d8b Forum

Has anyone been able to rewrite the OS yet which would allow the use of newer technology in motherboards? It seems lately that I am replacing the LPS 152 power supplies in both of my d8b's each year now. I am sure something else is bound to fail soon. I am going to rebuild a new power supply for the desk because I'm tired of the power problems. My latest experience was caused by excessive heat in my studio one of the d8b's went down during a session. The fault was mine for not realizing how hot it got in the room as being in may we don't have the central air on yet. So over two days the temperature in the room probably reached High 90s. I could not restart thed8b for the entire day. The next day it booted up fine and that was three days ago it has worked ever since. But on Startup it experiences a very short symptom of a rail cap failure for bout 2 seconds and then boots. I am sure the cause is the old power supplies.

I could use the current box to house new power supplies and build a separate unit for the CPU. There is one other alternative. I just found a 2-unit rack chassis which will house an ATX motherboard and has sufficient room in it and fans to completely transfer all the contents of the current box into it. I'll have to make some Cuts in the chassis to accommodate the current motherboard but I would love to be able to mount a new ATX style motherboard in it.

I don't don't want to mount anything inside the desk because Mackie obviously had reasons for not putting the power supplies in the desk most likely because of noise and Heat. So I don't mind having an umbilical cord. Once I receive the new chassis and start my first modification I'll post pictures and hopefully success story here.

But I was just wondering if anybody has attempted to or has successfully rebuilt the OS yet. I say yet because I'm sure it can be done I just don't have the expertise to do it.

I have also heard about software emulation programs that will run on current systems to emulate a 386 pentium. But I wonder if BIOS incompatibility is the real problem.

I have been recently delving into the existing code using IDA pro...it appears that the MBR is fairly standard stuff (MS-DOS header and stub code, followed by a PE header, and some code to load PME.SYS into memory and execute it).
PME.SYS seems to do a lot of setup stuff (data arrays in memory, etc), and finally loads and executes Mackieos.exe, which appears to be the main application.
Neither of these programs are written to run under Windows / Mac / Linux, so actually getting them to run would require extensive work, or possibly some form of wrapper / emulation of the existing hardware.
I suspect that PME.SYS is doing the hardware setup and recognition of the various pieces that are needed to make the system boot correctly, so another avenue of exploration may be to reverse engineer PME.SYS to recognise newer hardware and present a compatible interface to the application.
Another possibility would be a completely new application built to run on WIndows / Mac using two serial ports to communicate with the D8B console.

Although I have made some progress with the reverse engineering, this is a huge task, and I'm only just dipping into it at the moment...sorry to disappoint, but I don't expect to see a D8B running on new hardware anytime soon.

Regards

John

Well, not surprised, but appreciate what progress has been made. I know this has been kicking around for at least the last 10 years or so. It is a daunting task. Interesting thought - Can't Windows 10 run a MS-DOS window and then you could just load the OS from there. (I guess if it were that simple, it would have been cracked many years ago).

Appreciate the effort, thanks.

RJ

reverse engineering, a very huge task indeed !

IMO, the problem is hardware support/drivers.

You probably couldn't launch the Mackie OS from MS-DOS within Windows (I think the last "full" DOS implementation was in Windows 2000 or maybe XP, but I could be mistaken. Later versions of Windows had rather limited DOS-shells that you couldn't even run DOS-games in, anymore).

I'll just think out loud, but what you could theoretically do, is to set up a virtual machine via VM-Ware, or in my case since I'm on a Mac, via Parallels. You could clone a d8b harddrive so it will exist as a "virtual" harddrive and then try to start the OS as if it was a real computer (up to this point, this is pretty easy to do)... but what will happen is the same thing as if you would try to run Mackie OS directly on a new/different PC: You'll get some error (or frozen screen) because the hardware is not what the Mackie OS expects, and there's no Mackie OS drivers for the PC hardware that IS there.

So, to "reverse-engineer" someone would either have to write new drivers for all needed hardware components in the way Mackie OS expects this (...not sure if anyone is familiar enough with the OS'es inner workings to even be able to do this... and likely a complete overhaul of how the OS communicates with the CPU would be needed, since a lot has happened with the CPU instruction sets used by newer CPUs vs. what happened back in the early 2000's. So, basically an OS update/rewrite comparable to going from Win 98 to Win 10).
I'd think this is almost impossible, or would take an individual YEARS to work on daily, to make this work... and all for free

...or, someone could write an emulation of the hardware the Mackie OS expects for a virtual machine. This is a little more likely to be achievable, since VM-software quite commonly already supports a number of hardware emulations, so with a little bit of luck, "only a few" new driver emulations would need to be created, that would expose the "new PC hardware" to the Mackie OS as if it was the original "old PC hardware."
There's some potential that this would introduce some latency, though (i.e. software emulations of hardware require CPU processing cycles that take time)... which could make the whole project pointless to begin with.
Besides, you need new PC hardware that still has two serial ports on the mainboard, for the emulated drivers to be able to take the actual hardware serial ports, and make them appear as if they were the hardware that was used on the mainboards in the Mackie rack units for the D8B. Does this sort of hardware still exist? I haven't looked for new PC hardware in some time, but was under the impression that stuff like serial and parallel ports were phased out many years ago...?

The only other option I could think of would be to literally re-write the OS from scratch, but I wouldn't hold my breath for that, either, considering that many consider the d8b rather unreliable on the hardware side, and the units still in use are getting less and less.

Long story short, the probability of the Mackie OS being ported to run on new hardware or a virtual machine are more or less zero. Unless there's some crazy genius maniac on here, who is financially completely independent and can afford to spend a few years full-time on a passion-project.

I don't reaaaally intend to crush any hope with this, but on the other hand, false hope can be a cruel thing... that's why I thought I'd share my take on this.

I'd LOVE to be proven wrong and be able to use a new computer (or virtual machine, or Arduino based little thing or whatever), though. But would still be surprised (not to say shocked) if that would actually happen

in the virtual world of today, linking past to present ("So, to "reverse-engineer" someone would either have to write new drivers )...this get's very tricky with legacy OS software IMHO

You probably couldn't launch the Mackie OS from MS-DOS within Windows (I think the last "full" DOS implementation was in Windows 2000 or maybe XP, but I could be mistaken.

Agree, the DOS header is simply part of the PE (portable executable) format, and does not mean that the program will actually run under DOS. All it does is print a message along the lines of "This program must be run under Win 32" or similar. This is probably generic, as there is definitely nothing that IDA recognises as Windows Library functions in the code. I suspect that the compiler that Mackie used (again, IDA doesn't seem to find anything that it recognises as being the "handwriting" of a particular compiler) simply produced a generic PE file with all the standard headers.

Does this sort of hardware still exist? I haven't looked for new PC hardware in some time, but was under the impression that stuff like serial and parallel ports were phased out many years ago...?

At the moment, I'm leaning towards an application running under Windows and communicating with the hardware using two serial ports (running under Windows should mean that a serial card or usb to serial adaptor could be used).
My efforts at reverse engineering have been mainly aimed at locating the routines that access the serial ports and the functions that call them, as any application would still need to run the startup sequence for the hardware in the console (initialisation, firmware download, etc....).

Regards

John

Y-my-R wrote:IMO, the problem is hardware support/drivers.

Yup... this is EXACTLY the issue(s)...

The D8B is 'anchored' in a (Mackie leased from M$) Windoze 95 OSR1 'time-stamped era'...

Mackie leased a specific version (latest and greatest at the time they completed any deal w M$ for their 'copy') of Windoze 95... everything including hardware support is stamped at a particular point in M$ Windoze 95's historic legacy... for an example, this is the reasoning as to why anything USB related presents 'particular' problems. There's only so much that can be done without the proper source code... even then it's gonna be a crap shoot just due to hardware and getting proper support (BIOS code integration, etc), never mind the GUI and the rest of the system functionality...

IMHO - Good luck to anybody in trying to work any/all of this out...

As always tho, you knew it was coming so here it is - "Your actual mileage may vary..."

Thanks for all the great information. Sounds like there is a little hope just above the zero mark .... LOL! I have read about software that will emulate a 386 computer, but I understand that the inner workings of he OS are where the problem exists. As for hardware, I have found a lot of it on the internet that I think is usable. I have detailed in the other thread related to building a new power supply, my plans to stuff the current newer motherboard into a 2U Rack ATX chassis and I just purchased low profile video card, modem card and RS232 card. As soon as the parts come, I am going to undertake that project. Also going to separate the Console PSU's into another 1U Rack case. If all works as planned, I will post pictures of everything on the forum and the steps taken. Maybe i might get a more reliable setup just by doing that.

Cheers