This one kind of leaked out into the world a few years back. Although you can run it under emulation now.

So, it’s the only exposure to ALPHA64 the majority of us ever had, well outside until one day I had discovered that the ALPHA64 SDK on the Windows 2000 Platform SDK pre-releases included the full toolchain.

At least being able to run Alpha under emulation now, it’s not as painful having to have an Alpha to cross compile ALPHA64 stuff now. It was a pain constantly rebooting to test before.. well, before my Alpha died anyways. It’s a fun bit of dead-end evolutionary tech though. That weird twilight.

I’d imagine DEC wrote the PAL code? I know the compiler is GEM based, but then again, all the RISC compilers were vendor supplied not Microsoft, which is a shame as we couldn’t blindly cross compile on i386.

Also check out this exciting branch of es40! ES1370 & MPU401 support works on the ’32bit’ alpha stuff, even the alpha version WinAmp runs! Sadly there are no audio drivers on ALPHA64..

NT on MIPS/PPC were dead after NT4 was released.

The ntvdm (16 but windows application support) was provided by Insiignia/SoftPC. There may have been a version of that with 32 bit application support but at the time they wanted a minor fortune to build it for alpha and the performance was not going to be great so DEC did it themselves.

Also 32 bit vs 64 bit alpha a non-thing for the most part. The ISA is identical – “32-bit” AlphaNT was a misnomer. It’s user mode virtual address space was limited to the same as x86 at the time but used the exact same instruction set. All alpha instructions are 32bits and all registers were 64bit. The calling convention was register based and the alpha stack was always 64 bit aligned.

There was likely a PAL to enable 64bit needs (tls, page at me walks, etc.) but iirc even the page tables were still the 64bit format which just mapped VAs above 4GB to fault.

There were big memory APIs in NT 3.51 and 4.0 so memory access above physical 4GB was possible (though that might have been a side effect of supporting whatever they called the hack 48 physical addressing support for x86 – can’t recall) mode. you could have an alpha ng system with more 4GB of physical RAM and just limit user processes to 2GB (3GB later and then the full 4GB) of virtual address space. Could do the same on x86 systems too.
A big issues for a 64bit Alpha NT would have been extending the PE image format to provide 64bit relocations and similar extensions to 64bit. The Win32 API and datastructures are a different story but ABI compatibility should would not have been that hard since they had Wx86 which could have easily been the basis for Wow64.

I’d imagine that running “32bit” alpha executables would be pretty easy. The real 64bit NT (as said elsewhere) was to be post Win2k. (yes win2k on ia64 was demoed and maybe used but that hardware was quite rare (if it existed at all – merced was any day now vapor for so long it was a joke) and that cersik. was built after win2k was released iirc. I left compaq after the Windows Alpha cancellation and tried to forget that the better product lost the popularity contest.

There is also that one that MS made that’s available for MIPS/PPC/ALPHA.. I’m under the impression that fx32 was only in the “32bit” alpha 2000 builds…. Alpha64 is so different.

I need to finish an update on this as now we have TWO emulators capable of running it!

This is incorrect. Wow64 was the 32bit on 64bit runtime that Microsoft created during development of IA64 and ALPHA64 NT versions.

Microsoft used the 32-bit x86 emulator and translation engine that DEC built for NT Alpha versions prior to 4.0.

We (DEC) built our own equivalent runtime at the time as part of FX!32 which was released for NT3.5+. We never licensed anything from Microsoft and we gave the x86 emulator and binary translator to Microsoft in an attempt to level the application playing field for Alpha – DEC was desperate to make Alpha a viable x86 alternative. You can see that the FX!32 Manager is included as a 3rd party tool on Win2k Alpha installation discs. (which is what brought me here – came across my Win32 Alpha Server RC2 disc).

Microsft basically used FX!32 components to prove out Wow64 on Alpha before IA64 hardware was available.

I know it’s crazy that we were sleeping on the compiler the entire time. We now have many programs!

YES?! It’s like big news! let me … uh email you?!

The archive uploaded by neozeed has the HAL from DEC Miata aka Personal Workstation a-series.