(This is a guest blog post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

A Christmas gift for those who run Windows NT on Alpha AXP, MIPS or PowerPC. The RISC versions of Windows are really lacking some good, high-end applications. Yes, there are utilities and games, Alpha even has Microsoft Word, Excel and Oracle DB, but apart from that, there just are no serious apps available.

Calamus is a professional DTP (Desktop Publishing) software. It has been actively developed by a German company Invers up until 2018. If you want to play around with the latest version you can download a 30 day trial and (at the time this article was written) even purchase the Lite version for 99 Euro on calamus.net. There are versions for Windows, Mac and Atari ST.

Atari ST ?! Well yes, the original Calamus was born some 30 years ago on Atari ST:

I had pleasure of using Calamus professionally on Atari for several years in early 90s. At that time 486 PC could max 64MB RAM and maybe 800×600 VGA. In contrast, a high-end Atari TT packed 256MB and true color 1280×1024 framebuffer. The memory and high resolution displays were desperately needed to process large images and complex page layouts. You can read more about my Atari TT restoration efforts.

In the mid ’90s DMC decided to port Calamus to Windows NT to take advantage of the ultra high-end RISC hardware (compared to PC or Atari). At the time of the port, NT was actively supported on all RISC platforms, so thankfully Calamus has been compiled on all of the available architectures. Alpha version was probably the most popular choice for publishing companies as it was fastest and supported outrageous amounts of memory needed for these high res glossy magazine covers.

After literally decades of searching, I finally tracked down and secured a copy of Calamus NT with support for all the RISC CPUs! This is how it looks when you first install it:

Interestingly there were separate builds for 386/486 and Pentium CPUs.

If you don’t have one of these machines you can still run Windows NT MIPS on Qemu:

And finally to the goods! You can get them in my my archive. If you just want to play with small demo without installing the whole app look in the demo folder.

As a closing comment I wanted to bring an interesting fact. The Calamus Windows NT port wasn’t really a full source code rewrite. This was deemed impossible due a large codebase size. Even that Calamus has 100% native Windows GUI and a lot of functionality has been rewritten, inside the software lives a small embedded Atari ST emulator that does on fly translation of some of the Atari/m68k ABI. You can read a bit about it here.