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Ibm Embos, Ever heard of that?
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Extremo | Posted: Jul 31 2003, 11:54 PM

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I recently purchased a settop-like Commodore 64 Web.It! computer (actually a x86-based PC unit with built in C64 Emulator).
This thing uses PC-DOS 2000 with IBM EmbOS (in ROM) as operating system. As far as I could find out, EmbOS is IBM's custom version of an embedded MS Windows 3.1.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find any more info on this on the internet (like SDK, application notes, whitepapers, etc.)
Has anyone ever heard of this thing and/or seen the development environment in action?
Extremo

vette3619 | Posted: Aug 1 2003, 01:46 AM

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Can you capture a copy of the rom
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BeGiNnEr | Posted: Aug 1 2003, 02:45 AM

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Mmmm, never heard of it, but it sounds interesting!
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Extremo | Posted: Aug 1 2003, 06:08 PM

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I will try to make a Ghost-Image of the ROM this weekend.
Could be a little tricky, because the machine has a ROM-"drive", a Flashrom-"drive" and a RAM-"drive".
Well, we'll see.
Extremo

apple2gs | Posted: Aug 1 2003, 06:53 PM

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my eduquest had a backup of its os and gui on a rom it was cool

vette3619 | Posted: Aug 2 2003, 12:36 AM

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cool
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Extremo | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 02:18 AM

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QUOTE (Extremo @ Aug 1 2003, 08:08 PM)
I will try to make a Ghost-Image of the ROM this weekend. Could be a little tricky, because the machine has a ROM-"drive", a Flashrom-"drive" and a RAM-"drive".

It's done!
Well, it really WAS tricky, but I finally got it working in VirtualPC 5.1. The original machine has a touchpad, dual video (VGA and SVideo) and a integrated modem.
It took me some hours to find out how the flashrom and rom drives are mounted. Since Windows (or EmbOS) resides in ROM, it cannot write to it's configuration files. The original machine uses IBM's shadow.exe to redirect disk writes to a ram drive.
I edited out all this stuff in the configuration files and put in drivers suitable for VirtualPC. The system still throws a couple of errors but it's running fine, although you can't connect to the internet via VirtualPC's virtual network, yet.
If you want so see what IBM EmbOS is like just PM me. I'll try to upload the .vhd to a pub or your personal server.
Oh, did I mention that it is in german?
Extremo

Roy | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 03:21 AM

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QUOTE (Extremo @ Aug 3 2003, 10:18 AM)

QUOTE (Extremo @ Aug 1 2003, 08:08 PM)
I will try to make a Ghost-Image of the ROM this weekend. Could be a little tricky, because the machine has a ROM-"drive", a Flashrom-"drive" and a RAM-"drive".

It's done!
Well, it really WAS tricky, but I finally got it working in VirtualPC 5.1. The original machine has a touchpad, dual video (VGA and SVideo) and a integrated modem.
It took me some hours to find out how the flashrom and rom drives are mounted. Since Windows (or EmbOS) resides in ROM, it cannot write to it's configuration files. The original machine uses IBM's shadow.exe to redirect disk writes to a ram drive.
I edited out all this stuff in the configuration files and put in drivers suitable for VirtualPC. The system still throws a couple of errors but it's running fine, although you can't connect to the internet via VirtualPC's virtual network, yet.
If you want so see what IBM EmbOS is like just PM me. I'll try to upload the .vhd to a pub or your personal server.
Oh, did I mention that it is in german?
Extremo

the image can be downloaded here:
http://202.192.202.18/roy/OS/EmbOS.rar

xJulian | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 07:48 AM

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Thanks, I'll have a look at it for sure. If it works out like it should (and no one else has time) I could also pack it into Win3.1-style installation floppies.
Edit: I've had a little peek, and my first impression is: LOL. That thing is closer to MS-BOB than to MS-Windows.
I've also started to look "under the hood"... I'm quite surprised it works (almost) without complaints, considering we're using a HD in place for the ROM- _and_ the RAMdrive. Maybe I can get around the need for two partitions using subst or a real RAMdrive...
Different question, was the PC-DOS inside the vhd included with the OS or did you choose it yourself?

Extremo | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 03:59 PM

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QUOTE (xJulian @ Aug 3 2003, 09:48 AM)
Different question, was the PC-DOS inside the vhd included with the OS or did you choose it yourself?

I had to rearrange things a little because the original BIOS of the machine allows to boot from D: (VirtualPC doesn't) so that the PC DOS bootfiles do not need to reside on C:.
The machine originally runs PC DOS 7 Revision 1. The only thing I changed is I made it run from C:.
The PC_DOS.zip inside the .vhd is not originally there. I just forgot to clean things up
You can get rid of some error messages by resizing the partitions so that drive E: has a little more space. I forgot that normally writes to E: would be redirected to another drive (C: I think) and so it doesn't matter that on E: is only 2048 KB available.
Extremo

xJulian | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 05:39 PM

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Okay, as far as I can tell right now, I should be able to make an installation CD, just FYI so nobody does the same work. Will this be considered abandonware?

vette3619 | Posted: Aug 3 2003, 07:03 PM

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Cool xJulian
I think it would be because it is Win 3.1/Dos based
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im_to_hyper | Posted: Aug 7 2003, 06:48 PM

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QUOTE (xJulian @ Aug 3 2003, 05:39 PM)
Okay, as far as I can tell right now, I should be able to make an installation CD, just FYI so nobody does the same work. Will this be considered abandonware?

Yeah, it would. If most of us have never even heard of it, why wouldn't it be?
Sorry this post ist so late.... I was out of town for awhile.

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