Next up....a....BeBOX!

[wierd_w]

21 hours ago, zzip said:

I've tried.   I use the alternate Loki libraries,  put all sorts of LD_ prefixes in front of the executable..  the stuff that works for the other games.

 

I do hold out hope that it's possible, so I'm open to suggestions.

I got it working on xubuntu 20.4 lts at one point.

 

The game assumes the bit flavor is 32bit, and is not multiarch aware. It will bomb, complaining about being unable to load pulse audio.

 

The fix is a dirty kludge; install the i386 pulse libraries, then make a custom symlink pointing to the 32bit library, in the main lib folder. Use the LD prefix to point at that symlink.

 

It should work after that.

[eightbit]

Give it a try on my (really old now, circa 2016) Sparky Linux distro!

 

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bruce-s-custom-sparky-gnome/

 

Not sure if it will work fine there, but I did add everything including the kitchen sink to this custom spin and was able to run everything I ever tried on it. I completely forgot I made this to be honest....

 

 

[zzip]

On 6/15/2022 at 8:38 AM, wierd_w said:

I got it working on xubuntu 20.4 lts at one point.

 

The game assumes the bit flavor is 32bit, and is not multiarch aware. It will bomb, complaining about being unable to load pulse audio.

 

The fix is a dirty kludge; install the i386 pulse libraries, then make a custom symlink pointing to the 32bit library, in the main lib folder. Use the LD prefix to point at that symlink.

 

It should work after that.

Thanks I'll take a look.   The 32bit issue makes sense, it probably stopped working once I went full 64-bit.  I do have a set of 32-bit libraries that I keep in a directory called Loki_Compat that work for other games,  but sounds EUS needs others not present there.

[MrMaddog]

On 6/14/2022 at 9:48 AM, zzip said:

I have Eric's Ultimate Solitaire for Linux.    

It was ported by a company named Loki.   Unfortunately EUS is the only Loki game that I can't get running on a modern Linux system.   To play it, I'd probably need to spin up a VM with a Linux distro from the early 2000s

The problem is that Linux distros are always changing but not the old Loki games.

 

I bought a used copy of Q3A from a music store (of all places) and ran it with no problems on Ubuntu...until I updated 8-point-something and the game stopped working!  It couldn't use the newer package dependicies.

 

I was lucky enough to find an open source port of Q3A to use instead but there's plenty of old Loki games that don't have source ports to use on modern systems.

 

[eightbit]

As I recall with my distro I have also installed the i386 dependencies (its been years, but I believe I did) which I did intentionally to keep support with a bunch of applications and emulators that were written for 32-bit. It might be worth trying to run it on my spin...might work.

[zzip]

4 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

The problem is that Linux distros are always changing but not the old Loki games.

 

I bought a used copy of Q3A from a music store (of all places) and ran it with no problems on Ubuntu...until I updated 8-point-something and the game stopped working!  It couldn't use the newer package dependicies.

 

I was lucky enough to find an open source port of Q3A to use instead but there's plenty of old Loki games that don't have source ports to use on modern systems.

 

I have a few of the Loki games working on Ubuntu 20:  Sim City 3000 Unlimited,  Heretic II, Railroad Tycoon 2

 

This page gives helpful information to get some of the games working:

http://www.improbability.net/loki/

 

But for many of the games, it is probably easier to get the Windows version of the game running under WINE than it is to resurrect the Loki port

[MrMaddog]

19 hours ago, zzip said:

But for many of the games, it is probably easier to get the Windows version of the game running under WINE than it is to resurrect the Loki port

 

Ugh, that is one can of worms I don't want to re-open cause using WINE is a PITA!

 

I've heard some good things about using Proton (Steam's version of WINE) with Vulkan drivers though but I don't have a Linux setup to try it out.

[eightbit]

Getting back on topic I have been working on the BeBox behind the scenes for a few weeks now. It all started with a case and Biostar i440BX chipset based motherboard. The board was dead and many of the caps were blown. I recapped it and it works again. I posted about that in another thread.

 

Anyway, it is functioning perfectly in BeOS 5 Professional for the most part. I originally tried an ISA sound card (Crystal based) and while that worked there was some weird choppy sound happening. I read that the SB Live! series is compatible with BeOS so I swapped it and now it sounds great!

 

The video is a tough one. Of all of the cards I have the only cards that natively display in full color with high resolutions are the ATI 3D Rage Pro cards (I have three of these) but their performance sucks as the driver in BeOS has no hardware acceleration. I could not find an external driver that allows it either. So, while it looks great the performance in games sucks. I know there is a hardware accelerated driver for the TNT/TNT2 cards for this that will fix that problem, so I ordered a 32MB AGP TNT2 online. Thankfully the card is not very sought after so it only cost me $9

 

You will notice two Voodoo2's in SLI in here. There is an experimental V2 driver for Be somewhere online I may try, but those are really there for the Win98 side. This machine will also of course be used for Windows 98 early 2000's gaming too. I am not wasting it all on just BeOS...lol! But it is good that the machine is now compatible. It is the only machine I have that will actually fully launch the stock BeOS 5 Pro install CD, fully install it and launch to the desktop without any issue.

 

And, as the 40GB IDE Spinmaster HDD I had in here died two days ago I decided to try one of these cheap SD to IDE solutions. I am fairly impressed. It is not the fastest device in the world (it runs at around 25MB/s) but it works fine, BIOS sees it fine. I tested a 128GB microSD card as well as an 8GB microSD card. FDISK sees it, BeOS installer sees it...it just works. It is mounted to the bottom of the case with some insane "extreme 10lb" Scotch velco strips. These strips are nuts. It was touch to get on, and I'll tell you I'd have to give it definitely at least 10lbs of pull to get the sucker off! Thats OK...that is actually just what I wanted. The strips allow it also to stand off of the case more than enough as to not short anything.

 

Anyway, that's where I am at this point.

[Osgeld]

Yea, the TNT and TNT2 and Vanta and the other 9 thousand variants were really decent cards at the time, but they ended up in every slop box and OEM machine ever made so there's a gazillion of them out there. In the early 2000's I honestly had a entire shoebox made for hiking boots full of the things and it started to get to the point where it was hard to give them away (course I worked for a computer "factory" refurb house at the time, they couldnt get rid of them either, geforce had been a thing and GF2 MX's started to replace them)  

[eightbit]

1 hour ago, Osgeld said:

Yea, the TNT and TNT2 and Vanta and the other 9 thousand variants were really decent cards at the time, but they ended up in every slop box and OEM machine ever made so there's a gazillion of them out there. In the early 2000's I honestly had a entire shoebox made for hiking boots full of the things and it started to get to the point where it was hard to give them away (course I worked for a computer "factory" refurb house at the time, they couldnt get rid of them either, geforce had been a thing and GF2 MX's started to replace them)  

 

Its funny as I remember having tons of them myself. But now when I look at my stash, I have a LOT of ATI. My brother is moving and dropped off boxes of crap for me to sell (or keep) and in those boxes I found even more old ATI cards. Its like the cockroach of video cards...lol!

[zzip]

On 6/18/2022 at 5:44 PM, MrMaddog said:

Ugh, that is one can of worms I don't want to re-open cause using WINE is a PITA!

 

I've heard some good things about using Proton (Steam's version of WINE) with Vulkan drivers though but I don't have a Linux setup to try it out.

Yeah I had a bad impression of Wine too.   But I've been experimenting with it recently and found it's less of a pain than it used to be.  I've been using WINEPREFIXes so that each game can have it's own customized settings (if needed).   And Wine's AppDB will give you a good idea of what games work and how well, along with any hints to get them working.

 

Haven't messed with Proton yet, but it sounds promising, especially if it's good enough for Steam Deck.   

[wierd_w]

Lutris is able to front-end prefixes quite nicely, and has a GUI to prod settings fairly easily. Even a front-end to call winetricks GUI on a per-prefix basis.

 

It can also utilize different versions of WINE, including versions of proton (and forks of proton, like Glorious Eggroll)

[Osgeld]

22 hours ago, eightbit said:

 

Its funny as I remember having tons of them myself. But now when I look at my stash, I have a LOT of ATI. My brother is moving and dropped off boxes of crap for me to sell (or keep) and in those boxes I found even more old ATI cards. Its like the cockroach of video cards...lol!

side topic, if you have any agp cards that can be modded for mac I wouldn't mind getting an upgrade for my G4 ?

 

Spoiler

GeForce 2/3/4 
GeForce 5200/5500
GeForce 6200 
GeForce 6600/6600GT 
GeForce 6800/GT/Ultra 
GeForce 7800GS 
Radeon 7000/7500 
Radeon 8500/9000 
Radeon 9200 
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9500/9700/9800
Radeon X800/X850 
 

 

Edited June 21, 2022 by Osgeld

[eightbit]

1 hour ago, Osgeld said:

side topic, if you have any agp cards that can be modded for mac I wouldn't mind getting an upgrade for my G4 ?

 

  Hide contents

GeForce 2/3/4 
GeForce 5200/5500
GeForce 6200 
GeForce 6600/6600GT 
GeForce 6800/GT/Ultra 
GeForce 7800GS 
Radeon 7000/7500 
Radeon 8500/9000 
Radeon 9200 
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9500/9700/9800
Radeon X800/X850 
 

 

 

 

Hmm, I only have (in AGP form) a few 3D Rage Pro cards. I have a Radeon 9800 but that is being used in my P4 machine And, I have a Radeon 7000...but it is PCI.

 

I think I also have a Rage 128 AGP...but that is not on your list.

 

 

[zzip]

11 hours ago, Osgeld said:

side topic, if you have any agp cards that can be modded for mac I wouldn't mind getting an upgrade for my G4 ?

 

  Reveal hidden contents

GeForce 2/3/4 
GeForce 5200/5500
GeForce 6200 
GeForce 6600/6600GT 
GeForce 6800/GT/Ultra 
GeForce 7800GS 
Radeon 7000/7500 
Radeon 8500/9000 
Radeon 9200 
Radeon 9600
Radeon 9500/9700/9800
Radeon X800/X850 
 

 

I have a Radeon 9600pro and a GeForce 5500.  PM me if interested 

[Osgeld]

11 hours ago, zzip said:

I have a Radeon 9600pro and a GeForce 5500.  PM me if interested 

might be, neither one of those has native support OS9 out of the box, I will PM you 

 

22 hours ago, eightbit said:

 

 

Hmm, I only have (in AGP form) a few 3D Rage Pro cards. I have a Radeon 9800 but that is being used in my P4 machine And, I have a Radeon 7000...but it is PCI.

 

I think I also have a Rage 128 AGP...but that is not on your list.

 

 

yea I have a Rage 128 in there now, I got one of the "rare" honest to god 667Mhz models they only made for 2 months ... its a sh..box and was missing the GPU so I had the rage it works its ... a rage 128 

 

anyway thanks for looking both of you, and that's enough derailing from me 

[eightbit]

Back to the hard drive solutions. I have been using the SD to IDE board and while it works fine, it just feels slow. I have not tested the speeds yet, but I can tell sometimes things are quick, sometimes slow loading. I have tested various SD cards in it so I guess it is what it is. It is usable, but I wanted to try something else too.

 

I tested this device today:

 

https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Female-SATA-Adapter-Converter/dp/B001PYSAJI

 

It plugs directly into the IDE port on the motherboard provided you have the clearance that is I do so I ordered one. And it works great! I stuck an engineering sample SSD drive from my company in it to see what it would do and it actually reads off the SSD drive name itself on bootup. Its a 240GB and it reads it as such however the BIOS is limited to 130GB so that is what is allowed for partitioning. Still, lots of BeOS and Win98 space.

 

Only issue I see is that there is no HDD LED activity with this plugged in. I am not sure if it is a faulty board (I ordered another to test), a limitation of the board, or perhaps a HDD LED header needs to be added. The board has a "JP1" unpopulated 3-pin area but I cannot find what that is for in any of the reference material either in the box or online. So, who knows.

 

If anyone has any clue or has used this particular device before please let me know.

 

Otherwise, I like it...a lot!

 

EDIT: Looks like JP1 is a switch for host mode or device mode now that I am looking closer. Oh well..

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by eightbit

[wierd_w]

SD card is not intended for 512 byte sectors, is the deal.

 

Its meant for closer to 4mb sectors.

[eightbit]

22 hours ago, wierd_w said:

SD card is not intended for 512 byte sectors, is the deal.

 

Its meant for closer to 4mb sectors.

 

Still it works well for what it is. I might just use it as extra storage (if I even need that) down the road. Right now this Startech device works wonders. I have the system dual booting BeOS and Windows 98 now and the SSD is chopped up in such a way that I have around 26GB for Win98, 80GB for game storage, and another 24GB for BeOS. As BeOS offers a nice simple bootloader/OS selector, I am using it (it is called bootman) and it works perfectly.

 

The version of BeOS I decided to go with is BeOS 5 PE Max Edition v4. It is BeOS 5 personal edition modified with updated drivers and tons of software. I could have installed BeOS 5 Pro and installed software on my own, but this version is really the best way to get everything you would ever want (and then some) in a painless way. It has a bunch of games and ports (like Doom, Hexen, Rott, etc) and all of the software you would want to do just about anything out of the box in BeOS. Really well put together OS and software collection.

 

 

[wierd_w]

Properly used with a filesystem that can make effective use of it (ExFAT being the industry go-to, but EXT4 and BTRFS can both use it effectively when set up right), SDCard is both cheap, and reasonably performant.  You just have to keep its limited write life in mind.

 

Your SATA->IDE bridge is by far a better solution though.

[Osgeld]

sd cards can be intended for 512 byte sectors, but nothing BUT 100% OG bare bones models, I had them running full blast with 512 byte sectors back in the day when I ported the Apple virtual serial drive to Arduino as a lark (and sold a handful) which is great when your os max can handle 32 Meg 

 

but for the reality of the day, SD to anything post 8 bit kind of sucks. Even on PI3b I did a comparison (a few years ago)  I got a inexpensive Samsung card at dollar general that had HDCXCHDMI blah blah blah amazon reviews says it goes so fast that plaid was out of style! A 2gig 5400 rpm OEM comity Toshiba from 20 years ago was above 10% faster though a USB 2.0 adapter... the thing you are putting the ultra badass sd card into has to be able to exploit the features it provides or you are going to have a bad day.

 

sata to IDE adapters are much less offensive in terms of speed (ultimately up to your system and OS) cause they talk the same language, but if your not sitting on a stash of sata SSD's, they do make IDE SSD's.  Kingspec is one I have used in automotive industrial applications for over a decade and not one has failed me, though in standard desktop form they tend to lean to the small capacity "disk on module format" where you plug a cart into your ide slot and off you go. I have 2, 2.5 inch 64 gig models in my G4, but they are 44 pin so a "laptop to desktop" adapter is needed, which is most common. 

 

going back to system and OS, there is a point of diminishing returns, for example my G4 powermac, OS 10.4 screams like a bat out of hell using the IDE SSD, 9.2... I replaced it with a IDE barracuda 160 gig ide drive and the difference, outside of noise, was measurable, but not significant 

 

 

[wierd_w]

Boring technical prattle about sdcards

 

Spoiler

SDCard is its own interface format. In addition to the highspeed modes which need an asic to drive, they DO have a 'bitbang' mode, but that is.. ahem.. not what is intended here.

 

While often placed on a USB 2.0 interface, modern sdcard can go much much faster. Typically, with a modern card, your performance is being tanked by the ~20mb/sec max throughput of that transport.  When it is a pci based solution, or a usb3.0 based solution, the speed not hobbled by the transport. (Such as with the asic based solutions in high speed cameras)

 

SDcard media is a very 'cheap' multi-cell flash design. It combines a multi cell flash array with a small sram, and a built in microcontroller with an operating rom.

 

Different generations of sdcard were designed with different 'array width' sizes in mind.  Prior to SDXC, the SDCard Assn. Was just fine recommending FAT file systems with reasonably large cluster sizes, as those sizes reasonably matched up with the width of the multi cell array underneath; anything from 2kb to 32kb, depending on the module.

 

Modern SDCard, with their advertised speeds of 133mb/sec or greater,  and very large capacities, have a write width that is closer to 4mb in size. This is way beyond the pale of normal FAT, but eXFAT can define allocation units that size. That is why the SDCard Assn. wants you to use eXFAT on those cards, and why they come preformatted with that filesystem.

 

Why does this matter?

 

The entire width of the array is the minimum granularity it can be updated in, because the whole 'sector' has to be wiped, then written again, on update.

 

The maximum throughput is achieved when the entire width is written in one go.  With older PC filesystems, that assume a 512 byte logical sector size, this results in blocks getting 'read-erase-modified' an excessive number of times, instead of just once.

 

This murders the flash array's longevity, ties up the built in controller, and slows sequential writes to a crawl.

 

The FSs I mentioned can be coaxed to cache up and commit blocks that are consistent with the width of the array. This makes them reasonably performant, even on shit SDCard media. (Again, assuming you are not getting slowed down by a slow transport) Getting the full advertised speed is entirely possible.

 

NTFS and co, cannot be coaxed that way. This is why an ntfs formatted sdcard is painfully slow.

 

 

These sata->ide bridges still provide 512 byte or 4096 byte hardware sectors, and the transport is already pretty fast. A modern sata drive will be waiting on the ide drive to do stuff,

[eightbit]

Just a small update that the BeBox rig is near complete. Lots have changed and for a lot of reasons I will get into when I post the final pictures of the build and explain the decisions I have made and why. 

 

And I will say that just as it was over 20 years ago BeOS is a **JOY** to use! Sure it is dated and does not do many things you would want to do today (although it does still hold its own) but for what it does do it does it so very well. Amazing how much more advanced the OS was over anything (in my opinion of course) for the time. Even now it is quite polished. Super happy to be able to use native BeOS 5.0.3 Pro in a rig again. And yes, I went from "BeOS Max PE" back to the stock BeOS 5 for some reasons that I will also get into when I post the final build pictures.

 

This build was truly a labor of love....my love for this excellent operating system of days gone by.

[eightbit]

Well, a major setback in the build. It appears the motherboard still has some problems even after the recap. Some really strange things happening. For one, use of soundcards. The sound is crackly when soundcards are used in almost every port. Only the sound is somewhat clear when the very first PCI sound is used (with a SBLive for example) and even then it pops and cracks here and there. 

 

And it is not the sound card. I have tried many (both ISA and PCI) with similar results. 

 

Joysticks do not work correctly either. My Sidewinders are not detected at all. If I try normal two button game pads the calibration is jumping like crazy all over the place. And, it is not the controllers either.

 

So, something is "polling" the bus and doing strange things. I have removed every card except the sound and video which is needed of course...same thing. 

 

I also noticed that the BIOS is "slow". It is not as responsive as a normal BIOS should be. POST and HDD detection is slow as well.

 

 

Well, again this board was given away to me for free as "not working" so I shouldn't have expected any less. I did get it to work somewhat, but I am done with this thing. I found a cheap ($20) NOS Gainward VIA Apollo Pro Plus chipset based Pentium II slot 1 board and ordered it. Not the chipset I wanted (Intel BX) but it was cheap enough and it is brand new with no cap issues. It's got to be better than what I am dealing with now and I couldn't complain about the price. This should still work fine with BeOS as far as I can see.

 

 

[Osgeld]

not to poop on your taco but it could still have cap issues just from age, depends on how it was stored. But yea the board you are currently trying to use sounds like it has "something" wrong with it.... causing buss hogging issues or maybe something tripping an interrupt constantly / randomly 

 

random thought, does it have any tantalum's?

Edited July 7, 2022 by Osgeld