GNU Chess ’87

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I am not much of a chess player. That said one thing that has annoyed me to no end is GNU Chess 1.2. Over on bitsavers is this fun directory:

And despite being a treasure trove of ancient GNU software, I have never been able to get GNU Chess to do much of anything. At best it’ll give the Chess prompt, and then it’ll either crash (good!) or worst case it just exits silently with no reason given.

I have put only minimal effort into debugging it, and really got nowhere. I don’t know why this is such a tough beast to deal with, or why I even care. As I mentioned above, I’m not much of a chess player.

But for some reason this time around I thought I’d try the earliest release quality Visual C++ to build it. I wasn’t expecting much, however for some reason this ancient version seems to run.

I had to enable a few things such as the RANDOM & HASH to make it look like it wants to play. I ended up having to make some changes after a draw or victory as the ‘self playing mode’would keep going. Not sure what’s going on there, and I added a line at the end of the logic loop to always print the board, so at least you can see what is going on if you have it playing itself.

With that said this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen:

  White Black Depth  Nodes  Score    Cpu     Rate
1. e2e4 e7e5      4   5793      0   0.00      1
2. d2d4 b8c6      4      0      0   0.00      0
3. d4e5 c6e5      4  17966      0   0.00      1
4. g1f3 b7b6      4      0      0   0.00      0
5. f3e5 f8c5      4 487931   -325   0.00      1
6. d1d5 c5b4      4 2079943   -425   1.00      2079943
7. e1d1 a7a6      4      0    775   0.00      0
8. d5f7           4 161840   4525   0.00      1
Averages:  4.00 ply, 550695 nodes,  0.20 cpu, 2753473 nodes/sec

Given I don’t have any good rusage emulation going on (I know its in MinGW at some point, and I probably can find it, and get it running on MSVC but I don’t see that as important) an 8 move victory seems pretty… unlikely?

Maybe it’s a good test of other C compilers to see if they produce anything. Or maybe it’s all a red herring? I haven’t tested with much but GCC 1.40 can’t even run it on x86. Watcom 10 can build, but it crashes during a self game.

It’s one of those mysteries, that I’m sure there is some fundamental lesson, but I’m not sure what it is.

Other than it’s a long way down, standing on the shoulders of giants.

I put the source & exe over on github. Not that I expect any takers.

On the trail of PCC for the 8086

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While on discord the topic came up of why there is no good/free C compiler for MS-DOS. Oh sure there is OpenWatcom but the 2 heavy hitters of the era, Microsoft C & Borland C are not open in the slightest.

There is DeSmet C, although it’s source is full of unnamed structs meaning that building it with anything sane would require a ‘lot of work ™’ which of course is not what I’m all that about. Instead, I remembered a directory up on TUHS /Applications/Portable_CC with a zip file 8086.zip Although this is a zip file, you’ll want to unzip on something Unix-y as there is a lot of case duplicate files. That said this is a PCC port to the 8086, which includes a libc, 8087 support, and is all expected to be built on a VAX-11/780 running 4.1BSD. Now this ended up being a stumbling block because I tried a *LOT* of things thinking that they were upwards compatible with 4.1, and the answer is USE 4.1!

So to effectively get going you’ll need a SIMH VAX780 and just follow my old steps on Installing 4.1BSD. As far as the zip file, I used Linux but had to create a tar file specifying the Unix v7 format with:

tar --format=v7 -cf pcc.tar .

And of course, convert the tar file to a simh tap file. Or if you are like me, just download a tap file here: PCC-Machines.tap.bz2.

With that said it’s a very strange setup as it relies on the 4.1BSD Vax environment so much that there is assembly injected into the linker. 

asm("movc3 r8,(r11),(r7)");

So this will not cleanly run. Just as it depends on many system a.out specifics on building for MS-DOS. It’s not so much a MS-DOS tool chain, rather it outputs to vax a.out and uses a slightly modified vax linker. The MS-DOS magic happens in the conversion of the final a.out into a com file.

That is right it’s a VAX specific cross compiler that only build’s COM files.

I’ve managed to build some trivial stuff, and they work. Sadly my attempt at building that InfoTaskforce of ’87 failed.

I haven’t dug that much further into the linker although I have to wonder if a GNU cross linker to make a.out could make something that the conversion program would be happy with. The assembler of course doesn’t work, perhaps it’s something with packing structs?

As always, the simple stuff looks trivial but it was a fair bit involved.

Since there is no real ‘cc’ it’s a script but the vauge steps are:

/lib/cpp -I/usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/lib86/include hi.c hi.i
/usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/c86/c86 < hi.i > hi.a86
/usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/a86/a86 hi
/usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/a86/ld86 -X -N -r -o hi.out /usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/lib86/crt0.b hi.b /usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/lib86/libc.a 
/usr/src/pcc/Machines/8086/a86/cvt86 hi.out hi.com

It kind of makes sense.

Seems like somehow a lost opportunity in of itself back in the day

Extracting warc files

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well since the catastrauphic outage, I’ve been looking through my backups trying to see how much of my ‘vpsland’ archive I have. And it’s not so hot. The good news is the physical machine that has the last known good copy is fine. It’s just in a place I can’t get to on the other side of the world. And I’m still in exile so shipping it really isn’t an option at the moment.

On the plus side I found a warc archive, some 22GB of the 400GB worth of files. So its a start.

So what are WARC files? why do people gzip them to get maybe 1% compression? How do magnets work anyways?

web archives are single snapshots in time of a site. Sounds like a MHT but something more ‘portable’ and open standard-ish. Which means there is a million tools, none of which seem to do exactly what you want.

All I want to do is extract all my files from the WARC, but that seems to not be what most things are geared to, mostly displaying the WARC like a web page, which means clicking hundreds of thousands of files. –yikes

Thankfully warcat seems to be able to fit the bill

python3 -m warcat extract ../user-giddythrill28@vpsland.superglobalmegacorp.com-old-install-2015-10-04-fc233ad0-00000.warc.gz

I didn’t see any package on Ubuntu so did the pip install:

pip3 install warcat

And that seems to have done the trick.

Now to figure out how to setup some cheap storage on azure and copy this stuff up or extract over there.

spot pricing

I’m using the new ‘spot‘ pricing model, to try to keep costs down. Obviously it’s not as good as dedicated slices, but it’ll not make me broke either. And I have a lot more messing around with containers to do, trying to string together nonsense.

Windows scp to remote machines with spaces in the directories

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Well one nice thing about Windows 10 is that it has a built in ssh/scp client! Although telnet is optional, I get that it’s insecure but jeez what is a retro user to do?

Anyways the subject at hand is copying files from somewhere that has spaces in the path. In this case I need a copy of OS X Snow Leopard from my Mac Pro cylinder to this junk Fujitsu Celsius. I’m still having USB issues, but I’d like to get my data off of an external disk formatted in HFS+. And for ‘reasons’ I wanted to use something “native” but I don’t feel like building a Hackintosh. While not a strict tutorial on getting Snow Leopard running, I did upload my old download of Empire EFI on archive.org as this kind of stuff is damned near impossible to find.

So back to the matter at hand, I have this VM setup on my Mac Pro, and I want it on this Windows machine. You’d think it would be something like this:

scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual Machines.localized/OSX 10.6/*" .
Password:
scp: /Users/neozeed/Virtual: No such file or directory
scp: Machines.localized/OSX: No such file or directory
scp: 10.6/*: No such file or directory

Okay so double quotes didn’t work. How about a Unix style escape for spaces? I mean it *is* scp after all, maybe it doesn’t know it’s on Windows.

C:\osx>scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual\ Machines.localized/OSX\ 10.6/*" .
Password:
scp: /Users/neozeed/Virtual: No such file or directory
scp: Machines.localized/OSX: No such file or directory
scp: 10.6/*: No such file or directory

Well maybe it parses it like C, so you need double backslash? NO that doesn’t work either. Talk about frustrating. So, in an act of insanity, I tried single quoting the interior spaces around double quotes, something idiotic like a bash variable:

C:\osx>scp -C [email protected]:"/Users/neozeed/Virtual' 'Machines.localized/OSX' '10.6/*" .
Password:
Mac OS Snow Leopard.vmdk                                                               69%   11GB  16.0MB/s   05:16 ETA

And yes, now it’s transferring. I’m just using a cheap 50zt 5 port 100Mbit dumb switch. It’s good enough and it’ll probably take some 30 minutes to transfer all the bits, but it’s working.

So there you go. You may not need it now, or tomorrow but it’ll save you the 20 minutes of frustration!

So there has been a problem

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Iรขโ‚ฌโ„ขve been on the road for a few months, basically in exile. Iรขโ‚ฌโ„ขve downsized my once large online presence to a desktop in an office Iรขโ‚ฌโ„ขm still obligated to for rent and internet. So my i7 workstation had been up to the task, although it seems I didnรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt have the right power settings to turn back on from a power failure.

So now Iรขโ‚ฌโ„ขm faced with a stale backup as i canรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt find my currents. so yeah content has been lost. So i also donรขโ‚ฌโ„ขt want to race back to a single point of failure, so once more again Iรขโ‚ฌโ„ขm going to try a cloud. Microsoft keeps sending me these $200 trial things so i thought I would try it. There is a large learning curve about their networks , and deployments. although there is a bunch of รขโ‚ฌยshake and bakeรขโ‚ฌย deployments to speed things along. As always the key is reading the documents.

I still have a lot of stuff to upload, so for the moment the database is restored but there is a lot of messing around needed for the the old layout.

So appologies for the mess.

Special thanks for Tenox for helping me with all kinds of issues, and support from my muse.

Its always darker before its bright, and its already getting dark in northern Europe.

IBM AIX for IA64 (Itanium) aka Project Monterey runs again!

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(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 processor – it totally failed. In the end Linux took spot of the “single Unix OS”. IBM donated pieces of AIX to Linux instead and the main legacy of Project Monterey was the famous SCO vs IBM lawsuit.

A little known fact, 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 were trying to locate a copy of the legendary OS. As time passed it seemed that the OS was lost forever.

…until some 21 years later friends of NCommander checked in with a set of AIX5L IA64 CDROMS! The CDs have now been dumped and you can download them here. Unfortunately downloading will not get you any closer to actually running this. As of today no publicly available virtualization or emulation platform can boot this. Yes we tried Simics, looked at QEMU IA64 and XEN/KVM for IA64, etc. The OS will not boot on modern Itanium 2 (McKinley) CPUs, only the early “pre-release” Itanium 1 aka Merced. The only emulator allegedly capable of doing so was the super elusive unobtanium called Intel SoftSDV.

It’s currently speculated that AIX5L IA64 will work on and only on so called Intel Software Development Vehicle (SDV) sometimes referred to as Intel Engineering Sample. You can see the original system overview here.

Intel Engineering Sample, image courtesy @RetroHoosk
Intel Engineering Sample, image courtesy @RetroHoosk

Later SDV was sold under several OEM branded versions: IBM IntelliStation Z Pro 6894, HP i2000 Workstation, SGI 750, Dell Precision Workstation 730 and Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius 880. They all look alike because all of them were in fact produced by Intel.

Intel Itanium Software Development Vehicle Lineup

The IBM Z pro is probably most suitable for running AIX. Finding one of these is no easy task. Luckily I was able to score a working HP i2000. Surprisingly AIX IA64 booted on a first try. The install went smoothly and I was able to log in!

AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation – boot loader
AIX 5L IA64 on HP i2000 Workstation – logged in

The OS feels like a standard AIX 5L. Nothing particularly special about it, except that it runs on Itanium. This RedBook outlines differences between the Power and IA64 versions. A few most interesting facts are that: Itanium AIX uses ELF object files. There is a new device driver model called UDI (Uniform Device Interface) with it’s own DDK. It came from SCO UnixWare. Also according early adopters guide, AIX5L IA64 introduces JFS2 file system.

Initially I was not able to get the onboard NIC working. AIX5L IA64 supports only two network cards:

adapter 23100020 IBM 10/100 Mbps Ethernet PCI Adapter (23100020)
adapter ae120200 10/100/1000 Base-T Ethernet PCI Adapter (ae120200)

The AIX Itanium Early Adopters Release Notes mentions a few other cards but I do not see drivers for these in the OS. The doc mentions Extended Hardware Drivers CD which we don’t have.

Luckily again I was able to find a working NIC on eBay!

The system comes with X11 and CDE but so far I was not able to get any GPU working beyond basic text mode. I tried many different video cards from that era but there simply doesn’t appear to be any driver in the OS except for basic VGA / LFT. I think the key to getting video working is the previously mentioned extended hardware drivers cd.

Finally, if you want to read more I have found some interesting pieces on ibmfiles and various mirrors here and here.

Update: Thanks to efforts of TRN we now have a working GCC and ports of lots of apps!

Update 2: After going through a pile of video cards I now have local X11 and CDE!

AIX IA64 local X11 with CDE

This was the lucky winner:

Update 3: SimCity is now available for AIX IA64! You will also need other stuff mentioned here.

Happy 4th of July!

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No kaboom!

Shockingly no explosions, I was recapping stuff to notice that the PSU I’m using is sliced. Of course a 35 year old PSU runs better. I need some transistors, and maybe some diodes, but I don’t have good access to any at the moment. So weird how 80’s DRAM could need +12/+5/-5v to operate. Oh well.