Updated Qemu for MIPS emulation

Today I found out that the latest ‘git’ repository version can run Windows NT in color, and with corrected mouse support! The NVRAM is still corrupting and you’ll have to fix the time/date but a usable mouse, and being able to see what you are doing go a long way!

I’ve put the updated binaries here.

If you feel adventurous you too can compile the emulator, I’ve downloaded todays snapshot to here in the off chance this won’t be build able for some time.

I don’t know if there is any good way to enable sound, but things like Visual C++ 4.0 & Quake 1 are usable in that you can actually see what is going on!

Here’s a screen shot of my NT 4.0 workstation….

Qemu MIPS Windows NT color

Qemu MIPS Windows NT color

9 thoughts on “Updated Qemu for MIPS emulation

  1. Looks cool! Do you know whether any of qemu platforms where you run NT has the ESP (aka NCR53C9X) SCSI controller? It were a good cross test case for qemu-sparc.
    Currently I don't expect more bugs in ESP, but who knows…

  2. I'm pretty sure you can 'hack' the source to enable the pci scsi on any pci qemu machine… I've done it for the i386 to test some scsi stuff when I had hopes of emulating a tape drive for netware……

  3. Tape drive, wow! Have you managed it?

    Though about pci scsi but I'm not sure whether there were any NCR53C9X pci adapters. There were isa ones, but I don't want to mess with ISA bugs on top of the SCSI-disk and ESP ones :).

    But I thought some MIPS/Jazz/PPC models were equipped with the ESP controller.

  4. I'm about to jump on a palne, but tonite I'll try to dig out what I did, regarding scsi on the pc…

    I modidied the scsi disk enough to identify itself as a tape drive, but it seemed all the software I had wanted specific models….

    one day I'll have to push harder with tme source and some sunos/solaris source I found.

  5. ah, Solaris is not that exiting yet: the versions 2.4 (probably 2.0) – 2.5.1 seem to be fully functional, 2.6 works good in a single user mode, 7-9 boot kernel (have a hack to boot them till single user mode, but don't have time to rewrite and push it upstream).

    Looking for synergies with other platforms to exclude sparc-specific bugs. Up now I see only two modules which can be in other platforms: ESP (aka Slavio/NCR) and Lance (aka Macio).

    I see from the qemu source that ESP is used in mips[el][64], but don't know whether ESP is really used by any legacy OS.

  6. Ok I'm back, and what I've re-created is that simply the newer builds of Qemu have the SCSI 'waiting' for the i386, you just simply have to attach some devices, and it'll enable it.

    qemu -L . -hda one.disk -cdrom r:\ISOIMAGES\winnt40wks_sp1_en.iso -d
    rive file=scsi.disk,if=scsi -net nic -net user -fda scsi.vfd

    So the above will create a machine generic enough for me to get a scsi disk for WindowsNT 4.0. The SCSI driver I'm using is this one:

    http://www.lsi.com/cm/License.do?url=http://www.lsi.com/DistributionSystem/AssetDocument/files/support/ssp/sdms/WinNT/nt896.zip&prodName=LSI53C895A&subType=Driver&locale=EN

    Naturally there is no BIOS, so you can't boot from the scsi disk.. I suppose it wouldn't stop someone with an LSI controller from copying the ROM though..

    The latest QEMU snapshots don't get along with Windows NT 4.0, though.. I suspect it's the new bios, but the new Qemu won't boot with the old bios either…….

  7. Probably I misunderstood your post. I thought you launched a MIPS-NT on a MIPS guest. But from the command line above, it looks like it were MIPS host and a usual NT/i386?

    Yes, scsi can be plugged into an i386 machine, but it's an LSI (as you mentioned) and not ESP. A MIPS machine would have the ESP scsi controller.

  8. Oh I'm sorry I didn't realize it was another chipset!

    sigh, I just launched the MIPS thing to see that yeah, it's the NCR 53C9x SCSI controller.

  9. looking at pc.c & mips_jazz.c it would seem to be a matter of setting up a esp_init instead of allowing the

    pci_create_simple(pci_bus,-1,"lsi53c895a");

    To do it's thing….

    I'm sure there has to have been someone out there vendor wise that used the 53c9x chipset, and just clone their settings…

Leave a Reply to atar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.