MiSTer FPGA Forum

OK thanks, I will try a disk created that way. My method is to use PowerShell:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/982 ... ows-system

NML32 wrote: ↑Sat Mar 05, 2022 1:29 am With the 1 Gig VHD it appears to be in a loop where it tries to run FDISK then reboots with the same message tried to run FDISK again.

Interesting. I'll take a look tomorrow to see if I can reproduce this. What's your method for creating the 1GB file? I want to try and follow your process as closely as possible.

Thanks for taking the time to test it! Is there a limit to the size of the VHD? I wasn't able to format a 1 Gig vhd, but no issues formatting a 500 Meg VHD. Most of my testing was with a 2GB VHD, with a little testing with a 400MB VHD. What happened with the 1GB which didn't work? I did a quick HyperTerminal test and was able to call a BBS. That's ...

OK, the easy setup process is now released. It evolved from being just a floppy image to being some floppies and a CD, but it's now as simple as a standard NT setup process. There is one component missing from the driver floppy, which is the UniATA driver for the hard disk. While I was able to reach-out to the author of the video driver (who kindly...

Congrats, was this a see if I can do it or did you have some specific memories attached to this archeology :D A bit of both. I was pretty young when NT 4 was current, but did enjoy using it when I could. My first job was with NT Server 4 so maybe I'll play with that version too. Did you try win2k? Afaic remember it was rock solid and performance w...

Unfortunately not. At least not the version I've tried which still crashes after first boot. I might try poking at that once the easy NT process is finished and posted. From my brief testing so far though, I found the failure messages of OS/2 to be even more cryptic than NT, so I don't have much hope that I can assist with that.

I've made some progress today on a single floppy image which does all the work for installing NT for you. You should just need this floppy, the NT install CD and a blank hard disk. I'd like to include the two necessary drivers directly within the floppy image, and am reaching-out to the authors of the drivers to ask for permission and pass-on thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. It's been pretty exciting for me to learn how this thing works and actually make changes which fix things. I'd never even looked at Verilog before this thread, so I was particularly pleased when I was able to fix the main floppy issue in there.

Found a fix for the remaining issue with NT floppies. PR here: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/pull/560

I'm going to re-evaluate the NT setup steps now that floppies are working. This should give a much easier process, and I'm intending to make a post for that in the "guides" section.

I've fixed one of the problems around this, and the PR is here: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/pull/105 NT can now read a floppy disk, but reading a second disk requires ejecting the image, trying to read the empty drive, and then mounting the second image. Just remounting a new image doesn't work as NT doesn't notice the image change...

Glad to hear it @sajattack. Thank you as well for providing the image. Having a working Linux image has been incredibly useful for the other troubleshooting I’ve been doing for NT. If you have a guide you could provide for how to compile the kernel correctly for the MiSTer, I would really appreciate it!

I just got NT to read a floppy disk for the first time. Someone put the NT kernel source code online a few years ago, and from there I've narrowed-down the problematic behavior to here: https://github.com/ZoloZiak/WinNT4/blob/f5c14e6b42c8f45c20fe88d14c61f9d6e0386b8e/private/ntos/dd/floppy/floppy.c#L5095 There's a registry key which sets this "...

I have found a solution for fixing NTFS conversion and have submitted the PR for it here: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/pull/557 Note that it's actually quite useful to keep the drive as FAT so that you can access it from DOS (maybe you need to do some troubleshooting, or copy something in from MisterFS). However, this provides you th...

It seems that the most recent updates to the ao486 core have broken the keyboard under NT. I have raised a github issue regarding this:

https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/issues/102

Update: Sorgelig has reverted the change which broke keyboard. Updating to the ao486 and BIOS images released today will solve this problem.

As I understand it the official minimum spec for 2000 is a Pentium although you "can" install it on a 486. With that in mind, the expectation of an FPU is not unexpected.

Unfortunately not. I got it installed and running all the way to first graphical boot. It then becomes very unstable, with critical system processes quickly crashing. It's my understanding that it may require an FPU, and this is why it's crashing.

Thank you! I just tried the Sound Blaster driver. Seems to work just fine! The only thing I'm aware of with lingering issues is floppy drive support. I'll try to do some digging in that area but it will probably involve too much low-level hardware debugging to be in my skillset. It's a shame too because floppy support would make the install process...

A cellphone photo will have to do. Here's the most important picture to take of NT 4...

Thank you!! That was all the info I needed to get full-color and resolution graphics working! The driver I previously linked to works perfectly if you point it at the linear frame buffer address of 0xf800000. This also solves the weird vga.dll crashes I've been having (since I don't believe we're even using that DLL anymore). Full instructions for...

I think I've run out of steam looking into the video issue. Compiling my own BIOS isn't going to go anywhere as the source code I have depends on very specific VBE emulation (which we don't have here). I've learned enough looking into this to understand that I don't know enough to make progress. The driver I've being trying to make work (https://be...

Very helpful, thank you. I'm also experimenting with compiling my own BIOS with VBE support. It's larger than 32KB, but the system does see the whole ROM in memory when I apply it so it might potentially work eventually (not that it's currently working in VBE modes, but I'll keep at it).

That’s some great info, thank you! I do suspect that there may be a BIOS change needed to get video working under NT so I’ll try with that one soon.

I'm happy to report that sorgelig and I have been discussing the changes. They got simplified to just a single number being updated and were merged! The new BIOS version is now released: https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/ao486_MiSTer/blob/master/releases/boot0.rom Update: Aaaand reverted again. Sorgelig realized this will actually conflict with the s...

Note that the vga.dll crash is still happening. I spent a little longer on this today. I managed to get a "universal" VBE driver up-and-running but it would only start in 320*200 256-color mode, which Windows was very upset about. That resolution is too low to be usable, but I was able to see that this solved the vga.dll driver crash issu...

OK, here are my instructions for getting NT running. The service pack slipstreaming is based off instructions found here: http://reboot.pro/topic/2383-windows-nt-service-pack-integration-slipstreaming-toolkit/ 1. Download the tool at http://navozhdeniye.narod.ru/sskit.zip (note that the mscab.exe file mentioned in the forum post is already in this ...

I've only had a little time to look into this today. So far I've found that I can improve stability significantly by installing Service Pack 3 (previously I was on SP1 because that's the ISO I have). This removes many of the crashes I have been seeing related to disk activity, even with the new driver. Floppy access still does not work. Upgrading t...

flynnsbit wrote: ↑Wed Feb 16, 2022 3:06 am Do you mind uploading your compiled bios to releases in your branch? I would love to mess with it.

Sure! Here's the most recent build: https://github.com/alexoughton/ao486_Mi ... 820-only-1

New branch, as I've narrowed-down the specific change in the upstream Bochs BIOS which fixes the crash: https://github.com/alexoughton/ao486_MiSTer/tree/lightest-touch This is a change to the memory map which reports to the operating system which ranges are reserved for BIOS use. I will do some more testing tomorrow before submitting a Pull Request...

Video driver work still to do. If I can't get an NT driver working, I will look at one from 98, as per your suggestion (as I know there were some NT-based drivers for 98, so the idea makes some sense). I now have a version of this which doesn't require an IDE update, only the BIOS needs updating. This version seems to not break DOS! Testing continu...

Neocaron wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 7:43 pm ...You can even have Msdos 8 running on NT....

I'm confused what you mean by this or how upgrading from 98 would work without fixing some of the other issues I've listed. Is there any possibility you're talking about Windows ME rather than Windows NT?