What Does It Take To Run DOOM On A $10,000 IBM RS/6000 From 2001?

Рет қаралды 186,185

Күн бұрын

Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/ncommander
Patreon: / ncommander
Twitter: / fossfirefighter
Discord: / discord
Blog: casadevall.pro
GitHub with Chocolate DOOM for AIX and more:
github.com/NCommander/aix_doo...
You know what ever computer needs? DOOM. Do you know what I couldn't find? DOOM for the IBM RS/6000, but that's not surprising. These machines were never meant for gaming, but that's doesn't mean you can't do it. If you like pain anyway
IBM's RS/6000 series of machines were the backbone of businesses for years. Intended as a replacement to IBM's PS/2 line of computers, these machines were intended to help break the Intel/Windows monopoly with the new PowerPC architecture, in corporation with Apple and Motorola.
However, those lofty dreams were never to be with the failure of Workspace OS, Copland and more, and the general demise of workstation class machines as a whole. What was left was a very expensive machine that only officially supported IBM's own variant of UNIX, known as AIX. AIX has a reputation for being an exceptionally quirky system, and well, that's a well earned reputation.
In this extra long NCommander special, we're going to explore AIX, discuss the RS/6000 Model 150 43p I'm running it on. Throughout this process, I'd explore the trouble in getting bash to build, getting neofetch to work, then the battle for high colors, SDL, and more.
Chapters:
00:00:00 - Introduction
00:02:10 - IBM's RISC Station/6000
00:07:29 - AIX
00:16:20 - AIX Toolbox for Linux Applications
00:32:53 - Road to DOOM
00:46:24 - Making Noise
01:04:17 - Conclusions
This video uses these sounds from freesound:
"record scratch.wav" by luffy ( freesound.org/s/soundID/ ) licensed under CCBY 3.0
"Dramatic Organ, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) licensed under CCBY 4.0 Attribution
"Ding Ding Small Bell" by JohnsonBrandEditing licensed under Creative Commons 0 License
Document icons created by smalllikeart - Flaticon (www.flaticon.com/free-icons/d...)
Atlantis by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Artist: audionautix.com/
Tracks used from the KZfaq Music Library Listed In Presentation Order:
* Future Glider - Brian Bolger
* Fat Man - Yung Logos
* Time to Spare - An Jone
* Island Dream - Chris Haugen
* June - Bobby Richards
* Kurt - Cheel
* My Peeps - Aaron Lieberman
* Would it Kill You - Mini Vandals
* Straight Fuse - French Fuse
* A Fool's Theme - Brian Bolger
* Stellar Wind - Unicorn Heads
* Blacksmith - Godmode
* Swoop141 - Kwon
* World War Outerspace - Audio Hertz
* Average - Patrick Patrikios
* Digital Ghosts - Unicorn Heads
* Press Fuse - French Fuse
* Forget Me Not - Patrick Patrikios
* First Dream - Brian Bolger
* Missive - Andrew Langdon
* Digifunk - DivKid
* Subway Dreams - Dan Henig
* Forget Me Not - Patrick Patrikios
* Wolf Moon - Unicorn Heads
* Outcast - Myuu
* Atlantis - Audionautix
* Light-Gazing - Andrew Langdon
#rs6000 #doom #retrocomputing

Пікірлер: 761

@Wertercat Жыл бұрын

Shoutout to the 4Front Technologies employee who went '...They need the license file for AIX? Alright, let me figure out how to make that' with no question as to why you needed it

@jaymzjulian Жыл бұрын

One of my coworkers described aix such: "Aix is what you get if an alien came to earth, saw what Unix is through Google translate, then went home and described to another alien what he thought it was though another translator, and _that_ alien implemented what they thought Unix was"

@bytetravell3r402 Жыл бұрын

AIX: Alien-Implemented UNIX

@hycron1234 Жыл бұрын

_Explains why the Aliens wipe us out_

@JoeZoda Жыл бұрын

Advanced Interactive eXecutive ...been working with it and loving it for 23 years.

@RetroDawn Жыл бұрын

@RogerWilco99 Yeah, I came from an SGI IRIX (SVR4) software development background (with some SunOS, Solaris, and Linux pre-1.0 experience) to an AIX project in 1995, and I was not a happy camper. Luckily, I was still doing SGI development for a while longer, eventually switched to Linux, and never had to use AIX again. I don't recall what they changed though, anymore. And, I can't say with certainty that IRIX did things in a Unix standard way.

@tacokoneko Жыл бұрын

i love old hardware, but this video is a perfect example of why, whenever I want to actually do anything such as work or games on that old hardware, I beeline directly to getting modern GNU/Linux booted on it with the most efficient drivers possible, and just headless serial if no drivers exist. using any old device on the real internet isn't secure at all without the robust code of modern OS and browsers.

@adriansdigitalbasement Жыл бұрын

As usual Michael, you really deliver. What an adventure! You have amazing tenacity that is rarely found these days, especially when unravelling poorly documented lost to time old tech.

@BAgodmode Жыл бұрын

3 days ago, is Adrian a patron?!? Word!

@Sladen70 Жыл бұрын

Michael's extensive drive has to be why i regularly watch NCommander. So much of the things gone threw in the videos are mind-boggling and tells me I still have absolute hoards of research to be competent in Linux the way I would like to be. An inspiration to me and many others, I'm sure.

@soviet9922 Жыл бұрын

The tenacity to run the system like a tower and blocking all air vents xD

@tookitogo Жыл бұрын

Honestly, I think the older stuff was often much better documented at the time than modern stuff is today. Of course, lots of that old documentation gets lost to time. (*cough* Apple Tech Info Library *cough*)

@unmanaged Жыл бұрын

Hey Michael … Adrian said you need need a C64 and I have one with the floppy drive in the original boxes (with the price tags from Hills Department Store) it does work, I do not have a psu but you dont want to use the nasty old brick anyway, The only problem is the power led does not light and needs to be replaced and I want to mail it to you please contact me over at kzfaq.info I ran a game called imposable mission off a floppy and it worked. I want to pass this along to you... I hate to do this in the comments but this is legit 100% free

@nicco1690 Жыл бұрын

Upon seeing the intro, I realized from the login screen that some of the machines at my local Walmart actually still run AIX, which is pretty cool.

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

Likely thin clients talking to a backend server. I've seen that with a few other venders, AutoZone's registers were on Unixware for a really long time, don't know if they still are.

@kadlerio Жыл бұрын

When I worked for Walmart circa 2008, they switched to AIX for the Telxon scanner gun things. IIRC it was HP-UX before that. I remember it being quite a bit snappier once the switch was made too.

@nicco1690 Жыл бұрын

@@kadlerio For our local Walmart, it was the optometrist's desk that had it, I had seen it because the cleric had used it to look up my prescription

@HappyBeezerStudios Жыл бұрын

@@nicco1690 They really sell everything at Walmart, even medical advice. But to add to the outdated systems still in use: the german Telekom still operates a MVS/OS/390 mainframe for their database

@matthewrawls1184 Жыл бұрын

Back when I did AIX support for IBM in the late '90s and early '00s, Walmart was a huge customer. I had no idea they are *still* using AIX systems even at the store level.

@Reziac Жыл бұрын

Wow. Now that you've got this thing magically working, I hope you'll contribute it to the DOOM ports archive!

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

That's a thing?

@kirill9064 Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander Can you add timestamps to track names?

@EmperorLjas Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander I'm sure Doomworld would be interested in it, even if nobody will ever use it.

@wayland7150 Жыл бұрын

@@EmperorLjas Nobody will ever use it? Now there's a perverse incentive.

@Cavi587 Жыл бұрын

@@EmperorLjas Yeah, just the fact it took this much work to get this working is probably a factor that will make more attempts at running DOOM on old AIX very unlikely. It would be pretty cool to archive it!

@WodkaEclair Жыл бұрын

me: knows zero about coding, code, or command line witchcraft also me: absolutely loves these types of videos

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

NOTES AND CORRECTIONS: - The tablet port was used by the Spaceball 3D Mouse, used for IBM's own CAD software - Past me, it was Ko-fi, not Ko-fo in the credits >.

@greatquux Жыл бұрын

Did Doom continue to hang even after you changed OSS to use your manually configured Crystal Audio driver?

@joelimmanueloelsner9211 Жыл бұрын

You are a fucking hero 😎

@infinity2403 Жыл бұрын

The problem with your Doom crashing has happened to me in Windows when testing multiple versions of GZdoom to find a very good stable version that wasn't chopping on my weird Dell Optiplex slim client, it's a thing with certain versions of either GZ or Chocolate doom and etc, and also using "wrong" wads, so your issue may be a really really bad combination of ports and wads, hope this information can help. (It usually would crash at the exact moment levels would change, this is not a problem with your system.)

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

Yes, unfortunately.

@kevinbowling7335 Жыл бұрын

The spaceballs are serial or USB. The tablet port is for a 6093 tablet.

@NJRoadfan Жыл бұрын

Found a bug at 57:03. Seeing that version of KDE gave me flashbacks of running Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac. The behavior of the original DOOM port with the palette switching was normal for mid-90s X software. Tons of stuff would only work at 8bpp as well. Caldera's port of WABI was one of them until they finally patched it.

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

The bug is proof I live in New Jersey.

@stanb1455 Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander How's living there?

@kreuner11 Жыл бұрын

That's gnome??

@SimonE-fz5pc Жыл бұрын

"Was it worth the price?" When I started my career in 2000 with a CAD System Integrator there were few options to get working for the "big fish". You had HP, Silicon Graphics, IBM and Sun if you wanted to do automotive or aerospace work. All priced in that range. OpenGL was a "new fangled" thing back then and CAD programs where using the commercial Motif library. And the software would set you back sometimes double the hardware cost (but the hourly rates even for freelancers made it feasible). AutoCAD Inventor and SolidWorks were in their infancy and nowhere near capable of doing what CATIA, UGS, ideas, Euclid etc could do on the unix machines. That started to change with the appearance of 3d capable (gaming) PCs. You talked about the netboot in the beginning, questioning it. I remember freelancers bringing their machine clean and whiped to the IT department (or us) of e.g. a automotive supplier together with their license code for the software (you always bought man with machine and license for development work) and two hours later it was installed to company standards. At the end it would be whiped again before it left the premises. For reinstalling there was an option to boot from an DDS4 SCSI tape ... oh well memory lane ;-). And under 5L Quake was no problem ...

@pmsrodrigues Жыл бұрын

This! Similar career path but as an IT specialist over the same period. CATIA v4 & v5, Alias Wavefront, UGS, Pro/Engineer, and many, many others. Everything from the concept & design to the manufacturing phase. There was no alternative. And at what designers and modellers were being paid, and customers writing checks for, price of the hardware and software was not at the top of our worries. We did start using Intel and Alpha based workstations by the 2000s but it took many years until the software reached the same quality and stability as their Irix/Aix/Solaris versions.

@davetronics Жыл бұрын

I concur. I was an IBMer back before there was an RS/6000. The initial software strategy for RS/6000 was all about CAD software. It was what was called 'the five Cs'. Can't remember what the last two were, but CATIA, CADAM and CADDS were three of the five Cs. The main competition was the HP 'snakes' and the SPARC. These machines all had far better floating point performance and far better memory and I/O bandwidth than any of the PCs of the era. He says the 43p cost $12k or so, but it was not unusual for a full-blown CAD desktop to cost $40k back then.

@TheStefanskoglund1 7 ай бұрын

@@davetronics license costs for Microstation for a year is a fair bit more than the cost for the computer itself.... a HP laptop and the large screen - something 3000 $ but the perpetual license for Microstation Connect edition is something like 6300 $ .....

@timothygibney159 5 ай бұрын

And this is why the inferior autocad and SOLIDWORKS won! It was 1/10th the cost and required 1/10th the hardware. It was cheap and extra development time paid itself with the cost savings

@MagikGimp Жыл бұрын

This is a gorgeous wet dream of old UIs all wrapped up in a fantastically made video, 3D renders and everything! I do love this channel.

@NorthWay_no Жыл бұрын

We used to run AIX at work and going home to linux just made me sad when I wanted to do admin stuff. 4.3 isn't just old, it is ancient. I had this weird hope IBM would release AIX for the PS3...

@Doug_in_NC Жыл бұрын

I wrote FORTRAN-based simulations on a rather earlier beige RS/6000 that sat on my desk in the early 90’s and a quick glance looked it like a PS/2 tower. 25MHz and a very respectable for the time 64 mb of RAM. I got it back in 1993 when over the air updates weren’t exactly common, so I used to get a box of 125 mb tapes with the latest software revs mailed to me by IBM automatically every 3 months, which certainly accounted for some of the rather painful price of the system.

@CarlosPerezChavez Жыл бұрын

25:46 The VisualAge prices were meant for corporate costumers. You could register for free to the IBM's Partner World for Developers program and you would get the developer tools for free for education, tests and development. Only if you sold the software that you made with whose tools then you would have to have you costumer to pay for licences.

@slycooper1001 Жыл бұрын

@RogerWilco99 dell made a ibm clone and i own one it's a model 333d

@gregdaweson4657 Жыл бұрын

@RogerWilco99 IBM deserves to burn, especially for what they did during the war.

@straightpipediesel Жыл бұрын

Nobody ever bought IBM hardware and software at list price anyway, or any enterprise stuff for that matter. You contacted your salesman for a quote which would invariably a good chunk off list. Even today, go to Dell or Lenovo's website, and it will be 30% off list.

@c128stuff Жыл бұрын

@RogerWilco99 So.. somewhat like how you typically pay for setup and usage when getting a dedicated environment at some cloud provider nowadays... Yes, IBM was rather early with that idea. I doubt the customer really owned the hardware in such cases.

@MrCommodorebob Жыл бұрын

It is kind of cursed to see a shared library with the .a extension. That would confuse the hell out of me for a bit.

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

AIX uses XCOFF vs. ELF which leads to a lot of exciting moments. If you look carefully when I do the dlopen() in SDL, you can see that I have to specify the GL path as libGL.a(shr.o). So much "fun".

@MyAmazingUsername Жыл бұрын

".a" ... Also known as the holy Gawr Gura extension.

@SpringySpring04 Жыл бұрын

@@MyAmazingUsername Ayyyyyy lmao

@paulwratt Жыл бұрын

that really just shows the age of AIX

@mercster Жыл бұрын

Linux once used the COFF format before they transitioned to ELF. Seeing .so for the first time freaked me out. :-)

@btarg1 Жыл бұрын

I was surprised you didn't use a community made Linux for this thing and did everything yourself, well played and very impressive

@greatquux Жыл бұрын

Epic, epic video. I think we pool our resources and get you a VAX for the next project! 🤣 also would love to see this box again on the channel maybe running a more modern Linux or BSD so we can compare performance and stability

@roundduckkira Жыл бұрын

Minicomputers need more coverage in general. NCommander does a PDP-11 when? :p

@botfap Жыл бұрын

Fun! I have a copy of VisualAge C for AIX 4.3.3 and a beta version of StarOffice 3 for AIX which never saw a commercial release. My 233Mhz 43P has long since died. I can stick them on an FTP somewhere if you like

@KiraSlith Жыл бұрын

Archive it! The Internet Archive is definitely the place to put prototypes for abandonware like that.

@regeneric928 Жыл бұрын

One of my favourite videos on KZfaq. DOS has a lot of attention on retro scene here, it’s nice to see someone working with those old UNIX systems. And on top of that, it’s a fantastic entertainment. Thanks for your work!

@magneticflux- Жыл бұрын

56:54 For anyone curious about the song used, SDL uses a clip from ~10 seconds in to "The Living Proof" by Will Provost, an obscure band that released it in February of 2000.

@Enstrayed Жыл бұрын

I am seriously in love with this new editing style.

@Ivy-pe2wz Жыл бұрын

You know, I'm mighty impressed that someone at 4Front not only saw your email, they also generated a license for AIX and sent it to you!

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

Indeed, you could say they were are the forefront there :)

@stephenwinson4302 Жыл бұрын

I remember those ridiculous workstation prices. In ‘98 the place I worked for sold software that ran on various UNIXes, but our office couldn’t afford an AIX machine to practice installing there, and I never ended up having to wing it. Very glad to finally get a little bit of a look into one of the ones I never was able to use, but was interested in.

@baremetaltechtv Жыл бұрын

I desperately want to see you get quake 1 working and release a write up so we can follow along

@KangoV Жыл бұрын

We ran AS/400s and iSeries machines. These were just awesome. An IBM engineer was waiting for us on Monday morning saying that our machine had notified them that a disk had failed. He came in, took the cover off, pulled the disk and put in a new one. The machine basically said "thanks, I'll rebuild now". All this while it was running the entire company. We were biting our nails! It all worked fine. All we ever did with it was swap backup tapes lol. It was never switched off, sometimes years at a time. If it did go down, they'd bring another one on a lorry, connect it via sockets in our shipping department, set it to boot off of a backup tape and voila, everything back and running. No fuss. This is what you pay for.

@HrHaakon 11 ай бұрын

Mainframe tech is so insane in so many ways.

@zkdr6278 Жыл бұрын

I love this format - the ups and downs of development/debugging hell make for great stories that I'm surprised aren't told more considering how popular speedrunning videos have gotten (taking a seemingly mundane subject and making a story out of it).

@UltimatePerfection Жыл бұрын

You took a huge RISC doing this.

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

Take my upvote ...

@JayJay-88 Жыл бұрын

You're like the AVGN of old Unix machines.

@calmeilles Жыл бұрын

My first experience of Unix was essentially a box with Start and Stop buttons which was a printer controller. My second and real introduction was being sat down in front of an RS/6000 server with AIX AIX 4.1.3 and being told "Type in r, o, o, t and press enter…" On what I subsequently discovered was a production box. Late 1996 we received a batch of new machines which it turned out had been used for sales presentations fro AIX 4.2 and still had all the funky sound and video files on disk. Unfortunately the required add-on accelerator card had been removed so my experience of the audiovisual tools was pretty much what yours was. I don't know about the desktop workstations but with the servers the SCSI card was included by default, so a factory install. One thing I really liked is that on any other machine changing a SCSI chain, adding or removing a device, would definitely need a reboot but with these it was plug and play - something we did twice nightly with a tape drive to run backups. To this day I have no idea if it was supposed to be PNP but it was absolutely rock solid. That compiler cost? Oh yes. The same numbers but this side of the Atlantic it was in £. All of IBM's software was extortionate. In another department we ran Lotus Notes and Lord knows how much they scalped us for that, I've erased the memory. You're dead right about cross-systems interoperability, for business purposes if you were running IBM-anything it was beautiful. But try not-IBM and you were in for a world of pain. Those new machines mentioned above we ended up downgrading to 4.1.3 because there was no upgrade path to 4.2 that would work for our non-IBM software, everything had to be re-installed at new versions. Thus 2 years later, circa 1998 we were going through the pain of transferring all the operations our RS/6000 estate handled to Windows NT 4 and an entirely new suite of applications for which at least the availability of commodity hardware gave us a massive saving. Running Doom? Nah, don't try that. 😀

@anthonutty Жыл бұрын

Absolutely a thrill to watch you speak so passionately on the subject (as always!)

@michaelsmith7739 Жыл бұрын

Great video! I cannot begin to imagine the time and effort that went into making this. The 90s style 3D scenes / infographics are great! That price tag on the IBM machine, sheesh!

@Cavi587 Жыл бұрын

First video from this channel that I stumbled upon - really great content. It really takes a lot of knowledge and determination to try and fix all the problems you had along the way. 99% of people would just give up with no easy to follow tutorial on everything. I like the kind of vids that attempt (and succeed!) at achieving something cool but on the way there show off and share knowledge about an old platform that most of us would probably never experience. It's fun and informative.

@loganjorgensen Жыл бұрын

Lord you are patient, I'm not a programmer but familiar keywords had me saying "Oh no, that is going to be a pain.". That project must have been hard and having to document that journey on top too yikes. ;) Excellent video, it's hard to make a dry subject matter engaging but you found a good balance of code specifics, functions, and visuals all while not leaving the layman in the dark.

@nikkiofthevalley Жыл бұрын

I am a programmer and this makes me want to stay well clear of AIX. This is a journey of pain and suffering. I honestly don't think I would have been able to do this, because of sheer frustration. And I've spent 2 weeks debugging errors in code that I wrote 6 years ago, only to realize that there's a hardware problem, which was a single solder joint in one of the buses that was somehow missed... (Embedded dev for anyone wondering)

@loganjorgensen Жыл бұрын

@@nikkiofthevalley Oh man that does sound frustrating. :S Trying to get into hardware repairs even though I know it will probably be frustrating lol.

@i_lost_my_bagel Жыл бұрын

After working 13 hours I needed this

@steffennilsen2132 Жыл бұрын

I think my heart skipped a beat at 54:20 when you said it was failing due to semaphore issues. Resolving that on such a relic of a platform sounds like my personal hell

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

I was immensely unamused when I found the comment in semaphore.h. One of the big tipoffs on how to fix this iwas SDL actually uses the old SysV SHM interface on IRIX, vs. POSIX interfaces, which, after I found the root cause, at least made it clear how to go forward.

@priyapepsi Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander if it makes you feel any better, it was very funny for me

@waaaaaaah5135 Жыл бұрын

This was an amazing journey to get Doom running! (And so the legend of porting Doom to everything continues...)

@tresf Жыл бұрын

This journey is fantastic. I used to work on RS6000 as a server OS and seeing the PC come to life and all the compiler nuances is quite the treat. Thanks for documenting this!

@anomaly95 Жыл бұрын

The entire PowerPC platform was rock solid enough where it was used in the embedded space for quite a while. From industrial automation, medical, test equipment, telecom, to networking. It could've been soldered directly to manufacturer's boards or used a common board type like MVME or CompactPCI.

@dycedargselderbrother5353 Жыл бұрын

I don't know if it's still the case, but Xerox copiers and printers are or were powered by PowerPC. GameCube, Wii, and Wii U, too, of course.

@HappyBeezerStudios Жыл бұрын

@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I always wondered if someone had written a Linux or BSD port that would run on the Gamecube. The used hardware is pretty close to a G3 Mac

@dycedargselderbrother5353 Жыл бұрын

@@HappyBeezerStudios Yes, there are various methods of getting Linux onto the Gamecube, Wii, and Wii-U. gc-linux is really out of date, though. It's based around Debian 5 and kernel 2.6.26 or thereabouts, 2009 era. The more modern wii-linux-ngx might work on Gamecube but it's not officially supported.

@ErebuBat Жыл бұрын

They are still used in space applications. Also the F-35 uses PPC and is projected to serve until 2070!!!!

@straightpipediesel Жыл бұрын

@@dycedargselderbrother5353 Current Xerox workgroup printers have an ARM front-end with a embedded NEC 80186 or similar for the print engine. They're buying chipsets and the software stack from Qualcomm (who bought CSR, who bought Zoran, who bought Oak). HP is a major Oak customer too. The full-size copiers are Intel Atom with a similar software stack.

@otherkrabs Жыл бұрын

Hooray! Congrats on getting it out!

@dritzzka6177 Жыл бұрын

I've always wondered about AIX and the Weird IBM Power machines of the 90s.. Thanks for the tour!

@dextrodemon Жыл бұрын

great video, wasnt expecting much when i clicked tbh, but i was glued to the screen the whole way through

@captaincorleone7088 4 ай бұрын

This is one of the most engrossing videos I've ever watched on KZfaq regarding tech adventures - and misadventures for that matter. I salute you and I've subscribed! 😁

@Geardos1 Жыл бұрын

very cool, appreciate the effort in making a video on weird and esoteric hardware with the quality and length this has.

@nickfries4317 Жыл бұрын

This was well worth the wait. Thank you for going through all this AIX pain to put this together for our viewing pleasure. 😄

@sillystev0n Жыл бұрын

57:02 a bug just passing by to say hi Great video! It was a nice ride learning about AIX and all of your misadventures. Looking forward to the next one!

@kostis2849 Жыл бұрын

I have successfully ran Doom (id demo version) on an SGI Octane with specialised hardware for Flint (high end post-production software+hardware by SGI, now withAutodesk). The viewport did not scale, but I was able to place the small doom window over the running Flint environment and have the output come up on the broadcast Sony monitor. The sound was perfect, coming out of the broadcast-quality monitors.A glorious gaming experience for 1995. Does this help?

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

It must have been a modified port. The id source code has an incomplete sound engine, although I didn't look at it for that long. I know they have something called sndserv, but the documentation makes it pretty clear its incomplete.

@kostis2849 Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander It was an official port from id, it actually was in a cd with various freeware

@HPPalmtopTube Жыл бұрын

Doom is installed standard / included with SGI Irix 6.5.x, with a full install (including the demos) you can launch it from the "demos" application group...

@timothygibney159 5 ай бұрын

I am sure it was quite superior and painless compared to aix. Solaris and Irix were the least crappy versions of Unix with SCO and aix just awful

@piwex69 Жыл бұрын

We had that box (albeit in white) running next generation firewall from checkpoint in 2001. Truly the trip into the memory lane (or how you say it).

@eduardocarrasco8830 Жыл бұрын

This is one of the most underrated channels in KZfaq. Top notch video !

@neviemdopice Жыл бұрын

34:57 type defaults to 'int' in declaration of 'fuck' nice

@gymnasiast90 Жыл бұрын

Again, your dedication to get deep into stuff and accomplish the goal no matter how many curveballs are thrown is something to be admired! Also, 15:35 was a bit scary, as I was actually playing the Windows 95/98 version of Freecell at that moment :P

@RN1441 Жыл бұрын

Wow, kudos for sticking with it!

@ChadDoebelin Жыл бұрын

that first gravis ultrasound hit so hard! you climbed a mountain here! very impressive!

@Codeaholic1 Жыл бұрын

Networking booting was very common in some environments. It made installation and updates easier. Commercial Unix vendors thought charging for compilers was a good idea. Unfortunately gcc was often much slower, producing less optimized binaries or even having bugs. Lastly AIX was weird but smit was cool

@c128stuff Жыл бұрын

Yes, netboot was pretty common in corporate IT environments at the time. I've built dozens of server environments to fascilitate that for large IBM customers during the 1990s. Ideally, IT staff would also rip any drives supporting removable media from the machine, and even internal HDDs, so everything 'storage' was network based. Besides the easy installations and upgrades, this also gave control over storage, backups, distribution of data etc, in other words, lifetime management on data, and a locked down end-user environment with easily replaced workstations because there was no user data on those.

@TheStefanskoglund1 7 ай бұрын

One of the reasons why two SunOS admins could support many hundreds of users.

@killerds Жыл бұрын

I used to be an AIX administrator, and one thing I'll say is IBM made a name on solid hardware. Like mentioned in the video, we had RS/6000 machines running for a decade and IBM continued to service them for a loooong time. As far as Unix goes I think SMIT is one of THE best configuration tools. Also while AIX did get better in later versions it was still a nightmare to compile many things. You are an absolute legend for wading through that hell.

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

if I ever get to the point that I buy a PA-RISC system, I'll have fun autopsying SAM. At least Sun gave up with admintool pretty soon.

@JohnnyMarauder Жыл бұрын

Thank you for yet another fantastic video. Well done!

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

@CarlosPerezChavez Жыл бұрын

I am amazed at your knowledge, talent and perseverance.

@CH32mix Жыл бұрын

58:20 i like how the gun sound is the only one sounding mostly correct, because sounds like you’re shooting at the poor computer to release it from its misery

@dannydandaniel8040 Жыл бұрын

Oh your a pro.... Just stumbled onto this channel. Great stuff

@dr.shuppet5452 Жыл бұрын

My trust in HP-UX increased after watching this video, knowing it builds SDL out of the box, unlike AIX. Maybe I should try Doom on HP Visualize C3750 to replicate the suffering...

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

SDL would probably built just fine on AIX 5L. More direct comparsion would be to HP-UX 10, or possibly 11.00

@bbuggediffy Жыл бұрын

I should too, and beat you too it as I also own a C3750.. Engarde

@inDasInnen 4 ай бұрын

really impressive how much effort you spent on this project. Not leaving "the road to Doom", dispite all those pain and suffering. This is real passion! 🙂Hats off!

@trevorvanbremen4718 Жыл бұрын

Memories!!!! I remember when the RS6000 first came out. I was given the 'enviable' task of porting the company software suite to AIX on a bottom end RS6000. IBM were not going to let us 'borrow' the machine for us to do the work 'in house', so I had to throw all the source onto QIC tapes. The only 'problems' I encountered were actually bugs in our own source! (Specifically, our code back then ASSUMED that a pid, uid and gid were 16 bit values and AIX used 32 bit values. It took me a couple hours to find and apply fixes and then a couple DAYS of compile time to generate the binaries. (The sheer SIZE of the resultant binaries was a bit of a shock... RISC truly DOES use a lot more instructions!!! Same finding as I had on the first port to the MIPS based DEC machines)

@FeelingShred Жыл бұрын

OK I must be missing something here, but I'm going to ask anyway: 1) Why would someone bother to buy a 375 MHz machine in 2001? (severely outdated) What was the main selling point on this machine? 2) Installing XP on it would probably fix all the problems. Would people use these machines for Unix software specifically? Or was Windows an option?

@54weasels Жыл бұрын

Good video, and was impressed with how deep into debugging this went. Perfect at 1.75 speed too!

@TheMactrix Жыл бұрын

Nothing like spelunking in old machines, OS', and apps... trying to get them to run. If I were you I would e very satisified... you did a great job...and kept me on the edge of my seat. I have to admit, that you kept pushing... I don't know... I probably don't have the reasoning skills like you do... LOL... but I was there the whole way with you. Great job!!!!

@DonMr Жыл бұрын

Old kde and Gnome give me memories about my first try on Linux.

@HamidKarzai Жыл бұрын

What an amazing mishmash of old UIs, completely and utterly foreign to me. Seeing you go through all those configurations actually knowing what you're doing created a real sense of *intimidation* in me. Excellent content

@FrancoCatrin Жыл бұрын

Great work!!!... up until the middle, because I started to feel stressed so I had to stop it for now. I'll continue watching it later haha. PSTD probably. Again, great work!!

@VorpalGun Жыл бұрын

That KDE loading screen... I had forgotten it, but the nostalgia hit like a truck. EDIT: I wonder how hard it would be to bring it back to modern KDE. There is theming support for the loading screen after all... Maybe it is time for my own cursed project!

@VorpalGun Жыл бұрын

I had a quick look. The themes uses qml. This should in theory be perfectly doable. But I consider qml cursed, so yeah.

@VorpalGun Жыл бұрын

So I went digging further. This is entirely possible: Sources for old KDE are still easily available, and it should be possible to extract the graphics. Some major caveats though: 1) Modern KDE/Plasma starts way too fast to realistically be able to see any of the animations (at least on my system). 2) I don't know if doing a non-full screen thing and showing the desktop in the background would be at all possible. 3) I don't think you could get it to play a sound. EDIT: You can, in the notification settings So given that the "experience" would be quite compromised, I don't think I'll do it.

@VorpalGun Жыл бұрын

This is actually cursed! There is (on Arch Linux) /usr/share/ksplash, part of plasma-workspace. I thought that was how it worked. However that directory, with two themes in it, appear to be dead code. Instead /usr/share/plasma/look-and-feel//contents/splash is actually what is available in system settings. This is also based on QML and it seems to have a similar concept of numeric "stages" (range 1-5 I believe?) to drive the animation. So there is hope for this still.

@priyapepsi Жыл бұрын

any luck so far?

@VorpalGun Жыл бұрын

@@priyapepsi Didn't end up having time for it.

@feliksas_the_lion 23 күн бұрын

I am actually gonna use your video as a reference guide to try Doom on my 43p-140 machine (which pretty much is a bit older revision, but the experience should be pretty much identical) that I've recently quite randomly obtained, thanks a lot for your work!

@dirkstrider8783 Жыл бұрын

The absolute *spite* in his voice during when he was talking about changing the color modes is fantastic. I got whiplash from it lol

@DaVince21 Жыл бұрын

Loving the little 3D transitions with the Blender font.

@madcrowmaxwell Жыл бұрын

I love that KDE interface. Linux was my daily driver OS during the KDE 3 era. I still love that UI.

@CMDRSweeper Жыл бұрын

I didn't use much Linux, but I did run an old Knoppix from time to time. Don't know how to put it, but that interface feels almost like coming back home for some reason, granted it is a bit too old to be usable though.

@HappyBeezerStudios Жыл бұрын

@@CMDRSweeper It has that simplicity without putting form over function. It's the same with the classic Windows UI, it just does its job

@TerraRoot Жыл бұрын

This really was an excellent adventure, and a really good way to learn skills.

@scottlarson1548 Жыл бұрын

In the 90s I was in a group that ported a gigantic application to various Unixes in order to get vendors to bid against each other and keep the platform prices down. Although AIX was one of the Unixes, porting to any Unix was always a head banging nightmare back then. Our application used semaphores, message passing, and shared memory and of course libraries didn't work right, compilers didn't work right, vendors lied to us regularly, and we had to single step through assembly code to prove they were lying and fix it. We always felt like we were the first people to have ever ported anything to any platform.

@jamiemarchant Жыл бұрын

I would have given up at the first setback! Well done!

@intrepidsilence Жыл бұрын

FWIW - Yes, XL C is easily as fast as they claim compared to gcc. Also, I have run into code that gcc simply will not compile. I have been working with AIX for almost 30 years now, so reach out if you have any questions or would like some recommendations. I'd be happy to help.

@FeelingShred Жыл бұрын

@intrepidsilence Жыл бұрын

@@FeelingShred These machines were used either as development systems for applications that would run on larger Power AIX servers or they were themselves a server for small businesses, for which it was plenty powerful. Typically when used as a server it would sit in a back room or closet and have a serial multiplexing device attached with many dumb terminals connected. Windows was never an option. In fact, back then AIX was the only real option to run on these systems. The “problems” discussed in this video never affected anyone using these systems as compiling games or Linux software was not something that was done very often. Software was either coded in-house for the platform or bought from IBM or third party vendors, like Oracle or SAS for the sole purpose of running it in AIX. While the 43P was not special, the larger servers were built much more robustly and were much better at providing uptime and high throughput than the PC counterparts in the day (and still today).

@mercster Жыл бұрын

@@FeelingShred Running a UNIX with support contracts from a company like IBM. You may not remember, but there was a good 40 years or so when IBM was king of business/financial markets. These UNIX machines also didn't need as much CPU horsepower: I/O was much more important.

@mercster Жыл бұрын

@@FeelingShred Yes they would use it for UNIX specifically.. all the servers were IBM and your desktop workstation needed to be interoperable. Mounting NFS volumes, using services like NIS, talking to various UNIX servers using various software... These are business machines, not personal PCs.

@someomeyouknow8221 11 ай бұрын

Thank you for making this video, it makes me very happy I can run doom on my 10.5 inch tab s6 at 2600x1440 at 60 fps with a tap. Much kudos for making this video, technology has gotten so far since then. And great job on debugging aswell. Awesome.

@AndrewErwin73 Жыл бұрын

Nostalgia. I really appreciate this content. I actually used CDE in the mid 90's. Love it!

@WareWolf801 Жыл бұрын

This was so fun! Great content!

@georgH Жыл бұрын

Awesome video, as usual. I always take the time to watch your videos on detail and enjoy them very much! As growing up in the 90s, I had so many memories from the OS/2 upgrades video (and the radioactive hot dot) I had noticed before, "casadevall" is a Catalan name, do you have any ties to Catalunya?

@NCommander Жыл бұрын

No, my dad's side of the family comes from Cuba, and then from is harder to follow back. I've been told its Catalaian before, but as far as I know, we don't have any direct tie to the region in the last few generations.

@georgH Жыл бұрын

@@NCommander There were many people that migrated to Cuba and South America in late XIX and early XX century, so that explains it :) Apologies for asking, I was curious as it's quite rare to see such a family name on an English KZfaq channel ;)

@chrislemery8178 Жыл бұрын

The title is misleading and also it isn't misleading. xD I came here to learn more about this computer and this video delivered. Excellent work sir! Sub'd!

@dylon4906 Жыл бұрын

this video was surprisingly extremely interesting. ive always been fascinated by the bsds and the proprietary unixes, probably due to how obscure they are when compared to linux. its so interesting seeing how they differ from linux, and even more interesting seeing how theyre the same. i always wanted to install solaris or aix in a vm to poke around but never had enough of a reason to. it was really cool seeing aix being explored pretty in depth in this video

@LossyLossnitzer Жыл бұрын

I only used AIX on the command line only , still my worst Unix I every used, with HP/UX a close second. Solaris was the best for me. Well done for all your work here, brought back memories like OS/2 Warp, BE OS, Xenix/SCO, Next STEP etc.

@barrywilliams9698 Жыл бұрын

What didn't you like about it?

@BAgodmode Жыл бұрын

YES THANK YOU IVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG AND ITS A WHOLE HOUR LONG!

@bersig Жыл бұрын

Road to Doom indeed. "M" for sure. :) I've used AIX and we even have a few (SunOS) systems still running CDE at work so I feel some of your pain. Thanks for the entertaining lunch break.

@user-yr1uq1qe6y Жыл бұрын

I remember walking into a job where the previous IT people left and we had to figure out an AIX RS/6000 with little guidance or docs. AIX was close enough to what I’d encountered with Unix before to save our butts on a system crash and restore from tape. Figuring out the custom apps done in what I recall was “business basic” was certainly an adventure I will never forget.

@nocturnalnights27 Жыл бұрын

This was an excellent video!

@autohmae Жыл бұрын

What an amazing project and so much effort. A RISCy project which many thought was Doom-ed to fail I'm sure... 58:25 I've actually heard this before.

@tchiwam Жыл бұрын

HAAHAH ! XLC !! Happy to share this pain with you :) It was good with P4 and P5. GCC could match the performance with a few days of hand tuning.

@framebuffers Жыл бұрын

Hooooooooooly crap the production quality went WAAAAAAAY up. Duuuude this is GOLD!

@DaVince21 Жыл бұрын

I've been looking forward for this! And it's a beefy 70 minutes! Hell yeah!

@allycat7699 Жыл бұрын

When I hit a wall with that bug and bash I gave up lol. Might get my rs6k back out now! Thanks for such an in-depth video!!

@bennydreamly Жыл бұрын

Wow this looks like yet another great video!

@bennydreamly Жыл бұрын

yes, and the "sephamore" problems.

@davidwootton7355 Жыл бұрын

Very interesting and well done. This is a blast from the past since I worked as a developer writing software for AIX on Power systems from about 1995 to 2012, transitioning to more Linux around 2007. SMIT was a joy, and much fun was had dealing with IBM's shared and static libraries, where both were .a file extensions, getting threading to work, and moving from 32 bit to 64 bit. I also spend a couple years in compiler development for AIX on IBM's mainframe 3090 systems, where AIX was even more entertaining. Linux and X11 were also an adventure in the mid 90's where one could easily literally burn out an expensive monitor if one wasn't careful with their X configuration files.

@davetronics Жыл бұрын

Your name sounds familiar. If you know about AIX/390, chances are we crossed paths in the early 90s. I worked on the TCP/IP stack for it at Kingston. Before that, I worked on AIX/RT and AIX/PS2 in Danbury, CT. This all seems like a lifetime ago now.

@davidwootton7355 Жыл бұрын

@@davetronics I worked briefly on Aix/370 - sent out to Santa Monica for 4 months to learn it for software support. That got moved to Austin so I came home. Couple years later I got moved to AIX/ESA in Kingston where I probably made a nuisance of myself as the lead on system installation software. That group morphed into a HPC development group with SP/1 and SP/2 and AIX, eventually morphed again to the land of HPC on Linux. Stayed until 2013, early retirement incentive, contracted with Intel for a year and a half part time then contracted back to my old group part time until last December.

@tolkienfan1972 10 ай бұрын

I used to use VisualAge on OS/2 for work. It was an entire development environment, including editor, compiler and centralized source control. It had features that no other system had then, and I haven't seen even up to today. It was a real pleasure to use in a team.

@powerpower-rg7bk Жыл бұрын

I do remember running a desktop environment back in my college days on AIX 4.3.x. There was a good word processor available for it as I leveraged it for various assignments. WordPerfect comes to mind. There was also a spread sheet application from that same era whose name is escaping me. The monitor issue might be addressed by a EDID minder to restrict what resolutions/modes that the graphics adapter can be seen. Almost a requirement to leverage newer displays on older, arcane hardware. XLC does have an advantage over GCC though how much varies by project as mentioned. The big advantage of using XLC (or say ICC on Intel x86 hardware) is the finer tuning levels with the ability to leverage unique hardware attributes. For example, XLC produced better vector code than gcc as gcc's original implementation was targeted for the various G4 class chips. On that note, it is the compiler it'd recommend for building software that requires supervisor or hypervisor only instructions as IBM supports them better in their own compiler. If I had to guess, modern versions of GCC can likely produce faster code than XLC from that era. Since you were having semaphore problems, how many were actually available when you were running the game? Increasing this limit often resolved some oddities, though as arcane as these problems are, I can only guess if it'd help at all. The performance of the RS/6000 is generally found in its superior double precision FPU performance at the time. The G3 and G4 lines had great integer performance but lacked the high performance FPU of the 604e. In addition the G3 was only implemented in a single processor configuration while the 604e supported quad CPU configuration. Against the G4, the 604e's stronger FPU gets out done by the G4's vector unit able to four single precision values at once. However, the 604e still reigns supreme when it came to double precision as the vector unit on the G4's didn't support the 64 bit data type. There were dual G4 options and this chips did support a quad configuration but Apple never shipped them like that and IBM never adopted them. One other difference with IBM hardware is that they had a higher clocked system bus than what Apple was using at the time. I think the 375 MHz model had its bus running at 125 MHz and used 133 MHz SDRAM memory that was underclocked to match it. On the flip side, Apple of that era only had a 100 MHz bus speed but did include 64 bit PCI slots + 2x AGP where as this RS/6000 was stuck with 32 bit PCI.