What if a Microsoft developer gets her/his hands on the leaked NT 3.5 code and secretly starts working on setting Windows 10 straight...
Believe it or not, Microsoft engineers already have access to old NT source code.
you don't say:)
Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
41–50 of 62 posts
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. Compare that with the story of getting Windows 2.x work in protected mode (two devs and a spare Friday evening...) https://gunkies.org/wiki/Windows_3.0
They were working with code that already pretended to be in protected mode anyway (with the exception of locking and unlocking blocks of memory... which was unnecessary with a hardware MMU.) Even saying that, it was amazing at the time to run essentially unmodified 'real mode' binaries in protected mode. (There was a tool that would take an existing binary and set the 'okay to run in protected mode' flag.)
yeah, they go into that in the referred-to book (The Personal Computer from the Inside Out).. though spectacularly irrelevant in this day and age, it still makes a thrilling read, for me anyway ;)
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
That proof is utter nonsense. Sure Nintendo might have just downloaded the rom, but they may have: 1) just concatenated the prg and chr roms and added an iNES header so they could validate in third party emulators. (Likely extra helpful for games where they were developing anti-epilepsy patches, since third party emulators have some really nice debugging tools.) or 2) Used a third party cart dumper that adds the iNES…
or 3) hired one of the iNES developers to develop their emulator, who kept using the file-format they were familiar with. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22756156
great detective work there!
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
a bunch of nintendo console code leaked earlier this month as well, including the code for the gamecube. any big emulator project that wants to maintain legitimacy is going to stay far away from these leaks. they'll send out messages on mailing lists warning developers NOT to look at the code and NOT to go fixing bugs based on the leaked code. an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation. if an em…
> an emulator is legal as long as it's a clean-room implementation And this is why it is often done on completely legitimate open source projects, and many projects don't shy away from doing so. Wine, ReactOS, and many more regularly do so completely legally. (of course there was that thing in '06... https://www.linux.com/news/reactos-suspends-development-sour... )
that reactOS kerfuffle is just one of many, many examples of how a tainted clean-room design can completely derail an open-source project, and most stories have a nastier ending than that one.
the dolphin emulator team (gamecube/wii emulator) made a statement on the nintendo leaks:
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a shame that they whitelisted such a small selection of titles (on 360).
I think that's more of a licensing things really. Some of those old games had really wierd diels especially for music rights.
Before your comment I thought the more likely reason that Microsoft qualifies games is to reduce the amount of development and support effort needed for their emulator. Even Halo 1 struggled to get some good framerates, IIRC.
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#46Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
What mystifies me is that the core of the OS is actually pretty good. I've never had any issue like a blue screen since a decade ago. The kernel and driver subsystems are rock solid. Had a few occasional GPU driver crashes but those are mostly the fault of the driver devs and they don't cause a system reboot since Vista. Why is the userland so bad in comparison? are they employing much worse developers to take care o…
Agree that Windows 10 seems to get the difficult stuff right. Stability, security, advanced graphics infrastructure, and very impressive backward compatibility with old binaries. Also agreed that the new control panels are a trainwreck, offering no advantages whatsoever over the old control panels they're trying to (very gradually) replace. It's also incredibly bloated. Gone are the days when a few gigabytes would be…
Minesweeper from the Microsoft store is bigger than a standard Win98 install. :)
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least it’s easy to patch out if you have a homebrew-enabled 360.
I'm curious to know how well unsupported titles work.
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows 10 is just layers built on top of layers all the way back to nt, you have to remove stuff instead of adding it to make it better. the funniest part is that you can have literal archeological expeditions from the menus, each click bringing you further back in its history https://i.imgur.com/K0xEDaN.png you can get back to components so old that are out of the new styling as well, taking the right turns: https:…
Let's also not forget this amazing jewel: http://i.imgur.com/48S59Xm.png Straight from Windows 3.x :-)
That looks like it's from NT 3 rather than Windows 3.x as it does support long filenames.
Re: Xbox and Windows NT 3.5 source code leaks online
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree that Windows 10 seems to get the difficult stuff right. Stability, security, advanced graphics infrastructure, and very impressive backward compatibility with old binaries. Also agreed that the new control panels are a trainwreck, offering no advantages whatsoever over the old control panels they're trying to (very gradually) replace. It's also incredibly bloated. Gone are the days when a few gigabytes would be…
Minesweeper from the Microsoft store is bigger than a standard Win98 install. :)
The original Xbox had 64MB of RAM, with no dedicated graphics memory.
The Microsoft Teams chat application uses 200MB to 550MB of RAM when idle.
My all-time favourite example of high-density software is Super Mario 64, which weighs in at 8MB.