Crypto Ancienne 2.0 now brings TLS 1.3 to the Internet of Old Things (except BeOS)

Who says you can't teach an old box new tricks? We did it before and we're doing it again. Crypto Ancienne ("Cryanc") is a TLS implementation for pre-C99 beasts and monstrosities featuring carl, a simple curl-like utility that serves as a demonstration command line tool and even as an HTTPS-over-HTTP proxy for suitably configurable browsers. Many operating systems are supported and a number of compilers too (not only gcc going back to version 2.5 and the egcs days, but also clang, MIPSpro, Compaq C and even Metrowerks CodeWarrior). Now, after a lot of late night hacking, screaming and unspeakable acts of programming, tons of bugs are fixed (including a long-standing big-endian issue with ChaCha20Poly1305) and the core has been significantly upgraded such that almost all of the supported platforms now support TLS 1.3.

And what are those supported platforms? Why, here's some of them as they were being cruelly whipped to perform like beaten dogs for your entertainment:

CP/M is (more) officially open source

This is good news! Let's see more of these classic operating systems go open for a new retrocomputing generation. Specifically, from Bryan Sparks, the current owner of DRDOS and associated IP from Digital Research,

Let this paragraph represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance, and otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner CP/M and its derivatives. This right comes from the company, DRDOS, Inc.'s purchase of Digital Research, the company and all assets, dating back to the mid-1990's. DRDOS, Inc. and I, Bryan Sparks, President of DRDOS, Inc. as its representative, is the owner of CP/M and the successor in interest of Digital Research assets.

This was to clear up an apparent earlier misunderstanding that Sparks' earlier open release of CP/M in 2001 was restricted to distribution via a particular site. Sparks clarified this was not his intent.

Overall, would I prefer a more conventional open-source license? Sure. But he didn't have to do this then, he didn't have to do this now, and he did. So, thanks, Bryan.

A brief dive into Power Mac INITs and NVRAM scripts, or, teaching Mac OS 9 new device tricks

Although I'd much rather use a real Power Mac, and of emulators I tend to use my own bespoke hopped-up fork of SheepShaver for the POWER9 CPU with my daily driver, QEMU is still important for Mac OS 9 emulation because it handles the full system rather than the quasi-paravirtualization approach of SheepShaver. Indeed, certain classes of application can only run in that context.

However, because QEMU is a much lower-level emulator, that means that things like mice are also emulated, and that tends to chug a bit even with QEMU's JIT (currently KVM-PR, the virtualization system for Power ISA, does not work properly with Mac OS 9 in QEMU for reasons that have not yet been determined). If you use the default mouse support, the mouse is entirely maintained by the operating system and the polling frequency is just slow enough to be frustrating, and you have to grab and ungrab it all the time. The normal solution is to use an absolute pointing device like the QEMU tablet and solve all these problems at once, but the classic Mac OS doesn't support it and the existing Wacom driver doesn't work. (SheepSforza, on the other hand, hooks the system mouse and system mouse pointer into the guest OS, so it's much more responsive and transparent if I do say so myself.)

To support this and other QEMU virtual devices requires updating the guest Mac. And, happily, there are now two approaches at least for doing so for the QEMU tablet, which make an interesting comparison on how we could get other devices supported on the classic Mac OS.