This has been a rush of excitement! Rairii published their port of the ARC & Drivers needed to get NT 4.0 working on commodity PowerMac hardware over on github. And what about running it under emulation? Once more again Rairii provided a custom fork of dingusppc, again over on github!

A custom CD-ROM worked best (for me?!) for installation, combining the ARC & Drivers, along with a copy of Windows NT Workstation onto a single disc. Rairii provided the magical recipie for creating the ISO:

genisoimage -joliet-long -r -V 'NT_arcfw' -o ../jj.iso --iso-level 4 --netatalk -hfs -probe -map ../hfs.map -hfs-parms MAX_XTCSIZE=2656248 -part -no-desktop -hfs-bless ./System -hfs-volid NT/ppc_arcfw .

And the needed hfs.map:

# ext.  xlate  creator  type    comment
.hqx    Ascii  'BnHx'   'TEXT'  "BinHex file"
.sit    Raw    'SIT!'   'SITD'  "StuffIT Expander"
.mov    Raw    'TVOD'   'MooV'  "QuickTime Movie"
.deb    Raw    'Debn'   'bina'  "Debian package"
.bin    Raw    'ddsk'   'DDim'  "Floppy or ramdisk image"
.img    Raw    'ddsk'   'DDim'  "Floppy or ramdisk image"
.b      Raw    'UNIX'   'tbxi'  "bootstrap"
BootX   Raw    'UNIX'   'tbxi'  "bootstrap"
yaboot  Raw    'UNIX'   'boot'  "bootstrap"
vmlinux Raw    'UNIX'   'boot'  "bootstrap"
.conf   Raw    'UNIX'   'conf'  "bootstrap"
*       Ascii  '????'   '????'  "Text file"

I went ahead and made the image, and added in Service Pack 2, Internet Explorer 3 and IIS3 onto the same CD-ROM to make things easier for me to deal with. It’s on archive.org.

On Discord and impromptu porting session broke, out and we got NP21 up and running!

Unfortunately, it is very slow. I have no idea how it performs on real hardware, it’s entirely possible that it really is unplayable. It’s still pretty amazing that the OS booted up and I could actually compile something!

Even the usual fun text mode stuff from Phoon, Infocom’87, F2C, compiled!

But will it run DooM?

Of course, it runs! I’m using the 32bit C code from Sydney (ChatGPT), which runs just great.

Into 3D space

I was able to compile GLuT on the way to try to build ssystem but there is two textured OpenGL calls missing, meaning that the more fun OpenGL stuff simply will not work.

Setting expectations

As a matter of fact, lots of weird stuff doesn’t work, the install is very touchy so don’t expect a rock-solid experience, but instead it was incredibly fun to try to get a bunch of stuff up and running.

Thanks again to @Rairii for all their hard work! This is beyond amazing!

— it’s 3am and I’m exhausted, but I had to share this out some how some way!

NT ON PowerPC! It’s happening!