Lucas Brooks

@shanselman @_h0x0d_ @jeffsponaugle @rozzie @jeffwilcox Old source code... from Ray Ozzie!!! Are those disk by any chance... these (from youtube.com/watch?v=33I3G3…)🫣?

Had a FANTASTIC day, got 40 year old source code off two 5 1/4" disks and running on an original IBM PC XT *and* on PCem with the help of @jeffsponaugle and @rozzie. Next steps, work with @jeffwilcox and share with you! Got lots of video and binaries. Lovely.

@stkirsch Hi there, Steve! I'm a Windows 1.0 researcher and your Usenet post from 1983 about the early Windows demo (utzoo.superglobalmegacorp.com/usenet/news007…) caught my attention. Curious if you remember any details about that build or if you might have any artifacts like disks/manuals?

I made a toolchain for this build, and now we can finally compile apps for the earliest available build of NT!

@timmisiak I'm currently working on a PE to/from COFF converter for an ancient 1991 build of NT, and ugh I still don't have a good solution for converting import tables. If you come up with a PE merger, please ping me! I'm sure there'll be brilliant ideas I can borrow!

@timmisiak And the merging of exception tables and everything else. You may not have enough space in the original binary to do so, which means you'll have to think about creating new sections and there'll be issues with that as well.

So I think it should be possible to "statically" link a collection of simple DLLs (or DLLs + EXE). Basically, resolve imports between DLLs, merge import tables, code sections, etc. Anyone have thoughts on what problems would need to be solved?

@kamiljdudek Win32 is very primitive, a lot of things (especially things from Win16) are stubs and APIs for file mapping and stuff are different compared to final NT. Executable format predates PE and is basically a modified version of COFF (I've written a converter to convert them to PE).

@mswin_bat I wonder what subset of Win32 and what EXE format this thing actually supports. Being early and MIPS probably makes it crazy

This April 1991 build of NT actually doesn't look that bad, the black Reversi board was caused by emulator issues. The black section on the right-hand side of the screen however is NT's problem.

@WinBetaNM No, I don't think the build number is anywhere in the build itself.

@mswin_bat Could we get a correct build number of this version based on the files we already have?

@esesci It's decompiled code yeah, NT has some structures mapped at hard coded addresses so likely it was just accessing one of those.

I guess this shows that Microsoft did most of their testing under the 1024x768 resolution, and therefore did not notice the issue.

A 1-byte patch fixes the issue nicely.

This instance of Reversi may even be the exact same one that @osterman saw during 'Thursday beer', given that this state save was created on a Tursday as well.

After about a week worth of work, @hyenaskyy and @substanc3dev managed to get this Windows NT build from 04/04/1991 shared by @jeffpar booting under emulation. I have just restored the state save of Reversi, you're now looking at an instance of Reversi started 32 years ago!

Patched dwm.exe to force it to render even on incompatible hardware. Should work on Surface RTs too.

@xmine64 @BetaWiki betawiki.net/wiki/Draft:Emu…

@mswin_bat @BetaWiki Could you send the link? I checked BetaWiki but I couldn’t find it, is it in the Talk section? Since ARMv7 version is leaked recently I assume you could boot this version on qemu, I guess you applied the WIM image to a disk image then booted the disk image using qemu.

Windows 8 build 8061 under emulation - achievement unlocked! Spent days on getting this thing to run under QEMU, lol. A rough guide with all the technical details is now up on @BetaWiki.

@x86corez @HexRaysSA cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/88…

@mswin_bat @HexRaysSA Is there a link to the ported MS-DOS Player?

Some time ago @scumdisk staged Windows 8 build 8400 ARM32 from the Repair Packages publicly available, and Pro is one of the SKUs available. Build 8400 is a great pre-release build to put on Surface RTs since it's production signed and has all the interesting new features.