For the RISC cpu!… That being Alpha & MIPS. Although the back of the box does mention PowerPC there is no PowerPC anything here…
Visual C++ 4.0 RISC box
I always did like the old Microsoft boxes during this time period… They always looked somewhat professional, not like today’s weird boxes that look like some kind of toy should be inside.
Also speaking of RISC cpu’s check the back of the Visual C++ 2.0 for mips box:
Visual C++ 2.0 MIPS box back
You have to remember it was “time” the golden age of the promised RISC cpu… Intel was hitting that wall with the 486, but lo the pentium changed all of that. And the Pentium PRO cemented all the little RISC cpu’s death. It’s funny how at the same time the “itanic/itanium” is just as dead as well.. MIPS. At least MIPS has their embedded space.. Which is funny looking back at the R4000 as a workstation CPU, and now it’s available in handhelds & set tops.. Although the Acorn derived strongarm is well… Strong-arming MIPS & Power for embedded dominance.
I’m pretty sure that Visual C++ 4.0 brought a lot of Windows 95 like functionality to NT, so I’ll have to see just how much(or little) of modern stuff will build. According to this link, 4.0a was the LAST version to support the MIPS, so Unless I can find 4.0a this is as good as it’s going to get.
If anyone has either insight on where to get Visual C++ 4.0a for the MIPS, or even where to get NT 3.1 for the Alpha give me a line…. Not to mention service pack 3 for the MIPS running NT 3.1… I have a feeling the shiped kernel is at fault in the emulator…
Are you interested in ppc? I bought a copy of this same software, but the sticker on the front of my box explicitly includes powerpc. Opening the box I have three CDs, one for each architecture. I really wish NT4 ppc could run on old Apple hardware…
I have an ISO of this (I think)..
MSVC40PPC
10eb631b0bda6a7a8185f3b314fc0bc8 VisualC++4.0PPC.iso
But I got this long after I was running NT 4.0 on a RS/6000 ..
Just browsing old stuff and stumbled onto this again, and only now noticed the screenshot on the back of the Visual C++ 4 box is essentially a forgery. Visual C++ 4.0 shipped alongside Windows 95 (with its UI), but NT didn’t get that UI for another year, and Alpha/MIPS don’t run Windows 95. Even installing NewShell on NT 3.51 doesn’t result in something like that screenshot. Either that screenshot came from the Intel version (which is not in this box!) or it came from a pre-release NT 4 that wasn’t public.
In related news, the NT 4.0 SDK has updated headers and libs for RISC (but not the compilers.) The “newest” MIPS/PPC Visual C++ is bundling the NT 3.51 SDK, so the NT 4.0 SDK is a nice update.