Windows NT PPC on Macs

[Rairii]

It only supports Gosammer boards currently, not sure what it would take to get it to work on anything older.

would need an ARC firmware and HAL port to the older chipsets (should be possible, I know Bandit has a PCI config bit to switch endianness over the PCI bus, but I'm not sure if that does the same as what Grackle's PICR1.LE_MODE does, or if additional workarounds would be needed in drivers there)

...also, drivers. Grand Central has no IDE; so a SCSI driver would be needed for ARC and NT there.

 

[alectrona6400]

if my DV iMac wasn't in pieces and in need of a recap, I'd do this

most intact slot loader

 

[Daniël]

Some movement on my front

 

[Daniël]

And there it is, I am confident this is the first ever iMac G3 to boot Windows NT natively :-D
Having quite some graphics artifacting, especially when moving windows around, but I want to swap out (V)RAM to make sure it's the early drivers and not the hardware, after making a quick image of the drive on a different Mac.

 

[LightBulbFun]

And there it is, I am confident this is the first ever iMac G3 to boot Windows NT natively :-D
Having quite some graphics artifacting, especially when moving windows around, but I want to swap out (V)RAM to make sure it's the early drivers and not the hardware, after making a quick image of the drive on a different Mac.

View attachment 75847View attachment 75848

Awesome! literally history in the making there!

 

[Rairii]

yeah, the ATI Rage modeswitch DSP timing code is incorrect (on Lombard it's only VERY CLOSE, with slight artifacts if you look in the right place), but I tried implementing the real way to do it and couldn't get it working. Maybe I should try again now I've implemented it correctly for Rage128...

"the first ever iMac G3 to boot Windows NT natively" - definitely outside of some hypothetical secret room at Apple! They deliberately tried for NT compatibility inside Open Firmware "just in case"...

 

[Arbee]

Right, the Gossamer architecture was clearly stated in pre-Jobs-return design documents to be intended primarily for NT. It's kind of too bad that wasn't a real option, but Apple at the time couldn't afford the work it'd require to QA and support.

 

[lampi]

But given that I started porting NT to Wii

Sorry for going off-topic, but I must ask: is it technically possible to get Mac OS to boot natively on a Wii? I've seen this partly achieved via Mac-on-Linux (here and here) and have been wondering ever since. Or maybe on a Wii U, which has more RAM, a better CPU and HDMI out? I dream of seeing this someday, but lately I've been asking myself if it's even feasible or just a Pipe Dream.

 

[Rairii]

Sorry for going off-topic, but I must ask: is it technically possible to get Mac OS to boot natively on a Wii? I've seen this partly achieved via Mac-on-Linux (here and here) and have been wondering ever since. Or maybe on a Wii U, which has more RAM, a better CPU and HDMI out? I dream of seeing this someday, but lately I've been asking myself if it's even feasible or just a Pipe Dream.

About OS9 on Wii, I'm not sure. It'd require at least bootloader patches because it expects to find an old GrandCentral-style interrupt controller or MPIC on KeyLargo.

I want to do OSX on Wii U at some point (also wonder how much would need patching to deal with the stwcx problem on Espresso), but I know almost nothing about darwin internals.

First step for either would be porting OpenBIOS or some other Open Firmware implementation though!

 

[eharmon]

qemu doesn't emulate any little endian mode either too

Rough...I'm impressed you developed this without emulation!

 

[alectrona6400]

About OS9 on Wii, I'm not sure. It'd require at least bootloader patches because it expects to find an old GrandCentral-style interrupt controller or MPIC on KeyLargo.

I want to do OSX on Wii U at some point (also wonder how much would need patching to deal with the stwcx problem on Espresso), but I know almost nothing about darwin internals.

First step for either would be porting OpenBIOS or some other Open Firmware implementation though!

This would actually be super cool, even if it doesn't boot all the way.

 

[Rairii]

Rough...I'm impressed you developed this without emulation!

I did use emulation, I hacked in little endian support to dingusppc and then fixed some other emulation issues to get NT running there, that's my dingusppc-nt fork.

 

[KGLlewellyn]

Has anyone tried running this on a G4? The Github suggests that NT4 should be okay with a G4 CPU but my experience says otherwise...possibly when trying to do this on my G4-upgraded B&W.
Sadly I don't have the original CPU to test with. :c


This shows up almost immediately when the text-based setup starts. There's no attempt of it loading up the drivers etc.
Okay, developer has confirmed it's a bug with the pvr check in the patch that ARC firmware uses to fool NT4's osloader to being chill with the machine, guess it impacts G4's specifically. They're working on fixing it!

 

[LightBulbFun]

About OS9 on Wii, I'm not sure. It'd require at least bootloader patches because it expects to find an old GrandCentral-style interrupt controller or MPIC on KeyLargo.

I want to do OSX on Wii U at some point (also wonder how much would need patching to deal with the stwcx problem on Espresso), but I know almost nothing about darwin internals.

First step for either would be porting OpenBIOS or some other Open Firmware implementation though!

OS X works by way of platform experts and kext/drivers, for example if ya look at Xpostfacto it installs "PowerSurgePE.kext" and that driver is the platform driver for the 7300-9600 machines, or you may notice when booting OS X on your Lombard theres a GossamerPE mentioned when it says "found root device"

so in theory it should be quite "easy" to port OS X/Darwin to a new PPC platform, in my limited understanding of things because of the nature of it, it dosent expect things to be a certain way, like how OS9 does etc, as long as you get drivers and a platform expert on the go it should work in theory, obviously actually making those things are a whole other ball game, but in theory I think its doable

I know of at least one case where it has been done, Mac on Linux, uses its own Platform Expert that it injects at boot time

 

[Nixontheknight]

OS X works by way of platform experts and kext/drivers, for example if ya look at Xpostfacto it installs "PowerSurgePE.kext" and that driver is the platform driver for the 7300-9600 machines, or you may notice when booting OS X on your Lombard theres a GossamerPE mentioned when it says "found root device"

so in theory it should be quite "easy" to port OS X/Darwin to a new PPC platform, in my limited understanding of things because of the nature of it, it dosent expect things to be a certain way, like how OS9 does etc, as long as you get drivers and a platform expert on the go it should work in theory, obviously actually making those things are a whole other ball game, but in theory I think its doable

I know of at least one case where it has been done, Mac on Linux, uses its own Platform Expert that it injects at boot time

man, imagine OS X on the Wii as well. Might be a bit harder on GameCube, mainly because there is nowhere to plug in a keyboard or mouse

 

[Unknown_K]

Are there any apps that will run on a PPC NT machine?

 

[finkmac]

i think there's a copy of PowerPC Excel

 

[chikorita157]

This is kind of cool, and I do have a Power Mac G3 B&W, but I have a G4 installed, so it might not work with that without putting the old CPU back in.

Someone should try to get AIX working on these Power Macs.

 

[Rairii]

This is kind of cool, and I do have a Power Mac G3 B&W, but I have a G4 installed, so it might not work with that without putting the old CPU back in.

It should work with the G4. The ARC firmware does patch the processor check in NT4's bootloader. I already received and fixed a bug report about that, and someone did get it to boot in a G4-upgraded Yosemite after that.

Are there any apps that will run on a PPC NT machine?

DOS and Win16 apps will run under the ntvdm emulator (emulates a 286, I think), and there's also an x86 emulator (which I think emulates a 486) for x86 Win32 applications.

Other than that, there's the Excel build for PPC NT as mentioned (Word got released at the same time but the only dumped variant is the older release which doesn't contain the PowerPC build).

There's also a port of Visual C++ 4.0.

 

[Daniël]

NT3.51 support has been added with release v0.05, so I had to give that a shot