back to article Windows NT on a whole new platform: PowerMac

Ever wanted to run Windows NT on your vintage PowerPC Macintosh? No, me neither, but now it's possible thanks to some amazing FOSS work. The newly-released maciNTosh project brings Windows NT version 4, the state of the art operating system circa 1996, to the iMac G3, the PowerMac G3 "Blue and White", PowerBook G3 "Lombard", …

  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Pirate

    At least...

    You won't get any 'Patch Tuesday' updates foisted on you that wipes your configs just because MS knows it can and delights in screwing their use base at every opportunity.

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge

      Re: At least...

      You won't return to your PC to find that Windows has restarted itself, either!

      1. MyffyW Silver badge

        Re: At least...

        ... and you will have the risk-posture of "Security by Obsolescence", which is apparently, a thing

        1. Dave 126 Silver badge

          Re: At least...

          Well, my NT 4.0 box was fairly secure because wasn't connected to the internet. Data shuttling was largely via Iomega ZipDisk*

          (the NTL Unlimited Dialup software was only for Win98. I dual-booted 4.0 and '98, the latter for some USB devices and games.)

          * I was optimistic about Windows 2000, seemingly the bells and whistles of 98 atop he foundation of NT... but it had an interesting bug... It could rewrite your ZipDisk with the contents of a ZipDisk that had previously been used on that machine, even that of a different user.

          1. My other car WAS an IAV Stryker
            Facepalm

            Re: ZIP re-write

            Happened at uni too many times and lost loads of old data, especially when switching disks quickly.

            Most often Win2k only replaced the FAT, but I didn't have the tools to fix it.

          2. I could be a dog really Silver badge

            Re: At least...

            * Did you unmount the disk before removing it ? Or more pertinently, did the previous user ?

            That is one thing the Mac (with it's software controlled disk eject) got right. You had to tell the OS to eject the disk - which gave it the opportunity to flush out any dirty cache.

            If you don't then there's always the chance that data hasn't been written, and a chance that it will get written when the device is next able to accept write commands - such as when you put a different disk in the drive. This applies even today with things like USB drives - it really is good practice to tell the OS before you unplug it, "Eject [disk name]" in OS X's Finder, "Safely remove hardware" in Windows.

            1. Dave 126 Silver badge

              Re: At least...

              That might have been it... this was a time before USB mass storage* was common and XP had trained me to 'safely remove hardware'. In my defence, the ZipDisk eject button wasn't mechanical like a floppy disk drive eject button was - so it's possible that I assumed that pushing the eject button would be akin to 'politely' asking the system to eject the disk when it was ready to.

              Also, the rewriting of ZipDisks didn't occur on NT 4.0 or Win 98 machines. I'm not sure I would even have known to unmount media on PCs. With floppy disks we just closed the folder and waited til the lights stopped blinking.

              * USB 1.1 wasn't really fast enough for storage, and solid state memory was expensive.

          3. Expectingtheworst

            Re: At least...

            Oh the beloved click on the Zips.

            Going to get nightmares again. I had forgotten. Damn !

      2. Blackjack Silver badge

        Re: At least...

        You may find however certain familiar blue screen of death... granted at least is not Windows 98.

  2. Dave 126 Silver badge

    Hmm, I have a PowerMac G4 that a friend gave me stashed in a cupboard, *and* I have fond memories of NT4, it just never crashed, and was always snappy and responsive - in stark contrast to all other Windows I'd used to that point (and possibly since). Hmmm...

    Nah, best not, I find I've gotta nip 90's nostalgia in the bud. FSM bless the lunatic who made it possible though!

    Still, I do use the G4's solid keyboard on my PC today.

    1. gryphon

      I had an NT4 file server that I inherited with 512Kb or so free on the C: drive that ran quite happily, even with reboots, for a couple of years before we managed to scrap it.

    2. MyffyW Silver badge

      Oh NT4 could crash, not always to the dreaded BSOD, but explorer.exe would - from time to time - get it's knickers in a twist, and given it wasn't just the file manager but the GUI, you pretty much had to restart.

      And then there were all the services which in and of themselves weren't the end of the world, but would decide not to restart. Once again, a reboot was required.

      And yet it was way better than what went before.

      1. Dave 126 Silver badge

        "- CTRL-SHIFT-ESC will launch Taskmgr without any help from the Shell, so if the Shell/Explorer is dead use this key combo to bring up TM and then reset/restart the shell. Even if your tray is missing and gone, this combo should start it."

        https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote_task_manager_and_i_just_remembered/

    3. Nursing A Semi

      Have you thought of turning it into an Amiga?

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        MorphOS only works with G4 and G5 machines.

    4. David 132 Silver badge
      Happy

      Tried installing NT 4 in a virtual machine on modern hardware? The installer process takes about 30 seconds. It’s heartwarming.

    5. RAMChYLD

      blocked

      Welp, too bad my PowerMac G3 is the beige tower one which means it's one of them unsupported machines.

      Not that there's any reason to change from Mac OS 9 to NT4 anyway. Since PPC NT4 is unlikely to support x86 software.

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: blocked

        [Author here]

        > Since PPC NT4 is unlikely to support x86 software.

        All RISC versions of WinNT contain an x86-16 emulator and can run unmodified 16-bit x86 software for MS-DOS and Windows 3.x.

  3. jake Silver badge
    Pint

    Really?

    "polarize people into shocked amazement, or leave them asking "Huh? Why?""

    I rather suspect that it'll be a little of both among most of us commentardariat.

    As in "That's really cool! But WHY? I know I'm wasting my time, but I must have a look!"

    So I'll be giving it a go in my !copious free time, just because I can.

    Beer for the developer(s), and another for the author for pointing it out.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why?

      Doh! Because it is better in almost every aspect than the mess that W11 has become. AI this, AI that... soon it MS will come out with a version that you pay a lot extra for just to have zero AI... until the first boot/update and it gets infected with the AI virus.

      There is a vaccine for it and it is called Linux (if you don't happen to have s PowerMac handy that is)

      1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

        Re: Why?

        [Author here]

        > Because it is better in almost every aspect than the mess that W11 has become.

        I had some small hope at one point that ReactOS could become this. Basically, NT 4 with USB and PnP. Or a clone of Win2K but with some of the more modern shell APIs.

        Compare with this insanely wonderful project:

        https://w2k.phreaknet.org/guide

        (A whole pile of unofficial extensions and updates to Windows 2000 to run some XP apps on it.)

        I still wonder if there would be room for a "Windows minimal" product from MICROS~1 that leaves out everything except the core OS and a very minimal explorer, for experts who want to configure the rest themselves.

        It too will never ever happen.

        1. Peter2

          Re: Why?

          At an industry event during the lunch, I suggested that if Microsoft released a copy of Win7 renamed "Windows classic for business" and then licensed it for £1 per user per month doing nothing but patching serious bugs with no new features added ever then it'd be a huge runaway success.

          Everybody at the table agreed that they'd buy it in quantity. We got the "last version of windows" Win10 (now replaced by Win11) instead.

  4. jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid Silver badge

    Back to the glory days...

    Seeing that NT startup screen brought back some warm cosy feelings for me. That reassuring feeling that whatever you had fired up NT to do was going to go well - whether it was a short specific data management task, a big coding job or just the non specific first boot of the day.

    Probably rose tinted spectacles, but ever since about windows 7 for me, the windows startup sequence just fills me with dread at wondering what hellspawned issue is going to stop me being productive this time. I've been conditioned to recognise the spinning dots of doom as a message that your PC has ground to a halt and won't be doing anything useful for quite a while now. And yet, the latest versions of Windows start with those spinning dots, just daring you to be even slightly optimistic about what you are about to try and do. No wonder I now have low expectations of Windows.

    1. Youngdog

      Seeing that NT startup screen

      I cut my teeth on NT4 in my first IT role and it taught me most of what i still know today about Windows. I think Windows 11 is ok and I can do a lot with it, but only NT4 would whistle Boney M's 'Rasputin' while dancing the hopak if if I asked it to

  5. Spoobistle
    Facepalm

    Awww

    Only got a Powermac 7200 - it'll have to continue mouldering in a corner!

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Awww

      [Author here]

      > Only got a Powermac 7200

      With a bunch of 3rd party upgrades, I think you can run OS X 10.3 on one of those.

      You'll need:

      • Maxed-out RAM

      • G3 CPU upgrade

      • a better graphics card, such as a reflashed Radeon 7000

      • I'd recommend a PCI SATA controller and an SSD

      • A PCI USB2/Firewire card

      That's more or less what I had in my 7600.

      You'll also need XPostFacto:

      https://www.macintoshrepository.org/10291-xpostfacto

      https://68kmla.org/bb/index.php?threads/xpostfacto.8108/

  6. david 12 Silver badge

    Slow

    Looks like perhaps using unbuffered graphics. Be interesting to see disk/memory/cpu comparison, and some file transfer and compile-time tests.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Slow

      [Author here]

      > Looks like perhaps using unbuffered graphics.

      Not so much "unbuffered" as a _unaccelerated_ flat framebuffer. There are mutterings that the author is working on a Rage128 driver, which is the default or onboard GPU in a lot of that period of Mac -- and for all that it can't do Quartz Extreme, its support in early versions of Mac OS X was very good and very fast.

      And there were PC/Windows drivers for Rage128 of course. Getting them running against PowerPC card firmware might be tricky, though.

      1. stupid-frakking-handle

        Re: Slow

        I suspect some of the slowness is due to the underlying architecture of NT on RISC-CPUs. At that time NT's paging code had been optimized for the Paged-memory management found in MIPS processors. So, if you wanted to run NT on a RISC CPU that wasn't MIPS, you either had to completely redesign the memory management, or you had to emulate the paging approach used on MIPS CPUs which caused problems for other platforms. I was peripherally (so to speak) involved in the PowerPC and Intergraph CLIPPER ports of NT (I knew the engineers at Intergraph who actually did all the hard work) so I have some inside information ;-)

      2. joeldillon

        Re: Slow

        Rage128 register-level programming docs are/were fairly easily available (I wrote a Qt/Embedded driver for it back in the day). The fact that it has a framebuffer, even if unaccelerated, is most of the work. Once you get that far, implement bitblt() (and its hardware, it should look the same on a Mac as on a PC) and you're most of the way to not-horribly-slow mode.

  7. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    Sometimes the Everest explanation is the only one that fits: "Because it's there"

  8. fromxyzzy

    I think this got done within an hour of the git going live https://archive.org/details/doom-ppc

    1. Dave 126 Silver badge
      Coat

      You got Doom running within an hour? You clearly didn't make a Marathon of it then!

  9. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Linux

    One is amazed...

    ... not that it can be done, but that anyone would want to do it!

    1. heyrick Silver badge

      Re: One is amazed...

      I have one of those blue and white things in the shed, never really knew what to do with it.

      Might give this a try on my summer holiday.

  10. mark l 2 Silver badge

    I wonder if it can be persuaded to run on an PPC Amiga? I used to have one of those PowerUP accelerators in my A1200 in back in the late 90s and i even wrote a letter to one of the Amiga magazines suggesting someone get PPC Windows NT working so I could use my Amiga for work without having to go out and buy a PC. I don't recall my letter ever getting published though.

    Any annoyingly even though i still have my A1200 packed away awaiting a recapping, i lost the PowerUP board during a house move and those things are super rare now and worth a fortune.

    1. Liam Proven (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      [Author here]

      > I wonder if it can be persuaded to run on an PPC Amiga?

      Not a whelk's chance in a supernova.

      MorphOS is your best bet, I reckon.

  11. Rich 2 Silver badge

    Oh dear

    “… By the last, it was an extremely solid and fast PC OS…”

    Oh dear M$. Where did it all go wrong?

  12. Bebu
    Windows

    Still have NT4 + SP6a on a CD

    although it was never users' desktop (all Win9X and hence SEP.)

    Unfortunately I had to support a peculiar network license service locked to printer port dongle that only worked under windows (and required accurate or consistent timekeeping.)

    Getting Win9X to keep time sufficiently well for the licensing software didn't work reliably but NT4 with a third party ntp client worked a treat.

    The licensing server ran for the better part of a decade well after MS stopped supporting NT4 and was only abandoned when the new dongles (received with each new set of licenses for appluiatiin updates) was USB only.

    Incidentally the USB version on any windows version was incredibly flakey. (Two steps back.)

  13. IGotOut Silver badge

    Rose tinted glasses?

    Solid and fast?

    Fast for the time, but boy oh boy do I remember having to reboot the NT4 server boxes on a very regular basis. Pretty sure it was every 40 or 50 days because if they ran 24/7 they would just go "Nope" and just refuse any more connections after a pretty regular set time.

    1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

      Re: Rose tinted glasses?

      The 49.7-day thing was a thing for Win95/98 only, I believe. (2^32-1 milliseconds)

  14. PRR Silver badge

    My recollection on running NT4, not in anger, on generic 486 w/ATA, was VERY solid if a bit slow and RAM-hungry compared to crashy Win95. Filesystem actions that boggled W95's mind, NT4 chewed to perfection. Obviously there was some wonk-ness left since we all have such different impressions.

  15. FIA Silver badge

    Pedant

    (NT 4 got all the way to SP 6A, after which Microsoft stopped support.)

    <Pedant>

    NT4 got all the way up to service pack 7, you just couldn't get it on this planet.

    </Pedant>

  16. Necrohamster Silver badge
    Gimp

    Some things are better left in the past

    If I drag my old PowerMac in from the shed and install NT on it, I'm definitely getting divorced

  17. Azamino

    Ah, Windows NT

    Despite spending a wasted fortune on Novell CNA training and exams etc that there NT4 paid my mortgage. Not very happy days at the time but in hindsight it all turned out rather nicely.

  18. maribert

    It can only enhance the user experience. I mean, NT4 was pretty horrific, but not nearly as horrific as the PowerPC Mac my employer made me use all those yours ago with MacOS. I mean, MacOS was _horrible_ Nothing makes sense, everything is weird, and the fact that were were supposed to use RagTime and later even OpenOffice on Mac (which is its own version of evil) for our work didn't help much either.

    I have used computer user interfaces since my teenage days back in the 80s, but MacOS really did take the cake as being the worst, least logical, least intuitive, user interface of at all time.

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