Word 97 works. Its x86 though. If we weren't stuck at SP2, there'd be tons of more useful things to install.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
NT on PowerPC Macs!
- Thread starter Rairii
- Start date
-
- Tags
- windows nt
- Sort by reaction score
All non-x86 versions of Windows (other than Windows RT) can run Intel x86 apps in some fashion. Most of the NT 3.5-4.0 ports can only run 16-bit (Windows 3.1) apps, but the DEC Alpha versions could run 32-bit. (The later Itanium and mainstream-Windows-on-ARM-64-bit versions could run 32-bit Intel apps out of the box.) As mentioned above, only Windows RT (stripped down Windows 8 on ARM 32-bit) couldn't run any Intel apps.
One PPC-NT-selling vendor (Motorola, IIRC) released their own 32-bit-Intel emulation layer that installed on NT in addition to the built-in 16-bit; and people recently re-found it and figured out how to install it on non-Motorola computers. So yes, Alpha and PPC versions of NT can run Intel apps just fine.
Heck, long before people rediscovered the Motorola 32-bit emulator, I ran Windows 3.1 versions of Intel apps on my PowerPC ThinkPad. (IE 3 was the latest browser ever released PPC-native, but IE5 was released for Win3.1, so I run the Intel Win3.1 IE5 as my web browser. As well as MS Office for Win3.1.)
That's really cool. Thank you guys. Would have been sweet to run NT on G3s and G4s back in the day.
Knowing what I know now, I'm surprised there wasn't something similar to VMware that let you run NT in a window. We had Virtual PC but it was painstakingly slow, and I suspect that running Windows PPC would have been quite a bit faster since you'd only have been emulating x86 user-mode apps, whereas the OS itself and all its APIs would have still run natively.
It's because PowerPC for Windows was very niche. Combine that with the niche of Macs, it didn't make sense.
Well. You could then run NT PPC in a virtual machine but what then? Where were the apps that would have prompted this effort? If the intention was to increase the use of NT PPC then that software would have had to come from Microsoft at least initally and they would rather you switched to Windows x86.
To clarify, I didn't necessarily mean a commercial product (with its associated cost-benefit justification etc.) but even just a proof of concept from an enthusiast. There were all sorts of wacky apps back then with varying amounts of polish, so I would've thought someone would have given it a go.
I do recall that the topic of booting NT natively would come up occasionally, but the answer at the time was "no", and that's as far as the conversation usually went.
I do recall that the topic of booting NT natively would come up occasionally, but the answer at the time was "no", and that's as far as the conversation usually went.
I see what you mean. Back then Microsoft was a bit of a dirty word so Apple users either shunned it completely or got their MS fix via VPC, SoftWindows etc. There wasn't much call for running it full time on very expensive hardware when you could do it better on a commodity PC box, even for the geekery of it. OS/2 for PPC didn't take off either and never made it to a golden master, let alone retail release, despite IBM's prior readying of a limited range of hardware for it to run on.
wx86 is also an alternative for running 32-bit x86 apps "natively" instead of Motorola Softwindows, it's been linked to earlier in the thread (previous page). AFAIK it was offered by Microsoft, for PPC, MIPS and DEC Alpha, for a very short period of time.
I didn't compare wx86 and Moto SW side-by-side yet, but some things might run on only one or the other, although almost everything should be able to run on either, as long as everything else is compatible with NT4 SP2 (or other installed components, like exact DirectX version and whatnot).
@Hakilo I used it on the Wii because that's what I have at hand, but a Wii U should be better, or one of the compatible G4 Macs. For the latter, you must be able to use ADB directly somehow, as we currently lack USB drivers for mouse and keyboard support. The Wii and the Wii U can get around the USB requirement for mouse and keyboard via some form of leveraging their support for these before booting into the NT OS, but you still have to watch out not to have them lose connection, as there's no plug'n'play for them.
i must've missed the wx86 comment. I found it though, and now I'm curious to compare the two. Might be my next project for this weekend.
G3, for sure. Particularly the old ones, and particularly particularly a PowerBook or iBook.
If you want to use an emulator, qemu-ppc would have probably done you better.
Wii U is just running it in Wii mode, I tried it. If you're looking for raw speed, you might want to look into a Titanium G4 with the Mac99 firmware build.