Qemu 12.2

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Well while I was busy playing with my DEC Alpha (lol) there has been a few updates on the Qemu front…. There is some super basic Dec alpha support going in, but no system support yet….

One can only hope that one day it’ll run NT!!!

Anyways, I’ve built up the latest version here for win32, Windows users.

As much as it kills me, the MIPS version still CANNOT boot NT 4.0… the ARC Bios runs great, but now the program crashes on the loader….

I did however do some basic tests with the i386 version and it seems ok.

16 thoughts on “Qemu 12.2”

  1. Wow, I never new there were a NT version for MIPS.

    Can you also build qemu git/master version for windows? There is a possibility it can do more (the sparc version definitely can).

  2. The MIPS was the 2nd port of Windows NT, the first being the intel i960. The MIPS version went from 3.1 to 4.0. There was even a Dec Alpha, and PowerPC versions as well.

    You can see my notes on running the MIPS version here

    If you can get me a pointer to the 'git' / 'master' I'll certainly take a stab at building it…

  4. btw, do you know whether there were legacy OSes for SPARC machines other than Solaris and NeXTStep?

    Booting them could help to find bugs in the current implementation.

  5. I *THINK* there was some builds of Mach for the sparc… The minix build was actually hosted on solaris, I think there is some mention in 4.4 BSD, but it'd be far more reliable by the time NetBSD hit the 1.0 …

    There apparently was a port of Windows NT to the SPARC, but it was a bait and switch, as SUN would have full control of the port, and they made sure it never saw the light of day…

  7. It is capable of booting Solaris 2.4-2.6 and the kernel of 7. I wrote some sort of a how-to in my blog.

    Both qemu-sparc and the how-to are far from being perfect though and reports/comments are welcome.

    NeXTStep requires a better graphic card than qemu emulates. Don't know whether it would run in a text-only mode.

  8. WOW that's a big deal….

    NeXTSTEP/OPENStep's 'text mode' was in fact graphical….

    Although the solaris thing is big too!!!

    I'll certainly have to fish around for some sparc solaris stuff, I hope I still have my old SUNOS CD…

  9. Preferably older than 2.4 and newer than 1.1.2, those are already tested. 🙂

    Glad you see it as a big deal. I had to find/fix bugs in a scsi controller, scsi disk, mmu, interrupt controller and cpu to get this far.

    Funny enough none of this bugs was preventing linux/sparc from working. 🙂

  10. It'll be a bigger deal when people see SPARC Solaris running on a laptop…. that doesn't cost a fortune….

    Although sad news on the windows front, it just crashes before showing anything……

    C:\msys\1.0\src\qemu\sparc-softmmu>qemu-system-sparc.exe -L ..\pc-bios -hda \tem
    p\disk.qcow

    It opens a yellow window, then crashes… Nothing is printed to the stderr, although that may be an artifact of it crashing 😐

    What version of GCC are you using to build? I'm wondering if it may finally be time to say goodbye to 3.4.5

  12. I just noticed that I'd need a Sparc ROM for this to go anywhere….. (beyond the windows version crashing…)…

    I don't suppose you'd have any leads on obtaining it?

    It just makes me wish I made rom images of all the machines I've owned over the years….

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