The most fascinating time for Windows NT were its first few years on the market, when the brand new operating system supported a wide variety of architectures, from default x86, all the way down to stuff like Alpha, MIPS, and exotic things like Intel i860, and even weirder stuff like Clipper (even a SPARC port was planned, but never released). One of the more conventional architectures that saw a Windows NT port – one that was actually released to the public, no less – was PowerPC. The last version of Windows NT to support exotic architectures was 4.0, with Windows 2000 only supporting x86, dropping everything else, including PowerPC (although Windows 2000 for Alpha reached RC1 status).
The PowerPC version of Windows NT only supported IBM and Motorola systems using the PowerPC Reference Platform, and never the vastly more popular PowerPC systems from Apple. Well, it’s 2024, and that just changed: Windows NT 4.0 can now be installed and run on certain Apple New World Power Macintosh systems.
This repository currently contains the source code for the ARC firmware and its loader, targeting New World Power Macintosh systems using the Gossamer architecture (that is, MPC106 “Grackle” memory controller and PCI host, and “Heathrow” or “Paddington” super-I/O chip on the PCI bus).
[…]NT4 only, currently. NT 3.51 may become compatible if HAL and drivers get ported to it. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.)
↫ maciNTosh GitHub page
This is absolutely wild, and one of the most interesting projects I’ve seen in a long, long time. The deeply experimental nature of this effort does mean that NT 4.0 is definitely not stable on any of the currently supported machines, and the number of drivers implemented is the absolute bare minimum to run NT 4.0 on these systems. It does, however, support dual-booting both NT 4.0 and Mac OS8, 9, and X, which would be quite something to set up.
I’m not definitely going to keep an eye on eBay for a supported machine, because running NT on anything other than x86 has always been a bit of a weird fascination for me. Sadly, period-correct PowerPC machines that support NT are extremely rare and thus insanely expensive, and will often require board-level repairs that I can’t perform. Getting a more recent Yikes PowerMac G4 should be easy, since those just materialise out of thin air randomly in the world.
I’m incredibly excited about this.
This is a beauty! If I only had still my PowerMac 6100 (which as I understand it should be one of the supported machines) lying around!
I even had an i486 extension card, making it effectively the most compatible system *ever*, period.
Oh, the good ol’ days! 🙂
I`ve never heard about that and Google isn`t very helpful. Could you run x86 software with this card? Or Windows? Or how?
Yes and no, you couldn’ start a *.exe from the Mac or a native Application from Windows. You needed to boot Windows from that card, obviously the ix86 version, not the PReP (PowerPC) one. The problem was, again, IIRC, that Windows couldn’t access the HFS partition, and vice-versa MacOS couldn’t access the other NTFS partition as well. It was a slowish 486DX expansion card with its own memory, bottlenecked by the bus (PCI2?). But it worked pretty good. Moving data between the two systems (you effectively had two computers) was a pain in the neck, it came down to floppies or CDs. Driver-wise it was pretty complete and stable (a wonder at the time), can’t recall whether those drivers were supplied by Apple, MS, third parties or a mix of them all.
Technically speaking I still think it was brilliant. Non perfect by any means, but still brilliant…
I’m also very excited; I kept some PPC Macs in the expectation that this would be possible someday. Unfortunately my 2001 era iMac G3 doesn’t get off the ground – this image corrupts OpenFirmware sufficiently badly that it can’t even boot to the hard disk without a power cycle. The CD is recognized as bootable, at least from the menu presented when holding down the Option key – it’s not listed from the Startup Disk selector in OS X.
Hopefully this project can get a little further though – I should be able to help on the NT driver set, although none of the sources for those are provided today. A 500Mhz PPC with 256Mb RAM should be a really nice NT 4 machine.
The Windows NT kernel was also ported to the PowerMac G5 and PowerPC based XBox360 consoles.
The PowerMac G5s were used as the “Alpha” developer kits, while the XBox360 hardware were still being finalized.
I was at the Microsoft Developers conference, when the Microsoft reps revealed the G5 kits running an early XB360 software stack on the G5s. The rep took a jab at Apple by saying “We decided to port a REAL operating system to the G5 hardware..,”
I agree, Mac OS Classic was a crash waiting to happen every time you booted it up. X wasn’t really usable until 10.4, which came out years later. I guess that with the i486DX card, those lonely years ago, a PowerMac was really the best PC you could buy (though I can’t recall whether it supported cross file system compatibility between the two Operating Systems).
Other than windows 2000, windows NT 4.0 was probably the Microsoft OS I liked the most. It was simple, fast and down to the point. Too bad out of all of the machines I still own (a 9500 604@120, a G3 wallstreet and a G4 Luxo) none of them seem to be part of the batch that runs it…. oh well….
Yep, NT4 was a beauty at the time… I used it first at home, on a double-socket (no multi-cores at that time!) motherboard. It ran circles around everything else. We eventually started using it at work too, and getting rid of all that DOS crap was really a bliss, especially when you’ve got dozens of workstations to support.
First job i was designer (highend powerpoint) for big corporate events. In 1999, using a dual socket and very importantly a scsi drive allowed me do drive up to 8 simultaneous videos *within powerpoint* on the screen. It was NT4 or nothing back then.
We used to run Windows NT on DEC Alpha machines. Very high-end at the time.
Windows NT 4 was the first one to move away from the Windows 3.1 ( Presentation Manager / File Manager ) UI to the Windows 95 GUI ( Explorer ). Windows 10 was really not so different either architecturally or in UI from Windows NT 4. As a user, Windows 4 was more like Windows 10 than Windows NT 3.51.
I remember the speculation back then that PowerPC would beat out Intel starting at the top and working its way down. Apple had moved, OS/2 was working on a port, and Windows NT was going to be available. It all seemed very plausible at the time.
Of course, by the time Windows 2000 was released ( x86 only ), the writing was on the all for every other architecture ( including Itanium ).
I look forward to seeing this episode on Action Retro.
We also eventually moved to Win2k, and the GUI seemed already bloated when compared to NT4 (don’t get me started on XP, sadly) but core (the NT kernel) was still the most stable. As I understand it NT 3.51 on Alpha was supposed to be the absolute best, although as you mentioned with a much older GUI…
Oh it seems we finally got ourSelves a kernel for PowerBook G9 / AmigaOne x8000/40 Power8 we’re just finishing
Borat Ali Gee: Noot , we used yoctoEmbeded, recepies from linuxFromScratch & main dev distro Debian Gnu/LinuxPPC64 endianBig \o/
https://www.powerpc-notebook.org/2022/12/prototypes-produced-lets-go-on-hardware-tests/