NT on PowerPC Macs!

[weckart]

Somehow, NT4 x86 worked with SGI 320 or 540 machines. Which had USB keyboard & mouse. I wonder if it's theoretically possible to port USB stack drivers to PPC platform .

There are USB drivers for NT4 out in the wild, with various levels of stability. I had the 250MB USB Zip drive back in the day, which came with NT4 USB drivers but not hot swappable. I think they presented the Zip to the system as a pseudo-SCSI peripheral. If you are going to port a stack or driver over, you might end up with more work than swapping x86 calls for PPC ones.

 

[Rairii]

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.

They weren't, for NT4 they included a backport of parts of the win2000 USB drivers, enough to support USB keyboard + mouse - but it's UHCI only so the lower level parts of the stack don't help me.

There are USB drivers for NT4 out in the wild, with various levels of stability. I had the 250MB USB Zip drive back in the day, which came with NT4 USB drivers but not hot swappable. I think they presented the Zip to the system as a pseudo-SCSI peripheral. If you are going to port a stack or driver over, you might end up with more work than swapping x86 calls for PPC ones.

I plan to port a stack, but the issue is most NT USB stacks have multiple drivers, and I want the main functionality (OHCI, root hub, hub, keyboard, mouse, mass storage) in a single driver (as it has to be loaded in text setup, and having a single driver for all this would be easier than having several that need to be loaded in the correct order).

I can reuse the higher level parts (keyboard, mouse, mass storage) from my Wii port at least, but even planning out the driver API is going to take some time.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

in a single driver

Not a programmer myself & personally I respect your efforts. But isn't this "putting all eggs in one basket" ?

 

[Rairii]

Not a programmer myself & personally I respect your efforts. But isn't this "putting all eggs in one basket" ?

It's the easiest solution given it needs to be loaded at setupldr time (for using USB keyboard at text setup, and being able to install NT directly from usb mass storage), so having one single driver is easier than having several drivers that must be loaded in a specific order. SGI320 did basically the same thing under NT4, although they only implemented USB keyboard and mouse support in one single driver.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

@Rairii
Thanks for explanation .

 

[lepidotós]

I wonder if the ReactOS drivers might be similar enough to at least use as a starting point.

 

[Madd the Sane]

It depends on which version of the NT kernel that ReactOS is targeting. If it's after NT 4, some reverse-engineering would need to be done.

 

[Nermal]

The docs say "NT5 (Windows Server 2003)" but 5 was Win 2000 so that's a bit confusing. Still post-NT 4 though.

 

[lepidotós]

NT 5.2 specifically (Windows Server 2003), though right now they're looking towards Vista. It used to be targetting NT 4, though I don't know if they got to USB input drivers before they made the move.​

 

[mikeboss]

unfortunately I do not own a G3 PowerMac anymore (only a bunch of G4s). luckily @Rairii has released binaries for NT PowerPC on Nintendo Gamecube & Wii:

GitHub - Wack0/entii-for-workcubes: PowerPC Windows NT ported to Nintendo GameCube/Wii/Wii U

PowerPC Windows NT ported to Nintendo GameCube/Wii/Wii U - Wack0/entii-for-workcubes

github.com

I was unable to find a working installer for ClarisWorks 1.0 for Microsoft Windows PPC anywhere on the internet, so I made one: https://archive.org/details/claris-works-10-windows-ppc