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 | 25 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

WordSet: Stolen Without Compensation

Posted on June 21, 2022 by Michal Necasek

A kind reader from a land formerly beyond the Iron Curtain recently supplied the OS/2 Museum with a curious word processor that calls itself WordSet. The files unfortunately lost their original timestamps quite some time ago, but it is apparent that this editor was released in the late 1980s, with copyright messages in different files referring to 1986 and 1988.

The editor runs on DOS, but there appears to have been a CP/M variant available as well, as evidenced by this manual (photo from an auction):

WordSet for CP/M manual

When the DOS version of WordSet (WS.COM) is started, the user is greeted by a screen that may look more than a little familiar:

WordSet main menu

It is not difficult to see that WordSet is really WordStar, superficially renamed and with user visible text translated to Czech.

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Posted in Editors, I18N, PC history, WordStar | 29 Comments

Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+

Posted on June 6, 2022 by Michal Necasek

The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox. The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern hardware.

Windows 95 in a usable resolution

I’d like to say that it was easy to adapt the existing Windows NT video miniport driver for Windows 9x… but of course it wasn’t. The Windows 9x display driver model is completely different and has nothing in common with NT. The Windows 9x display driver has much more in common with Windows 3.1 (and 3.0 and 2.x) drivers, and it has clearly directly evolved from those older drivers.

So what makes it a “minidriver”? A Windows 2.x/3.x display driver has to implement a very significant chunk of GDI. Bit blits, lines, text output. There is a lot of cases to handle and a great deal of complexity. To give some sense of the complexity, the Windows 3.1 DDK sample driver for Video 7 cards is about 1.6 MB (circa 60,000 lines) of assembler source code. And that’s just for 8bpp displays.

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Posted in Development, VirtualBox, Watcom, Windows 95 | 66 Comments

Compaq EGA Technical Reference Guide

Posted on June 1, 2022 by Michal Necasek

A rater nice Compaq EGA Tech Ref recently turned up on archive.org, under the title COMPAQ Enhanced Color Graphics Board Technical Reference Guide. It’s from December 1986, relatively late in EGA’s life (given that it was about to be obsoleted by the VGA in just a few months), and it is rather good.

The Compaq Tech Ref is significantly more detailed and in-depth than the IBM Tech Ref. On the other hand, IBM supplied a BIOS listing which is very valuable, both when interfacing with the BIOS itself and when trying to understand certain details of the hardware. Compaq documented the BIOS well and provided nice examples, but that’s not the same as the actual source code. As is often the case, looking at both references is best.

Posted in Compaq, Documentation, PC history | Leave a comment

NT video miniport UHD

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Michal Necasek

I’ve finally managed to update the previously released NT video miniport. The reason for the update was indirect, hacking up the video “hardware” access code to support other environments. That led me to separate the generic mode set code from the mode table oriented logic. Since the NT miniport does not need the mode tables, the resulting boxvideo.sys is now about 1 KB smaller without losing any functionality.

VirtualBox NT video miniport driver, now at version 1.6

As before, the miniport should run on any x86 version of NT from 3.1 up to 7, with the caveat that for NT 3.x, the user has to supply FRAMEBUF.DLL from the NT installation media (see included README file). Also for NT 3.1 only, the installation and mode selection process is different from later versions.

At some previous point, so long ago that I don’t even remember, I expanded the list of supported modes to go up to 5,120×2,880 pixels. This is not extensively tested because I don’t have such a large display, but at first glance it does not appear to be completely broken.

Get the updated driver here. The source code can be viewed here.

Posted in NT, VirtualBox | 5 Comments