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NT on PowerPC Macs!

yeah, after some inactivity on the powerpc side, been working on it again recently.

I bought a powerbook5,2 from yahoo auctions japan, it arrived yesterday, unfortunately the optical drive worked exactly once then broke.

On the lombard side, I worked on the MESH scsi driver for NT, it works under emulation but not on real hardware yet, for the next grackle release I'll want to include that. There's also a bugfix in the keyboard driver so ctrl+alt+backspace for ctrl+alt+delete now actually works multiple times per boot lol.

I implemented the nvidia support because I noticed some powerbook g4s have nvidia cards, my goal for an initial preliminary uni-north release is for it to theoretically be able to boot on all laptops.
 
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Rairii said:
I implemented the nvidia support because I noticed some powerbook g4s have nvidia cards
Click to expand...
For what it's worth, only 12" PBG4s got NVIDIA graphics; 15s and 17s all received Rages or Radeons of some variety, as did every G4 iBook.
 
Rairii said:
yeah, after some inactivity on the powerpc side, been working on it again recently.

I bought a powerbook5,2 from yahoo auctions japan, it arrived yesterday, unfortunately the optical drive worked exactly once then broke.

On the lombard side, I worked on the MESH scsi driver for NT, it works under emulation but not on real hardware yet, for the next grackle release I'll want to include that. There's also a bugfix in the keyboard driver so ctrl+alt+backspace for ctrl+alt+delete now actually works multiple times per boot lol.

I implemented the nvidia support because I noticed some powerbook g4s have nvidia cards, my goal for an initial preliminary uni-north release is for it to theoretically be able to boot on all laptops.
Click to expand...
At least the 5,2 is a 15". The optical drive is extremely easy to get to.

Most the uninorth macs I plan on using this on are ATI chips. I think the only nvidia Mac I would be trying to use it on is my 12" 867MHz. That unfortunately has no HDD in it. I bought it that way, the 12in's are extremely hard to take apart so I'm wondering what demented person took the time to take it out, and put it back together fully without a new one. The thing is also the most pristine, like-new looking laptop I own.

I was also wondering, there is a pull-request on the github mentioning booting on old-worlds. What would I need to do to actually to test that out? I've got a PDQ, and two beige G3s I'd be willing to test on.
 
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Success on 500MHz white iBook G3 IMG_8095.jpeg

I was actually surprised the USB disk showed up in the option picker. I figured I’d have to go into open firmware and figure it out but nope! Super easy.

IMG_8092.jpegIMG_8093.jpeg

IMG_8094.jpeg

It isn’t as stable as it is on my B&W G4. And every login it opens display settings telling me to reinstall the display driver. I had one BSOD and one freeze requiring a hard reboot. But I mean it’s NT running natively on an iBook so I’ll take it lmao

Edit: I have determined that opening task manager is the cause of the BSOD.
 

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boots on my 800Mhz iBook G3 PowerBook4,3 :) slightly cheating here in that I just imaged over my Pismo install, Target disk mode FTW :) I have got my clamshell ready and waiting for when the patch thats needed for that is put in place :)

1729505501746.jpeg
 
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Quick question for a newbie, what was Windows NT 4 build for? I’m assuming you can’t run exe apps? What could you do on it back in the day?

Either way it’s surreal to see the classic gray windows UI running on old Macs natively.
 
TSE said:
Quick question for a newbie, what was Windows NT 4 build for? I’m assuming you can’t run exe apps? What could you do on it back in the day?

Either way it’s surreal to see the classic gray windows UI running on old Macs natively.
Click to expand...
Of course you run exe apps. That's like 90% of what Windows runs. In this case, the problem is that there was not and still isn't a "fat" binary format for Windows executables, and still isn't, so you need to run PPC Windows exe files on these particular builds of NT 4. The Alpha and MIPS builds had the same problems, and the ARM builds of Windows 11 still have the same problem to this day.

As for what PPC Windows is for? Well, it felt like more of a "If you build it, they will come" situation, but that didn't happen, so NT4 on PPC didn't even get beyond Service Pack 2, where as on x86, they went all the way to SP6.

Windows 2000 only supposed x86. to give you an idea how well it all went for them.
 
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patches for the iBook Clamshell (and 1Ghz 17 inch AlBook, which should also work for the 867Mhz 12 inch PowerBook) so of course I had to try :) this is one of the systems I was most looking forward to seeing it on as, along with the iMac G3 I think its one of the most incongruous systems to run NT4 on if that makes any sense! :)

1729513561029.jpeg
 
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repairedCheese said:
Of course you run exe apps. That's like 90% of what Windows runs. In this case, the problem is that there was not and still isn't a "fat" binary format for Windows executables, and still isn't, so you need to run PPC Windows exe files on these particular builds of NT 4. The Alpha and MIPS builds had the same problems, and the ARM builds of Windows 11 still have the same problem to this day.
Click to expand...
wx86 was a thing, and for powerpc insignia did fork it to add their emulator: https://archive.org/details/softwindows-32-powerpc-v1.01 (given that IA is coming back up now I guess I'll link there)

"the ARM builds of Windows 11 still have the same problem to this day." -- no? ARM64 NT includes x86 (and later versions have AMD64) emulation.
 
Not sure what the state of nVidia support is, but as a point of reference, this is what it does on a 12” PowerBook G4 with nVidia GeForce FX Go 5200 video card.

53629FFA-E394-4F8C-990F-0CE834BBFC5A.jpeg
 
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Rairii said:
Looks like the modeswitch didn't work at all, maybe the registers are in a different place on that card.

Can I have a device tree dump from that system?
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Sure, what method do you want me to use, just dump with IORegistryExplorer in OS X, or dump from OpenFirmware?
 
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LightBulbFun said:
boots on my 800Mhz iBook G3 PowerBook4,3 :) slightly cheating here in that I just imaged over my Pismo install, Target disk mode FTW :) I have got my clamshell ready and waiting for when the patch thats needed for that is put in place :)

View attachment 2439955
Click to expand...
I was wondering if that would work. I wanted to get it on one of my TiBook's, to see if any PCMCIA devices work. Unfortunately the TiBook I was going to use won't turn on for some reason. So i'll have to figure that out.
 
TSE said:
Quick question for a newbie, what was Windows NT 4 build for? I’m assuming you can’t run exe apps? What could you do on it back in the day?

Either way it’s surreal to see the classic gray windows UI running on old Macs natively.
Click to expand...
Windows 11 is NT. Every version of Windows since Windows 2000 (excluding ME\Millenium Edition) is Windows NT. NT was Microsoft's new OS the way OS X was for Apple. You can do anything on it you could do on other Windows at the time, but you could do it better because it wasn't DOS. The only thing that didn't work as well was, well DOS stuff.

The very few DOS games I have played in my life, all work just fine on Windows NT so I never understood the issue the DOS people had with Windows ME (no real mode DOS) and Windows XP back in the day.
repairedCheese said:
As for what PPC Windows is for? Well, it felt like more of a "If you build it, they will come" situation, but that didn't happen, so NT4 on PPC didn't even get beyond Service Pack 2, where as on x86, they went all the way to SP6.

Windows 2000 only supposed x86. to give you an idea how well it all went for them.
Click to expand...
I was really irritated when I found this out. I understand dropping the architecture, but doing it mid-product cycle? Cmon. NT 4 was supported, it should have been all of NT 4 not just up to SP2. Stupid decision.
Rairii said:
wx86 was a thing, and for powerpc insignia did fork it to add their emulator: https://archive.org/details/softwindows-32-powerpc-v1.01 (given that IA is coming back up now I guess I'll link there)

"the ARM builds of Windows 11 still have the same problem to this day." -- no? ARM64 NT includes x86 (and later versions have AMD64) emulation.
Click to expand...
I use that software on both of my NT 4 installations. It works pretty well, there's more incompatibilities due to being stuck on SP2 than there is being a different architecture lmao.
Does anyone know if there's anything similar for NT 3.51? I've been meaning to try it out, if only because it had PPC support throughout its whole cycle. I never used anything prior to NT 4 at all, even in the PC world.
 
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I didn't actually realise that NT PPC couldn't run x86 apps. The Alpha version could, but having looked it up I've just learned that it was technically an addon provided by DEC, rather than being part of NT itself.
 
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Nermal said:
I didn't actually realise that NT PPC couldn't run x86 apps. The Alpha version could, but having looked it up I've just learned that it was technically an addon provided by DEC, rather than being part of NT itself.
Click to expand...
It runs 16bit x86 apps on its own, just not 32bit ones. Thats where softwin32 by that Insignia company comes into play.
It works pretty well, lets me run office 97. I tried getting office 2000 working but it needs SP3.
 
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repairedCheese said:
Windows 2000 only supposed x86.
Click to expand...
And 32bit Alpha up to RC2, and it was also ported to the Itanium. It was shown at WinHEC 1999:

Intel has been providing a great IA-64 development environment for us.It’s actually an emulator for the Merced chip set.So, what you see over here is, if you take a look at your screen, it is Windows 2000.
[…]
So what we’ve got on our Alpha system, again, the same thing, a 64-bit Windows 2000.
Click to expand...

XP for 64bit Alpha actually saw the light of day again.
 
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