Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
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Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
1–10 of 91 posts
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#2love software archaeology like this.
there was another article where someone bootstrapped the very first version of gcc that had the i386 backend added to it, and it turns out there was a bug in the codegen. I'll try to find it...
EDIT: Found in, infact there was a HN discussion about an article referencing the original article:
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#3[flagged]
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#4[flagged]
there is something to be said about old windows installation CDs being essentially modern-day equivalents of immutable docker layers - i don't think one could say that about modern windows, but then i'm not super clued in into ms stuff.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#5> The first batches of Quake executables, quake.exe and vquake.exe were programmed on HP 712-60 running NeXT and cross-compiled with DJGPP running on a DEC Alpha server 2100A.
Is that accurate? I thought DJGPP only ran on and for PC compatible x86. ID had Alpha for things like running qbps and light and vis (these took for--ever to run, so the alpha SMP was really useful), but for building the actual DOS binaries, surely this was DJGPP on x86 PC?
Was DJGPP able to run on Alpha for cross compilation? I'm skeptical, but I could be wrong.
Edit: Actually it looks like you could. But did they? https://www.delorie.com/djgpp/v2faq/faq22_9.html
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#6[flagged]
> The detail about needing to reinstall Windows NT just to add a second CPU shows how tightly coupled OS and hardware were — there was no abstraction layer pretending otherwise.
In this case there was: the reason you need to reinstall to go from uniprocessor to SMP was because NT shipped with two HALs (Hardware Abstarction Layer): one supporting just a single processor, and one supporting more than one.
The SMP one had all the code for things like CPU synchronization and interrupt routing, while the UP one did not.
If they'd packed everything into one HAL, single-processor systems would have to take the performance hit of all the synchronization code even though it wasn't necessary. Memory usage would be higher too. I expect that you probably could run the SMP HAL on a UP system (unless Microsoft put extra code in to make it not let you), but you wouldn't really want to do that, as it would be slower and require more RAM.
So it wasn't that those abstraction layers didn't exist back then. It was that abstraction layers can be expensive. This is still true today, of course, but we have the cycles and memory to spare, more or less, which was very much not the case then.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#7I'd like to see someone build the Linux source code leak that came out not to far after Quake was released.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#8Quake book incoming from Fabien?
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#9[flagged]
> The detail about needing to reinstall Windows NT just to add a second CPU shows how tightly coupled OS and hardware were — there was no abstraction layer pretending otherwise. In this case there was: the reason you need to reinstall to go from uniprocessor to SMP was because NT shipped with two HALs (Hardware Abstarction Layer): one supporting just a single processor, and one supporting more than one. The SMP one h…
Linux also used to have separate SMP kernels back when multi processor systems were rare.
Re: Let's compile Quake like it's 1997
#10Funny, I've just been (re-)playing Quake 2 recently.