Binbows Support

Everything below is written by people who have seen this thing fail in every way it can fail, and a few ways it shouldn't be able to. Roughly half of this page is real troubleshooting, which is half more than the era usually managed.

First steps

Before reading any of the specialised sections, work through these. They resolve about 80% of reported problems, which says more about the problems than the steps.

Check the firmware mode. Binbows is a UEFI application. If your VM is set to legacy BIOS, or your PC is in CSM mode, there is nothing to boot and the machine will say so in its own words.
Turn Secure Boot off. The binary is unsigned. Secure Boot will refuse it, usually with a message that does not mention Secure Boot.
Verify the checksum. A truncated download produces exactly the symptoms of a broken image, because it is one. The hash is on the download page.
Try QEMU with OVMF. It is the environment everything is developed against, so if it works there and not on your machine, the difference is your firmware and that is useful information.
Undo the last thing you did. Whatever it was. You know what it was.

Error code index

When Binbows encounters an unrecoverable problem it stops and tells you, at length, with a hexadecimal code. It also does this when it hasn't encountered one, on every boot, immediately. Support has raised this internally.

Messages you may meet, and what they mean
Message	Official meaning	What actually happened
`0x0000DEAD`	Stop code	The three parameters beside it are the hexadecimal words every programmer can read out loud. That's all you're getting; the rest arrives on the day.
The error name	Environment variable missing	Withheld. It is four seconds away and worth the four seconds. If you truly cannot wait, the answer is also sitting in a file on the disc.
The three modules	Kernel, DLL and executable at fault	None of them exist. One of the addresses is a joke twice over and we are not explaining that one either.
`Bad command or file name`	Unrecognised command	Not a crash. You typed something that is neither a Binbows command nor one of the forty declined ones. Try `HELP`.
`Not ready reading drive C:`	No filesystem on the boot device	A real error, and the only one on this page. The medium came up without a Simple File System protocol — usually a VM attaching the ISO in a way the firmware exposes oddly.

The one real piece of advice: write the code down before pressing a key. Everyone presses the key first. Here that is survivable, because BIN brings it all back — a courtesy the operating system being imitated never extended to anyone.

Known issues

Documented, reproducible, and in most cases not going to be fixed, because fixing them would change the character of the product. The ones that are real limits say so.

ID	Issue	Status & workaround
BB-001	Nothing boots on a machine in legacy BIOS or CSM mode	Won't fix. Real limit. It is a UEFI application; there is no 16-bit real-mode path and there is not going to be one. Modern firmware has been dropping CSM anyway.
BB-008	Secure Boot refuses the image	By design, elsewhere. The binary is unsigned. Turn Secure Boot off, or run it in a VM, which is what almost everybody does.
BB-014	`TYPE` on a long file crawls	Confirmed. Every line that scrolls off the bottom repaints the whole screen from memory — roughly 10–15 ms each, so a thousand-line file is a genuinely visible ten seconds. Double buffering would fix it and has not been needed anywhere else yet.
BB-023	`DIR *.TXT` lists everything	Confirmed. There are no wildcards; the argument is ignored. On the roadmap, below several more interesting things.
BB-031	Filenames with accents show up full of question marks	Won't fix, deliberately. Anything above 0x7F is not a code page 437 index, and guessing a mapping would be worse than admitting the gap. The `?` is the admission.
BB-047	The boot splash doesn't appear	Ask it. Type `LOGO` and it names the reason: no filesystem, no `LOGO.SYS`, file empty or absurdly large, unreadable, or a BMP format it cannot draw. Wanted: uncompressed, 8, 24 or 32 bits per pixel.
BB-052	The splash appears but the bar doesn't move	Not a bug. Palette cycling needs an 8-bit BMP with the ramp in entries 192–255. A truecolour bitmap displays perfectly and simply sits there. Use `tools/mklogo.py` if you want the animation.
BB-066	`FORMAT C:` stops at 68 percent	Cannot reproduce as a bug. It is a `Stall(900000)`. It is supposed to hurt.
BB-078	System becomes unstable after 49.7 days of uptime	Won't fix. No Binbows session has ever reached 49.7 days. The bug is theoretical and we intend to keep it that way.

Y2K compliance guide

Year 2000 Readiness Disclosure _□×

Binbows 98 SE is Y2K compliant, with the following clarifications:

Dates from 1980 to 1999 are handled correctly.
Dates in 2000 are handled correctly.
Dates from 2001 onward are handled, in the sense that something happens.
February 29, 2000 is recognised as a valid date. We were as surprised as anyone.
The year 2038 is somebody else's problem and we look forward to reading about it.

If your system clock rolls back to 1980, the CMOS battery is dead. Replace it. This is a genuinely correct diagnosis and possibly the most useful sentence on this website.

Knowledge base

Articles from the Michaelsoft Knowledge Base. May contain knowledge.

KB100001 — The screen is black and the machine is clearly still on

No Graphics Output Protocol, so there is no framebuffer to draw into and nowhere to report that. The application halts. Almost always a headless VM or a serial-only console.

KB100014 — The text is enormous, or microscopic

Working as intended. The font is magnified by a whole-pixel factor picked from your panel: 2x at 1280x800, 3x at 2560x1440, 5x at 4K. VER tells you which one it chose. Low resolutions get 1x and look exactly like 1998.

KB100027 — DIR shows a file I did not put there

Probably NvVars. Some firmware writes its own variable store to the EFI system partition, and since DIR reads the volume rather than a fixed list, you see it. This is the strongest available proof that the filesystem is real.

KB100033 — There is no sound

There is no sound. A UEFI application has no practical audio path, so the startup chime, the error ding and the modem handshake are all left to your imagination, which is where they were best anyway.

KB100041 — The mouse does nothing

Nothing reads it. Input is keystrokes from the Simple Text Input protocol and that is the entire input system. Clean the ball anyway; it can't hurt.

KB100058 — My files are gone / did this format my disk?

No. Binbows opens exactly one volume — the one it booted from — and it has no writing commands at all. FORMAT C: counts to 100 and reports failure without touching a byte. If something is missing, it was not this.

Contact support

There is no phone queue, no ticket system and no chatbot. There is a tiered support organisation, and every tier is the same inbox.

Tier 1 — General support: [email protected]
Tier 2 — Escalations: [email protected]
Tier 3 — Critical: [email protected]
Bug reports: [email protected] or GitHub Issues
Response time: between one day and one geological era
Escalation path: write to the next tier. It is the same inbox. It will not be read faster, but you will feel like you did something, and that is what escalation is for.

Full department directory on the about page. binbows.net runs a catch-all, so [email protected] also works and has, historically, been used.

Please include your error code, what you were doing, and what you expected to happen. "It broke" is a valid report but it starts a longer conversation.

🚧 SUPPORT DATABASE EXPANDING 🚧
Found a new failure mode? We collect those. Send it to [email protected].