6 ms·
Why does trying to break into the NT 3.1 kernel reboot my 486DX4 machine?
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago> I installed Windows NT 3.1 on a Compaq ProSignia 3080 When you see a listing for a used 3080 on eBay, make sure you read the fine print before deciding that it is a great deal.
- rado 6y agoBragging in front of 386 users
- fouc 6y agoIndeed! Incredible specs. > For improved performance, I maxed out the RAM at 128MB and swapped the socketed Intel 486DX-33 by an AMD enhanced 486DX4-SV8B (write-back cache and SMM) in a voltage adapter socket.
- codeflo 6y ago128 MB in a 486 is insane. 16 MB was a lot in that era. I remember upgrading my Pentium II (!!!) from 64 MB to 128 MB, in order to not suffer death by loading screen in Diablo II.
- scoopr 6y agoHUGE pagefile.sys!
- herodoturtle 6y agoYou said it mate. I ran a 486DX266 at the time and it only came with 1MB of SIMM memory. Hell, I even remember upgrading it to 4MB of EDO memory was a big deal (and this was done purely so that I could run "Crusader: No Remorse"). And now I write software for a living. Good times.
- aliswe 6y agoGreat game back in the day!
- forinti 6y agoIf I recall correctly, my 486 had 4MB of RAM. I then had a Pentium 166MMX with 64MB (16MB was what was usually offered) which I recently upgraded to 80MB with a couple of sticks I found in an old box.
- mrlonglong 6y agoHas any one ever seen a 386 with 4GB of RAM in the wild?
- gspr 6y agoThese kinds of stories make me so happy: they convince me that creativity is alive and well, and that everyday humans are keen explorers :-)
- malanj 6y agoThere's a great gem in the comments too. [Background: the question author (Michael) answered their own question] Why is this not the accepted answer - waiting for a better one? – piiperi @piiperi To me, it feels a bit arrogant to accept a self-answered questions before a couple of days have passed. Granted, on the other hand, in the case of this question, a different answer is quite unlikely. – Michael Karcher
- TeMPOraL 6y agoA different answer is quite unlikely, but improvements are always possible :). Case in point, another gem from the comments: I see your NOP (90h), and raise you an explicit DS prefix (3Eh). It's all about the style points! :-) Any instruction with a memory operand can have a segment prefix. In this case, the DS prefix is implicit/implied, but it can be explicitly specified without changing the meaning of the instruction. Both ways work to pad the extra leftover byte of space, but the explicit DS prefix does not change the instruction's execution speed, whereas the NOP actually takes 1 cycle of time to execute (plus possible decoding). – Cody Gray
- Mauricebranagh 6y agoInteresting form the headline I thought the OP was trying to break into a NT machine where the password had been lost. I did this back in the day for a big Uk Cinema chain's booking system - basically boot to floppy and extract the secrets to run Jack the Ripper on
- anaisbetts 6y agoThis is the kind of work I used to do every day in the Windows Sustained Engineering team at Microsoft, this person would make an excellent kernel engineer
- RyJones 6y agoI thought this was going to be a post by Raymond Chen.
- zinekeller 6y agoFunnily, one of the comments on the answer did reference Chen's ONT: > I see your NOP (90h), and raise you an explicit DS prefix (3Eh). It's all about the style points! :-) Any instruction with a memory operand can have a segment prefix. In this case, the DS prefix is implicit/implied, but it can be explicitly specified without changing the meaning of the instruction. Both ways work to pad the extra leftover byte of space, but the explicit DS prefix does not change the instruction's execution speed, whereas the NOP actually takes 1 cycle of time to execute (plus possible decoding). – Cody Gray Style points is linked to https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121113-00/?p=6103 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121113-00/?p=61... which is about a bug in Microsoft Money (a useful product that was killed by the Windows 8 MSN).
- MKarcher 6y agoPost author here: Not so surprising, I have ONT as dead tree edition in my home, and I actually read most of it.
- phendrenad2 6y agoIs Raymond Chen a kernel engineer? Seems like he mainly works on the win32 API.
- anaisbetts 6y agoRaymond has worked on basically the entire OS, he's an extremely competent kernel dev despite his current work being in userspace
- anthk 6y agoInteresting enough, Win NT 3.5 was able to run Unreal and unreal based games :).
- Koshkin 6y agoOne of my favorite things about the NT3.1 design was that the subsystems, such as Win32, were completely abstracted from the base system and even communicated with the kernel by means of message passing. This was changed later (for better efficiency).
- js2 6y ago> The Windows NT 3.1 CD comes with the full set of debugging symbols Props to Microsoft for doing this. Also, for providing symbol servers which allow a debugger to pull down symbols remotely, over the network. One part of my job is helping developers debug mobile application crashes on both iOS and Android. Fortunately, Apple makes iOS debugging symbols available (not as conveniently as they could, but you can get them). This at least allows for properly symbolized backtraces. Android however is the bane of my mobile application debugging existence. There's no hope of getting debugging systems for any version of Android not built by Google. You can kinda sorta get something useful for Nexus devices by pulling down the Nexus images and extracting public symbols from the libraries on those images. Still not as good a full debugging symbols, but better than nothing. Sadly, Google doesn't make available the debugging symbols for WebView, which is where I see a lot of crashes. Not being able to symbolize the stack traces makes it almost impossible to diagnose the cause.
- unixhero 6y agoThat is a badass answer.