XT Server online

[reenigne]

As I mentioned in another thread, I was planning to put my XT online so that anybody who wants to can run programs on it. Well, I've done it - today I'm announcing the XT Server. It doesn't run DOS programs as is - there is an extremely minimal operating system I hand-coded in about 800 lines of assembly, so you have to write programs specifically for it. In theory it could run DOS programs if you include a copy of DOS as a part of your program.

I haven't tested it very thoroughly yet, so it might not be very stable. If it stops working, wait a bit and try again.

I won't ramble on about it too much here since there's lots more information on the site.

Enjoy!

 

[Trixter]

I'm having trouble comprehending how awesome this is. I know it is tremendously awesome, but am not sure if it ventures into excessively and ludicrously awesome. I vote yes!

I am currently finishing up a crash course on 808x optimization, but when it is done I will test the system and blog about it with some examples (if that's ok with you).

 

[reenigne]

I'm having trouble comprehending how awesome this is. I know it is tremendously awesome, but am not sure if it ventures into excessively and ludicrously awesome. I vote yes!

Heh, thanks!

I am currently finishing up a crash course on 808x optimization, but when it is done I will test the system and blog about it with some examples (if that's ok with you).

Sure, no problem.

 

[pearce_jj]

Well it's definitely working :D I like this idea - it's very cool.

 

[reenigne]

Well it's definitely working :D

My first submission from someone else!

I like this idea - it's very cool.

Thanks!

There are still quite a few bugs in the server software that I need to work out. At the moment the most serious seems to be that the timeout isn't working, so if somebody submits a program that doesn't complete it brings the whole system to a screeching halt until I reset the server (at which point all the submissions in the queue disappear). So if your program gets stuck in a queue and doesn't run, wait a while and then try submitting it again.

And if anybody has any suggestions about why SetCommTimeouts doesn't seem to be having any effect, I'd love to hear them. I'll try implementing it a different way.

 

[reenigne]

The server has been offline for a few days due to a hard drive crash, so if you were hoping to play with it and found it broken, now's a good time to try again.

As well as fixing the timeout problem I mentioned above, I've made some more reliability improvements and added some more new features in this version:

• The website now says if the server is offline or online.
• You can cancel your job if it crashes or takes too long.
• Programs can return binary data from the XT over HTTP as a file.
• Programs can capture an image of the (CGA composite) screen.
• Programs can capture the audio from the PC speaker.

Coming soon:

• Booting from disk images.
• Running .COM and .EXE files.
• Interacting with the machine via the keyboard, in real time.

 

[MennoJoshua]

Is this server still online? The frontend API still responds, but I always get this response:

XT Server​

The XT Server has received your file.

[Cancel]

Your program is starting
Sorry, something went wrong with your program.

This concludes your XT server session.