Quick tip time! This is an anecdote from a libre project I’m working on, specifically Auctions.
One of the things I am doing right now is implementing the Cocoa/Mac UI. I’m writing a flow using sheets for signing in to accounts. I had a lot of issues making the sheet accept input; it just wouldn’t let any of its fields become the first responder.
Poking around DuckDuckGo, I found a Stack Overflow question that seemed pretty interesting, and the answer was to override NSPanel‘s canBecomeKeyWindow method to return YES. I did some searching around in Apple’s Developer Documentation to see how the system determines when a window can become a key window, and I found this nugget:
A window that uses NSWindowStyleMaskBorderless can’t become key or main, unless the value of canBecomeKeyWindow or canBecomeMainWindow is YES. Note that you can set a window’s or panel’s style mask to NSWindowStyleMaskBorderless in Interface Builder by deselecting Title Bar in the Appearance section of the Attributes inspector.
I had turned off Title Bar in Interface Builder as I thought it should be disabled since the window would be shown as a sheet. I re-enabled Title Bar, and voila! The sheet worked perfectly, and did not have a title bar when displayed as a sheet.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve written anything here. Part of that is due to my life being hectic lately. I’ve been dealing with health issues surrounding my family and I have also been happily adjusting to my new job.
When I started this blog, my goals were two-fold: a place for my long form writings on various topics, and status updates with the projects I work on. I still wish to write articles like those, but I want to share more content.
To that end, I would like to reimagine this blog. I intend to start sharing more, shorter articles with tips and tricks I learn, cool software and services I find, and also more cat posts.
On September 18th, we adopted a new kitten, Melody. She was born in July of this year, so she is still growing a little every day. She also has been adjusting to life with her big brother, Mr Gaz. These two get into hilarious hijinks regularly, so stay tuned!
I look forward to sharing more and interacting with my readers.
It has been a while since I have written an article about retrocomputing. In some ways, it feels weird to refer to Windows 2000 as retrocomputing. I used Windows 2000 as my go-to operating system for the majority of high school, well after Windows XP was released. And yet, it is now 22 years old.
I have a special affinity for Windows 2000 in my heart. It’s the last version of Windows that has the true “classic” UI. Windows XP and later do have “Windows Classic” themes, but they are still obviously tweaked. It is new enough to run some software considered modern yet old enough to run many of the software designed for older Windows versions. The NTVDM still supports 16-bit Windows 3.x apps, and I’ve had success running DOS applications on it as well.
But none of that can compare to the true reason I find Windows 2000 so comfortable. Weeks before my grandfather died in 2001, he took me to his new office to show me where he worked. He had a Windows 2000 workstation and let me unlock it and open some of his files. It was the first time I used a computer running Windows 2000, and the last time I used a computer with him.
The Athlon: An introduction
I have a Compaq Presario 2100 laptop. It is a surprising workhorse. I bought one new, in 2003, and had it for many years – but I gave it away to a friend who needed a computer in 2010. In 2019, I needed a 32-bit x86 system for testing Qt 5 and Firefox for Adélie, so I found a Presario 2100 on eBay in good condition for a good price. It ran Adélie for a while, with Windows XP Professional in dual-boot.
This individual specimen has a 2.1 GHz Athlon XP, 1 GB RAM, and a 250 GB WD Blue disk. It’s a perky little laptop, with enough oomph to play some great games (SimCity 4! Midtown Madness 2!) and chomp through small builds. The Presario 2100 is actually one of the systems I did OS development on back in the day, and I ran everything from NetBSD to Solaris to Windows Server on it at one point or another.
The only quirk I’ve noticed – which will be relevant later in this article – is that when booting Linux, the battery needs to be removed. It doesn’t hold a charge, and the kernel’s ACPI module is angry and deadlocks if the battery is present during initialization.
Installing the Windows 2000.
I inserted my Windows 2000 CD and proceeded through installation. It took over two hours to perform the “hardware detection” phase, which struck me as odd. About 20 minutes in, I turned the system off and back on as I was hoping that would help it along.
The GUI was slow and nearly unresponsive. It took multiple seconds to draw simple controls. And installation, in all, took almost four days to complete. When restarting, it was very slow to boot as well. I was concerned there may be a fault somewhere – perhaps the CPU was failing. However, Windows XP still worked fine.
I used the debug logging facility of NTLDR and found it slowed when ACPI.SYS was loaded. I removed the battery and rebooted Windows 2000. It was instantaneous. As it turns out, the Windows 2000 ACPI driver was having the same issue as Linux. After upgrading to SP4, I was able to boot with the battery inserted without issue, so the issue has been worked around in a patch.
You’ve come a long way, baby.
The next step was installing the drivers for all of the hardware. The modem, network adaptor, and display adaptor were simple and worked just fine.
I installed the official Broadcom wireless drivers from HP’s Web site. It worked, but only supported WEP and WPA networks. My network is, of course, WPA2. I found this fantastic backport of the Vista driver to older Windows versions. I installed it, and then installed the Boingo Wireless client for a front-end. To my surprise, the laptop works flawlessly joined to a VLAN on my dd-wrt powered Linksys WRT3200ACM. This allows me access to some internal resources on my network – most importantly, a micro HTTP server on my laptop where I can stage patches and file downloads from the Internet.
Boingo Wireless, happily running WPA2 on Windows 2000
At some point, I do think it would be an interesting project to set up a proxy server and allow the laptop limited access to the real Internet. It will require a lot of research to ensure full security.
And now for the fun!
So far, some of the productivity software I’ve installed includes Office 97, Office 2000, Visio 2002, Liquid Motion, and Crystal Reports. In fact, this blog article has been written entirely on the Athlon in Word 2000.
For development, I’ve installed Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise including Visual J++ 6.0. I have some SDKs and tools that I would like to add, but I haven’t found a lot of time yet. Some of the tools available in the Platform SDK may start to be useful to me soon. I am definitely having strong ideas for software to write targeting these older platforms.
Games I’ve had success with include Hasbro’s Yahtzee, Chessmaster 7000, and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Hoyle Solitaire from Sierra On-Line also runs flawlessly despite being a 16-bit game for 3.1 and even warning during setup that “Windows NT has not been tested”. The only game that gave me issue was Slingo. It crashes on startup, before the intro screen, and running the included DXDIAG gives a DirectDraw error.
Visual C++ 6.0
Hoyle Solitaire
Writing this article in Word
A few examples of having fun on the laptop
Final thoughts.
This has been a blast to set up and I have been enjoying running this laptop again with the software from yesteryear.
This project has been everything that I had no longer felt with my other projects. Personal accomplishment, inspiration for future projects and ideas, and surprisingly, a significant amount of fun!
I am looking forward to writing some projects to enhance the retrocomputing experience for the community at large. Here’s to the future, with one paw still in the past.
I decided to drag it out last night and see how it was going. Maybe it could be better after a rest…?
Bug Check c0000218. Not better, but worse.
It had a new bug check, STOP 0xc0000218. The SOFTWARE registry hive, where Windows 2000 keeps its HKLM\Software keys, is now apparently corrupted. This is significantly worse than before, when it was randomly having Kmode exceptions during use.
I asked one of my retrocomputing buddies that knows a lot about older Windows versions — my mother — who suggested booting to Safe Mode and trying to defragment. Safe Mode runs only on the SYSTEM hive, so the SOFTWARE corruption isn’t an issue. Apparently sometimes Windows can get very angry if the SOFTWARE hive is fragmented, because it has to load entire sectors in the boot environment.
Safe Mode was not quite the joy I had hoped for.
Always a bug check in win32k.sys on this one.
I tried to boot the Windows 98 partition, wondering if perhaps it could at least serve as a sentinel of any hardware issues.
Windows 98 randomly missing system files.
It claimed various system files were no longer present. It still seemed to work, other than some networking functions. I used ScanDisk, which found no errors in the FAT nor surface errors. Onward to the memory diagnostic. I used a Vista-era Windows Memory Diagnostics boot CD that I had laying around from 2008 and ran two passes of the basic test and a single pass of the extended test.
Succeeded!
No errors were found. Unfortunately, this leaves me in an unenviable place: from all I can tell, the hardware is fine, but multiple operating systems are failing to boot properly. Additionally, the computer refused to boot Windows install media at all.
At some point, I will pull my Windows XP laptop out and try to use WinDbg to find out what I can from the bug check screen. Hopefully I can remember how to do that. Until then, Erin (the Armada) will unfortunately remain unusable.
The Cat Fox Life 