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Messages - Olafur Gunnlaugsson

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1
Applications / Re: ArcaOS 5.1 - First Impressions
« on: January 02, 2024, 08:32:09 pm »
I believe Hyperthreading is an Intel only feature - meaning it only appears on Intel CPUs.  If I understand it correctly Hyperthreading was/is a technology by Intel to provide some of the benefit of multiple cores without actually having all of the hardware of the multiple cores.

It is not an Intel only feature, it appeared originally on minicomputers specialised in database jobs and on some workstation/server chips, a number of the later SPARC chips have hyperthreading. The original idea is literally to speed up database jobs by having a parallel hardware threads packing inherently inefficient relational database code into something more efficiently executed on a normal CPU core, this gave you a 7 to 20% speedups in specialised tasks for for a 3% to 8% increase in transistor count. Intel originally introduced Hyperthreading on Xeons as an answer to Sun SPARC's with hyperthreading close to 20 years ago.

Even though current versions of HT are a bit more generic than the original designs they still have the same flaw, the code is packed out of order, and there is a slight unpredictable (fuzzy) delay in reordering it, not an issue in most cases, but for hard real time work such as some drivers and audio applications that get their timing reference from the soundcard rather than the CPU, this leads to hiccups. As an example on Windows, most professional audio programs that require a single timing reference (not all do) simply turn off HT via ACPI while they are running, turning it back on again when they exit.

SPARC server chips were not doing any hard real time work so this was never really an issue with them, however it became an issue as soon as Xeons came out since they were being used for real time audio and video work. I still turn HT off on my Intel machines regardless of OS due to past experiences with driver and app issues, and even on Windows I have never really found an application that takes advantage of HT to such a degree to make me consider turning it on again, but your milage may vary.

2
Hi Richard

An alternative to c and rexx is pascal - very similar to c.

WDSibyl is a fairly good RAD system, similar to Delphi, and may be of interest https://wdsibyl.org/en/

That website has some issues, you can try the os2.org archive instead at https://archiv.os2.org/

3
Vispro/Rexx is now free but not open source, you can download it here: http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/download/pub/os2/dev/rexx/VISPROREXX-3_1_1.wpi


4
Applications / Re: HyperAccess 7
« on: November 09, 2023, 10:34:45 pm »
Ar you sure the sectors containing the library file are good?

Try downloading https://winworldpc.com/product/hyperaccess%20/7x and see if you get the same error.

5
Setup & Installation / Re: 5.1 and Samba/can't make it work!
« on: October 12, 2023, 07:24:30 pm »
I can't get Arca Mapper Network Connections to function. After many tries using 3 machines I was unable to det the Network Browser to work I've tried using different settings for Protocol in SMB config and got nowhere.. Don't know what else to try. Anybody got any  luck with this new setup for Samba --- Thanks for any ideas.

klipp
Do not know if it is the same issue, but some 5.1 users are reporting that Arcamapper does not install correctly, a reinstall has helped for some.

6
Setup & Installation / Re: Multiple installations of AOS?
« on: September 02, 2023, 04:58:21 am »
Sorry I wrote that text about 12 years ago when I still worked at Mensys. It was intended to READ if you want to use MORE then 5 license you need to buy a commercial license.
It NEVER intended to imply you can use eCS personal license in upto 5 devices at the same time. Thats a violation of the OS/2 EULA.

Roderick
I know, I was not wondering about the license useage, but about the number 3 vs 5

7
Off Topic discussions / Re: John Poole Software Operating System/5?
« on: September 01, 2023, 03:16:05 pm »
I came across this video and website showing called OS/5 by John Poole Software. I thought it was interesting.
https://youtu.be/xaTelXsXNRU?si=M38TFnjPSyagE63V
One can still download it?
https://vetusware.com/download/OS5%20Desktop%201.1/?id=17975
 8)
Here is the information on it from the video on YouTube
'
OS/5 is a Shareware PC operating system based on a Microsoft programming language that itself was rarely used. Intended to be an inexpensive, lightweight alternative to Windows, OS/2, and other graphical user interfaces, OS/5's Desktop runs in text mode while retaining many GUI features. Created by John Poole and released in 1996, two versions of it are known to exist, and would have been lost entirely if I had not saved them over 25 years ago, because they have not been archived anywhere online and trying to search for OS/5 or its author will turn up nothing except this video.

Download OS/5 version 1.0: http://www.amstereo.org/files/os5v10.zip
Download OS/5 version 1.1: http://www.amstereo.org/files/os5v11.zip
Ignore any security warnings; I run the site and it does not store any personal data. Feel free to archive these files elsewhere.

Time flow:
0:00 Introduction
1:00 OS/5 1.0 documentation
1:56 OS/5 1.0 review
6:53 OS/5 1.1 documentation
8:15 OS/5 1.1 review
13:25 Visual Basic for DOS
14:43 Higher resolutions
16:08 Memory & disk space
17:15 Conclusion
'

It is a simple DOS shell that was written in Visual basic for DOS (V1 presumably, I think 2 and up were Win only), it is very rudimentary even for a Shareware DOS shell.

8
Setup & Installation / Re: Multiple installations of AOS?
« on: September 01, 2023, 03:12:07 pm »
In the eCS license text an error slipped that I had written. It was intended to read you are only allowed to use more then 3 personal licenses of eCS.

This can also be read that eCS can be installed on 3 systems (personal version). But this is NOT correct.

Did you mean 5?

"eComStation 2.1 versions:
eComStation 2.1 is released in two flavours:

The Home & Student version can be used by any private or small office user. As a private or small office user, it is allowed to have up to 5 licenses installed for production usage. This version includes 6 months of Software Subscription Services.

If more than 5 licenses are needed, it is required to purchase the Business Edition. The Business Edition includes 12 months of Software Subscription Services. Volume discounts are available for the Business Edition."

9
Applications / Re: VBox OS2
« on: August 14, 2023, 02:38:40 am »
I got some ISOs to try. Win98se does not load at all. Tries to boot from CD and then VBox aborts loading. Going to try another ISO.

As an alternative, if you cannot get VBox functioning, VirtualPC for OS/2 runs all older Microsoft OS's and SVista runs most of them.

10
Applications / Re: Lost / Missing Software for OS/2
« on: July 21, 2023, 11:10:24 pm »
Hello. So, officially we are looking for the VABasic 1.5 patch for OS/2 that used to be publicly available on the IBM support Site.
If someone has the filename, dead link, or (more important) the file, please let me know.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980209101610/http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/vabasic/
There was a large 1.2 patch for both OS/2 and Windows before 1.5, even that would be better than nothing as it solved a lot of issues.

11
Applications / Re: Lost / Missing Software for OS/2
« on: July 21, 2023, 08:09:22 pm »
Hi Martin,

as far as I know, there were only full versions of VABasic.
No, IBM issued patches for VA Basic, for some reason it was only available from the website and not from any of their FTP sites and I lost my copies of the patches in a Partition Magic related incident in 2000, by that time IBM had taken down the website.

12
Setup & Installation / Re: Trials and Tribulations
« on: May 20, 2023, 07:01:28 am »
Panorama nor Snap will not work on either the Nvidia MX400 or an S3 Trio I have and the only way I could see anything was to setup as SVGA
SNAP should work on those two cards, but as an alternative both of these cards have a discrete native OS/2 drivers, in the case of the S3 Trio, both classic and GRADD versions.

ArcaOS does not support 6x86 chips like the K6 BTW, some of the Arca supplied code is compiled for 686 using GCC and may not work on your setup. eCS is a much better bet.

13
Hardware / Re: [Solved] Iomega ZIP 100 IDE
« on: May 16, 2023, 03:33:49 am »
I tried DFSee, but DFSee does not see the drive at all. LVM can see the drive, but no operation actually works. I tried renaming the drive, and it says it worked, but when I open it again in LVM, the original lack of disk name appears.

MiniLVM shows an extra unavailable drive with the right size, but no operation is allowed.

I found a USB zip drive and hoked it to an ArcaOS 5.1 beta system. Everything seems to work. I can verify that my zip disks are working. I used this system to assign a drive letter to the disk.

Back on the IDE Zip drive system, the disk with LVM information does not appear. Adding a drive letter does not seem to help.

Wasn't there a kink with the IDE ZIP drives? Did they not show some strange behaviour if they were set up as busmasters, especially with some chipsets? It's been 25 years, but I gave up on IDE ZIP's altogether for some such reason and only used SCSI versions.

I can vaguely recall setting it up for friends a few years later that the most successful setup was having them as a slave on IDE channel 2, with the caveat that most MB's post 2005 only have one IDE channel ...

14
Hardware / Re: OS/2 Warp 3 Graphics Card Selection Input?
« on: May 11, 2023, 03:14:47 pm »
I have a machine with 16-bit ISA slots and I'm looking to install OS/2 WARP Version 3. What would some graphics card recommendations be as I know driver support was always an issue with OS/2 that didn't get better to WARP 4. Been searching for a compatibility matrix for what drivers where included in WARP 3 but having a hard time tracking that down.

Trident ISA cards using IBM drivers are the best bet for ISA, some of the Trident ISA drivers even have features that later drivers do not support such as changing resolutions without rebooting etc. Pro level ISA cards such as Matrox, S3 et. al. work well but are impossible to find. Tseng Lab. cards work well too, but have slow DAC's, but superb DOS support. Cirrus Logic (aka acu MOS, etc), ATI and SiS also work well but similarly have a slow DAC with the exception of a couple of ATI cards.

Almost any ISA card can be made to work actually, I used an obscure Avance Logic (aka Realtek) ISA card for years, that I have never seen offered for sale before or since, despite keeping an eye out for it on eBay for a quarter of a century.

15
Applications / Re: Running old OS/2 Software - Issues
« on: December 23, 2022, 05:38:25 pm »
Did an old version of OS/2 have a spreadsheet applet? Perhaps as an example program. I tested ver 2.1 at one time and it had some different programs installed but can't remember what now and have never installed anything older. Sounds like it from the readme.
Yes, some 2.x versions had a tiny spreadsheet and PIM.

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