Toots for movq@tilde.zone account

Written by movq on 2025-01-31 at 12:48

Mehr #gruen wagen.

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Written by movq on 2025-01-30 at 18:14

Got a bunch of those 5.25" floppies and I’m really surprised by how many of them still work. 😳

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Written by movq on 2025-01-19 at 17:27

[#]ISS (the long “line” on the right) passing Venus and Saturn, and #Jupiter and its moons a few days ago

Not spectacular shots, but hey, it’s something.

Also saw the crescent Venus and Saturn’s rings through my scope (you know, the one for bird watching, not a telescope).

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Written by movq on 2025-01-19 at 11:58

Neat OS/2 feature: The “settings” window of an icon usually shows some generic options. That’s what I’m used to these days. In OS/2, it can also show program-specific settings. The video shows me configuring two launchers for FTP-PM with different connection settings.

Digging deeper into the WPS (e.g., what do I have to do to create such a settings dialog for my own programs) is on my not-necessarily-small TODO list. I’ll get there … eventually.

[#]RetroComputing #OS2 #IBMOS2

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Written by movq on 2025-01-15 at 16:09

Alright, I have a little 8086 assembler for my toy OS going now – or rather a proof-of-concept thereof. It only supports a tiny fraction of the instruction set. It was an interesting learning experience, but I don’t think trying to “complete” this program is worth my time.

The whole thing is just a learning project, I don’t want to actually make a usable OS. There are a few more things I want to have a look at and then I’ll eventually move on to 386/amd64 later this year (hopefully).

[#]RetroComputing

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Written by movq on 2025-01-09 at 16:33

Another thrift store find that breaks my heart a little bit: OS/2 1.2 floppies overwritten with something else. 😅🥴

[#]RetroComputing

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Written by movq on 2024-12-28 at 18:54

After taking a short break for Christmas business, I’ve worked on my little toy operating system for the 8086 again.

It understands the basics of FAT12 now. I’ve actually never sat down before to learn how FAT works. 🤦 Well, better late than never, I guess.

It can’t do subdirectories nor timestamps and I probably won’t implement that. One flat directory is good enough for my purposes and the OS has no notion of time, yet, anyway.

It’s really cool to be able to exchange files with the Linux host or other DOS VMs. 🥳

[#]RetroComputing #Learning

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Written by movq on 2024-12-25 at 06:47

Alrighty, #AdventOfCode 2024 is over – glad I could do the final day on OS/2 again! –, here’s my summary:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-12-25/0/POSTING-en.html

Merry Christmas. 🥳🐧🎅

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Written by movq on 2024-12-24 at 06:28

This was more like an actual puzzle. Staring at a thing and looking for patterns. 😃

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Written by movq on 2024-12-24 at 06:26

Yay! That was cute. Plotting the machine as an SVG and then checking the wires manually actually worked. 🥳

[#]AdventOfCode

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Written by movq on 2024-12-22 at 13:07

I’ve been making a little toy operating system for the 8086 in the last few days. Now that was a lot of fun!

I don’t plan on making that code public. This is purely a learning project for myself. I think going for real-mode 8086 + BIOS is a good idea as a first step. I am well aware that this isn’t going anywhere – but now I’ve gained some experience and learned a ton of stuff, so maybe 32 bit or even 64 bit mode might be doable in the future? We’ll see.

It provides a syscall interface, can launch processes, read/write files (in a very simple filesystem).

Here’s a video where I run it natively on my old Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop (and Warp 3 later in the video, because why not):

https://movq.de/v/893daaa548/los86-p133-warp3.mp4

(Sorry for the skewed video. It’s a glossy display and super hard to film this.)

It starts with the laptop’s boot menu and then boots into the kernel and launches a shell as PID 1. From there, I can launch other processes (anything I enter is a new process, except for the exit at the end) and they return the shell afterwards.

[#]RetroComputing #Learning

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Written by movq on 2024-12-15 at 08:29

Well, some people didn’t like day 14, I didn’t like day 15. 😂 Very straightforward puzzle, mostly just “work” to type it out.

Also, my calendar looks wrong in the browser now. 😱

[#]AdventOfCode

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Written by movq on 2024-12-10 at 10:12

grep doing Unicode, thanks.

1

2

6

߈

8

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Written by movq on 2024-12-09 at 12:08

Dec 09 13:04:31 systemd-logind[728]: Powering off...

Dec 09 13:04:31 systemd-logind[728]: System is powering down.

What are you talking about, I was nowhere near the laptop …

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Written by movq on 2024-12-07 at 10:24

Ported day 6 and 7 from Java to C. The EXE files are 32 bit OS/2 executables. Daily reminder that I love Open Watcom v2 – such an immensely helpful tool for these retro shenanigans. 💚

The ports are pretty straightforward. Same data structures and algorithms. I re-used my AoC framework from last year.

Results (Pentium 133, OS/2 Warp 4, IBM Java 1.0.1):

FTR, these are the runtimes of the same Java programs when run on my i7-3770 from 2013 with OpenJDK 23:

day06/2 ... [00:00:00.117] Result: [1812]

day07/1 ... [00:00:00.008] Result: [28730327770375]

day07/2 ... [00:00:00.157] Result: [424977609625985]

I’ll leave it at that.

(cc @mms)

[#]AdventOfCode #RetroComputing

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Written by movq on 2024-12-04 at 16:58

Damnit, my normal modern keyboard doesn’t have an “Insert” key anymore, because apparently this is an archaic function now. It’s a split keyboard and I actually like this thing a lot, but a missing “Insert” key means trouble in DOS and especially OS/2. 🥴 Can’t even do copy-and-paste (Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Insert).

[#]DOS #OS2

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Written by movq on 2024-12-01 at 06:06

LOL, what a start.

I thought I had prepared well enough and then I noticed: Wait a minute, Java 1 does not have a library function for sorting stuff.

So, day 1 meant implementing a sorting algorithm for me. 🤦

And it’s … slow. I doubt that later puzzles will be runnable on my Pentium. 🫤

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Written by movq on 2024-12-01 at 06:03

🧵 for #AdventOfCode with Java 1 on OS/2 Warp 4

[#]RetroComputing

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Written by movq on 2024-11-30 at 09:07

Some more flightsim this morning. Moved on to FS2000 running in a Win2k VM. It’s much more impressive but also very power hungry (still runs faster in this VM than it did on my PC back then).

And it goes downhill from here, because I now had to fight the “copy protection”. 🙄 Guess I’ll stick to FS4/FS5, running them in DOSBox is much easier.

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Written by movq on 2024-11-30 at 05:24

Those early flight simulators were very “flat”. The ground didn’t have any 3D structure. So when you flew “up a hill”, the entire ground would come closer to you. 😅 And actual mountains were additional polygons on top of that flat surface.

[#]Retrogaming #DOSGaming #Flightsimulator

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