket module won’t load. There may be a way to upgrade the Windows 95 socket support but that is of limited interest to me given that Windows 98 SE works without tweaking. I have not tried to figure out if and how well other Mercurial versions work, since 1.1.2 did the job I needed.

With the source code on a Windows 98 machine, it’s no problem building it with the Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 compiler, it is just a question of running wmake. Happy hacking!

Posted in Development, Source code, VirtualBox, Watcom, Windows 95 | 18 Comments