Windows NT PPC on Macs

[KGLlewellyn]

@Rairii said this on the MacRumors forums:

Ohooo, Okay I have a tonne of PCI cards. Hold my beer haha.

Ahh, had a bit of a dumb brain moment. We're gonna need hardware that has NT4 PPC driver support, that is going to be a very small list ugh.

 

[croissantking]

Can you try one of the DEC ethernet cards that NT has built in drivers for?

 

[Daniël]

Does that mean theoretically we could install PCI cards that have NT driver support in our G3/G4 towers and have them work? It'd be nice to add a PCI NIC and Soundcard. That'd make the OS feel very usable.

There are PCI NIC drivers for PPC NT, even included in the OS, but I think that's not the case for soundcards. The included drivers seem to all be for ISA soundcards, including the CS4231(A) "PowerPC Audio" driver (PReP machines used that soundchip on an ISA bus). Any PCI soundcard with NT4 drivers probably only has them available for x86 NT, and no source code to compile a PPC driver from.

With maciNTosh making PPC NT available on far easier to obtain, commodity Apple hardware, as well as possible to emulate through DingusPPC, I'm really hoping this gets more devs onboard to help build drivers to support more hardware features.

 

[KGLlewellyn]

Can you try one of the DEC ethernet cards that NT has built in drivers for?

I think I might have one in one of my Alpha boxes which I might be able to borrow.
EDIT: Nevermind, it's an EISA card, so that's a no go. D:

 

[KGLlewellyn]

Random thought but we've got the Kx Audio Driver which appears to add support to Mac OS X PPC/Intel for Creative Soundblaster Live PCI cards, I'm wondering, and please forgive me for being completely ignorant here on the NT4 driver model, but what the feasibility might be on using this as a start to make a NT4 PPC Creative Soundblaster Live driver? https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads...-live-and-audigy-series-e-mu-edsp-driver.581/

 

[Daniël]

Random thought but we've got the Kx Audio Driver which appears to add support to Mac OS X PPC/Intel for Creative Soundblaster Live PCI cards, I'm wondering, and please forgive me for being completely ignorant here on the NT4 driver model, but what the feasibility might be on using this as a start to make a NT4 PPC Creative Soundblaster Live driver? https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads...-live-and-audigy-series-e-mu-edsp-driver.581/

That might be a good start, given it looks like the original Kx Audio Driver this was forked from was specifically for Windows, to be built with Windows DDK 7.1.0. That stretches back to XP, but it might (with probably some necessary backporting) be able to be coaxed into being built with the NT4 DDK for PPC.

That said, I still hope down the road, Burgundy and Screamer drivers will materialize, as it would be epic to hear this blaring out of the iMac G3 speakers

 

[KGLlewellyn]

That might be a good start, given it looks like the original Kx Audio Driver this was forked from was specifically for Windows, to be built with Windows DDK 7.1.0. That stretches back to XP, but it might (with probably some necessary backporting) be able to be coaxed into being built with the NT4 DDK for PPC.

That said, I still hope down the road, Burgundy and Screamer drivers will materialize, as it would be epic to hear this blaring out of the iMac G3 speakers

Absolutely that'd be pretty sick! The ideal situation would be to use the built-in sound, but failing that, SB Live PCI cards are plentiful!

I also have tried grabbing a 3C595 for like $12 off eBay, that seems to have a NT4 PPC driver. Will report back once it arrives!

 

[croissantking]

@KGLlewellyn I've just grabbed a DEC 21140 based card off eBay myself so pretty soon we're going to find out if this works!

 

[NJRoadfan]

The kX Audio drivers aren't going to be too helpful in NT 4.0. They are WDM/DirectSound drivers, so only target Windows 2000 or newer. I'd target the onboard audio of the supported machines. The "AWACS, "Screamer", and "Burgundy" chipsets in the currently supported machines has ALSA drivers, so there should be enough documentation out there to clobber up at least a wave output driver.

 

[KGLlewellyn]

Looks like the PCI bus isn't working fully in NT. I've tried both a 3C905 and a 3C595 both of which have drivers but alas it reports 'Network card is not present in the system'. I'm not aware of any specific tools that allow me to probe the bus in NT4 PPC so I can't really provide more info than that at the moment. :c

 

[croissantking]

Looks like the PCI bus isn't working fully in NT. I've tried both a 3C905 and a 3C595 both of which have drivers but alas it reports 'Network card is not present in the system'. I'm not aware of any specific tools that allow me to probe the bus in NT4 PPC so I can't really provide more info than that at the moment. :c

Ah that is a shame! Though hopefully getting the PCI bus to work won’t be too much work.

 

[Rairii]

odd, I know the HAL probes the bus fine..?


...OH i think i know what the issue is, the network card detection probes as many PCI buses as the ARC device tree says there are, so on yosemite it will never probe anything behind the PCI-PCI bridge lol

 

[KGLlewellyn]

odd, I know the HAL probes the bus fine..?


...OH i think i know what the issue is, the network card detection probes as many PCI buses as the ARC device tree says there are, so on yosemite it will never probe anything behind the PCI-PCI bridge lol

Oooh cool, will be awesome to see this work! Thank you again!

Man, it's definitely a shame that NT4 didn't have any PPC PCI sound driver sorted. Otherwise we'd be mostly set with the essentials!

 

[Rairii]

Oooh cool, will be awesome to see this work! Thank you again!

Man, it's definitely a shame that NT4 didn't have any PPC PCI sound driver sorted. Otherwise we'd be mostly set with the essentials!

This test build should work with the PCI network card detection.

To update your existing installation, use "Update boot partition on disk" option in firmware setup.

 

[Rairii]

Actually, I just found and fixed some HAL issues. Try this build. To update the HAL, you need to boot from the new ISO, boot into NT and then copy A:\halgoss.dll to D:\os\winnt40\hal.dll and reboot (if you're running 3.51 then it'd be D:\os\winnt351\hal.dll of course)

 

[Rairii]

started on uni-north support today as I was bored

slightly less cursed, but still cursed enough that drivers would need to be specifically made for it (ok, patching existing drivers may work!)

this is running in pseudo little endian mode: MSR_LE on as NT wants, but hardware still big endian as uni-north removed the PCI endianness swapping bit from bandit as far as I can tell.

 

[croissantking]

started on uni-north support today as I was bored

slightly less cursed, but still cursed enough that drivers would need to be specifically made for it (ok, patching existing drivers may work!)

this is running in pseudo little endian mode: MSR_LE on as NT wants, but hardware still big endian as uni-north removed the PCI endianness swapping bit from bandit as far as I can tell.

View attachment 76434

Amazing work, keep it up.

 

[Rairii]

plenty of things still need to be done before i consider it ready for a public release, that said:

 

[KGLlewellyn]

Heyo,
So sorry for the delay on updating the testing with the network card. It seems that the changes you did indeed does cause Windows NT to detect the card and allow me to add it as a valid adapter.
However, it does not seem to be able to -use- the card. It posts an event saying "A Device attached to the system is not functioning" and "Unable to read the driver's exported linkage configuration information", when editing the adapter config it says "Cannot configure the software component" Not sure if any of this helps. I'm using the 3C59x driver.

 

[croissantking]

Heyo,
So sorry for the delay on updating the testing with the network card. It seems that the changes you did indeed does cause Windows NT to detect the card and allow me to add it as a valid adapter.
However, it does not seem to be able to -use- the card. It posts an event saying "A Device attached to the system is not functioning" and "Unable to read the driver's exported linkage configuration information", when editing the adapter config it says "Cannot configure the software component" Not sure if any of this helps. I'm using the 3C59x driver.

This is the same exact result as I have had with a DEC 21140 based PCI card. It is detected and the drivers install, but the card cannot start upon reboot.