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NT on PowerPC Macs!

@Rairii
I just reinstalled, this time setting up a dualboot with Tiger. Tiger basically doesn’t recognize the NTFS partition whatsoever. When I was installing Tiger I actually thought the Mac partition wasn’t created, I only noticed that the only volume available in DU was smaller than the actual drive.

I installed Tiger assuming I would have have the normal NTFS support Tiger has, and then would be able to install a write driver to copy stuff over to NT vs burning a CD every time. This would be the normal behavior had I plugged in a drive that had any version of x86 Windows installed on it. Is there any reason for this or a workaround/plan for a workaround?

In the second screenshot, the NT partition does show up in diskutil as a CD partition. I told it to mount, and while it did say it was mounted, nothing actually happened.

In the GUI disk utility all it shows is the 10GB Tiger partition, and thinks there’s ~7GB unallocated.
 

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Project Alice said:
@Rairii
I just reinstalled, this time setting up a dualboot with Tiger. Tiger basically doesn’t recognize the NTFS partition whatsoever. When I was installing Tiger I actually thought the Mac partition wasn’t created, I only noticed that the only volume available in DU was smaller than the actual drive.

I installed Tiger assuming I would have have the normal NTFS support Tiger has, and then would be able to install a write driver to copy stuff over to NT vs burning a CD every time. This would be the normal behavior had I plugged in a drive that had any version of x86 Windows installed on it. Is there any reason for this or a workaround/plan for a workaround?

In the second screenshot, the NT partition does show up in diskutil as a CD partition. I told it to mount, and while it did say it was mounted, nothing actually happened.

In the GUI disk utility all it shows is the 10GB Tiger partition, and thinks there’s ~7GB unallocated.
Click to expand...
The way the dualboot partitioning works currently, I deliberately do not add the NT partition into the APM partition table directly - there is a dummy partition that covers it, but that starts before the NT partition and not at the NT partition, and it also covers the ARC system partition located after the NT partition.

This was done deliberately, as I wasn't sure if there would be compatibility issues with allowing other OSes to mount the NT partitions. (Also, I deliberately used the "CD_partition_scheme" type for this, as that's one of the types hardcoded to not show up in OSX Disk Utility.)
 
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Rairii said:
The way the dualboot partitioning works currently, I deliberately do not add the NT partition into the APM partition table directly - there is a dummy partition that covers it, but that starts before the NT partition and not at the NT partition, and it also covers the ARC system partition located after the NT partition.

This was done deliberately, as I wasn't sure if there would be compatibility issues with allowing other OSes to mount the NT partitions. (Also, I deliberately used the "CD_partition_scheme" type for this, as that's one of the types hardcoded to not show up in OSX Disk Utility.)
Click to expand...
That makes sense of what I found then.

I don’t think mounting the NT partition would cause any issues though. I don’t know enough about the other ones, ARC, etc though. So maybe there would be issues there.

But I have used Macs for years to rummage through PC HDD’s, and even writing to them and there’s never been any ill effects on the Windows side afterwards. Tiger only mounts NTFS as read only without a 3rd party driver anyway.
 
Doesn't macOS mount NTFS as read only? I'm pretty sure macOS is smart enough not to mess with partition types that it doesn't understand.

The NT partition doesn't include x86 stuff so a VM on an Intel Mac can't boot it, etc.

Open Firmware can deal with FAT partition but not NTFS.
 
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mikeboss said:
much to my delight, this project is still alive. initial support for Mac99/Uni-North systems has been developed:
github.com

Releases · Wack0/maciNTosh

PowerPC Windows NT ported to Power Macintosh systems - Wack0/maciNTosh
github.com github.com
Click to expand...
The dev has been working on it, I check that page periodically and there's been commits to stuff every couple of weeks typically. Nice to see old world support added though.
 
I kind of want to install this on my DLSD just for fun, though I imagine it wouldn't have great support for the hardware. I suppose there's no harm to it either, though...​
 
Doubt it would work much at all, seeing as there is missing USB support and the DLSD generation had USB-based keyboard and trackpad.
 
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lepidotós said:
I kind of want to install this on my DLSD just for fun, though I imagine it wouldn't have great support for the hardware. I suppose there's no harm to it either, though...​
Click to expand...

Doq said:
Doubt it would work much at all, seeing as there is missing USB support and the DLSD generation had USB-based keyboard and trackpad.
Click to expand...

Amethyst1 said:
OOTB, NT4 is having none of it. There were USB drivers for the x86 version FWIW.
Click to expand...
Yeah, NT 4 x86 didn’t even get USB support at all until l think SP3 or SP4. And NT wasn’t a plug n play OS until Windows 2000. We’re limited at SP2. Which still pisses me off. You’re gonna support an architecture it should be supported throughout the operating systems lifetime. Its like if Apple just stopped updating PPC at 10.4.6 or whichever was the first x86 release. Sure we’d have Tiger sort of, but half the apps that work need at least 10.4.10. 90% of NT4 software needs SP6.

I’d imagine we won’t ever get full USB support for this. Most likely just they keyboard and mouse. Personally I’d be happier with networking and audio. Actual graphics acceleration would be nice too but I don’t see that happening. Luckily the frame buffer isn’t too bad.
 
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Project Alice said:
Yeah, NT 4 x86 didn’t even get USB support at all until l think SP3 or SP4.... I’d imagine we won’t ever get full USB support for this. Most likely just they keyboard and mouse. Personally I’d be happier with networking and audio. Actual graphics acceleration would be nice too but I don’t see that happening. Luckily the frame buffer isn’t too bad.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't give up all hope just yet.

Unlike Windows 95 OSR2, Microsoft didn't support USB on NT4 at all, but some manufacturers did (e.g. Dell, Lenovo) and there has been some informal work towards improving USB support on the X86 side of things, with some other people making their own drivers:
forum.winworldpc.com

Windows NT 4.0 Shell & USB

Apart from using NT 4.0 for a year or so in one of my first office jobs in combination with Novell Netware, I've never really needed to use it.
forum.winworldpc.com forum.winworldpc.com

USB driver for Windows NT4

Open access to USB devices in Windows NT4 by installing these USB drivers.
smallvoid.com

USB Access driver for Windows NT 4.0 - ThinkPad A3*, R31, R32, R40, T30, T40, T41, T42, T43, X2*, X3*, X40 - Lenovo Support US

support.lenovo.com support.lenovo.com

What would most likely solve the problem on the PPC/Mac-side is if someone gets the X86 drivers working on PowerPC (e.g. finding a way to run the existing USB driver code using CPU emulation, perhaps using a PPC driver-wrapper to interface between the API, hardware and emulator) or creates an open-source NT4 USB driver which could then be ported to PowerPC, the latter being more likely.

P.S. NT4 also did not support reading FAT32 out of the box, but it does support FAT16 and there are X86 drivers for FAT32 as well.
 
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Project Alice said:
We’re limited at SP2. Which still pisses me off. You’re gonna support an architecture it should be supported throughout the operating systems lifetime.
Click to expand...
They did the same with the MIPS build, or the W2k AXP builds which never made it out the door. Maybe it was because the platforms were only sold in minuscule quantities compared to x86.

GA204 said:
P.S. NT4 also did not support reading FAT32 out of the box, but it does support FAT16 and there are X86 drivers for FAT32 as well.
Click to expand...
Using pinball.sys from NT 3.51 you can access HPFS as well.
 
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I had some time today to test my PB 5.2 with NT. For some reason I have problems starting the computer with 2GB RAM (both RAM sticks tested separately work without a problem). After removing one RAM stick everything goes back to normal. The installation went without problems, I even managed to install Winamp 1.7 :) (I didn't try newer versions). Too bad there is no sound driver :(
Thanks again @Rairii for your work.
 

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eastone said:
I had some time today to test my PB 5.2 with NT. For some reason I have problems starting the computer with 2GB RAM (both RAM sticks tested separately work without a problem). After removing one RAM stick everything goes back to normal. The installation went without problems, I even managed to install Winamp 1.7 :) (I didn't try newer versions). Too bad there is no sound driver :(
Thanks again @Rairii for your work.
Click to expand...

Wait, how did you install Winamp? Is it built for PPC? I thought that it was impossible to run x86 software on this OS.
 
gpat said:
Wait, how did you install Winamp? Is it built for PPC? I thought that it was impossible to run x86 software on this OS.
Click to expand...
There are references in this thread to it. There is software that installs a 32bit x86 translation layer. 16bit x86 apps work out of the box that.

I have all sorts of stuff installed. Not everything works, but quite a bit does. Office 97, 7zip 9.20, and Sim City 2000 off the top of my head.
 
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Project Alice said:
There are references in this thread to it. There is software that installs a 32bit x86 translation layer. 16bit x86 apps work out of the box that.

I have all sorts of stuff installed. Not everything works, but quite a bit does. Office 97, 7zip 9.20, and Sim City 2000 off the top of my head.
Click to expand...

How well does it run?
 
TSE said:
How well does it run?
Click to expand...
It runs fine. It runs better under Mac OS. But it runs fine lol. There’s also no sound.

Office is totally fine. 7zip feels faster than you’d expect. I wouldn’t know it was running through a translation layer if I didn’t know any better.
 
Project Alice said:
It runs fine. It runs better under Mac OS. But it runs fine lol. There’s also no sound.

Office is totally fine. 7zip feels faster than you’d expect. I wouldn’t know it was running through a translation layer if I didn’t know any better.
Click to expand...

That’s amazing. PowerPC lives on!
 
eastone said:
For some reason I have problems starting the computer with 2GB RAM (both RAM sticks tested separately work without a problem). After removing one RAM stick everything goes back to normal.
Click to expand...
signed integer overflow?
2 GB = 0x80000000 = -2147483648 (singed integer) = 2147483648 (unsigned integer)

Has anyone else tried 2GB?
 
Tratkazir_the_1st said:
Somehow, NT4 x86 worked with SGI 320 or 540 machines. Which had USB keyboard & mouse.
Click to expand...
True, but they came with a customised NT4 build and HAL that took care of their peculiarities (in the most well-meaning sense of the word).

Nermal said:
At least on a generic PC, the underlying firmware can present a USB keyboard and mouse as PS/2. I suspect the SGI machines were doing the same thing.
Click to expand...
The notes here suggest they might not have.
 
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