After our last story about porting Doom to weird versions of UNIX, I suggested porting Doom to Xenix should be the next challenge. Well, as cb88 pointed out – it’s already been done, and even improved upon.
I should have known.
After our last story about porting Doom to weird versions of UNIX, I suggested porting Doom to Xenix should be the next challenge. Well, as cb88 pointed out – it’s already been done, and even improved upon.
I should have known.
Great. Now I have to buy a 386 or 486 system and put those Xenix floppies sitting in my office and try this out.
Nope, you don’t need to. PCem is amazing emulating very old x86 systems.
Just point to https://www.pcem-emulator.co.uk/, install it and configure it for a 486 (e.g: AMI486 BIOS).
Also, a simple Google search will help you howto get ROMs files.
I am aware, but I have two boxes of Xenix 386 floppies sitting on a shelf, and I’d need an actual computer to use them on for that authentic experience
Drumhellar,
Maybe some day people will use VR to get that authentic experience. Put on the headset where you can recreate the world of 386 floppies. If we had this, it would finally give us a use for VR to go back to the pinnacle of computing haha!
Oculus and its ilk is cool, but do you remember the first VR craze in the 90’s?
I remember a coffee shop in downtown San Jose, CA with a Sun UltraSparc workstation in a corner and a VR headset. Of course, I never saw anybody actually using it. Not sure why they didn’t go with an SGI workstation.
Also, VRML was the next Big Thing (R), and well supported with the right plugin in Netscape 4.xx web browsers.
And also, the movie Lawnmower Man. What a weird film adaptation – the book was about a possessed guy that is buck naked on his hands and knees eating a dude’s lawn, and when the dude complains, he turns into a lawnmower demon and runs over the customer.
Somebody somehow read that short story and said, “Ya know what this movie needs? A Virtual Reality sex scene, followed by a VR murder that kills the girl in real life.”
Wild times, man
Drumhellar,
I know, it seems to be cyclic.
I had totally forgotten about it! You know what that means? Someone else is going to reinvent it for the first time
It didn’t age well. I wonder what it’s like to watch tales from the crypt today.
Funny how that works out… Xenix isn’t somewhere I’d expect graphical games but after all the dos game was just writing directly to the hardware anyway so I guess it makes sense.
There weren’t really GUIs for Xenix.
Except when there were… since SINIX was Xenix derived and had a GUI called Collage:
https://retrocomputingforum.com/t/a-bit-of-xenix-history/1869/2
From what I am reading it sounds similar to MGR in functionality and was block based so all the windows aligned to chracter blocks on the screen.
I have a play with this last week. Downloaded the qemu image and played Doom for a while, followed by playing hangman with my kids from /usr/games. What a contrast. Amazing what people put their minds to. I have had a bit of a fascination with Xenix this year. Thanks for the link cb88. Someone did port X11 to Xenix with some hacking but questionable how usable it was.
Apparently there was a port of MGR to xenix also that runs at VGA… so that would be quite useful actually if you just had to have graphics and windowing on Xenix. Betaarchive forum post has a archive of it and a bunch of other Xenix software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atvTV9xU3Cw
Great vid of Xenix running on a Compaq SX20. What’s ironic for me personally (with a little pain) is that I had an SX20 like that one in 1st year uni. I ran OS/2 2.1. Also had 2 years prior to that an NCR PC8 (AT286/6Mhz) that had Xenix as an OS option to NCR DOS back in 1986. Only discovered that yesterday… All of that hardware plus everything else I had older than PIII went to the tip a 15 years ago. Kind of wish I didn’t but then again…. can’t keep everything…
Doom is probably the most ported game In History.
It’s the hackers’ version of ‘but can it play Crysis’
From vintage computers to medical equipment to appliances. “It CAN play DOOM” is the ultimate badge of honour!