Ok, my friends say I’m insane to have bought this… but I couldn’t resist.
It’s a DEC Alpha 221164 machine, with 64MB of ram, and a 4GB disk!
It’s the best technology of 1996-1997!
So I’ve gone ahead and installed Windows NT 4.0 on the beast… at 600Mhz it’s pretty dammed fast… considering how old it is. Although I suspect a Pentium III I found in the garbage with a 1Ghz cpu is 2x faster…..
But at any rate, this is a DEC Alpha, the long time geek cpu of dreams etc…
What makes this slightly useful for me, is that I do have Visual C++ 4.0 & 6.0 for the Alpha. So at least I can build *SOME* stuff to run on the thing….
So I’ve been fighting the compiler, and it seems it’s default blended optimizations do *NOT* work on my machine.. I’m sure this will be fun down the road. However it seems setting the target cpu to the 21064 produces ok code.. I’ve got to bench the stuff, but at least my exe’s are not crashing.
So what have I manage to produce today so far?
Well…
unzip is a major one.. It’s hard to use a machine today without it.
The other thing I’ve manage to get running, is Quake! I’ve included my source & project trees as it was a feisty little thing to build..
I’m currently building & testing over terminal services so I don’t know what the speed is on the console… Also, this build does not include networking… I’m sure the winsock code will work just fine, I’m just not in a good position physically to test it, as Quake1 will *NOT NAT* correctly.. Also the SDL sound doesn’t actually output anything, so I’ve built it with the null sound driver..
I’d love to get that m68k->C build of frontier elite to go on the Alpha but I’m afraid my 64mb of ram will be a major constraint..
I know this isn’t much of an emulation thing, as the only emulator that possibly can run Windows NT for the Alpha costs upwards of $16,000 USD… It’s cheaper to score an alpha on ebay for $100 USD.
Well here is the screen shot…
Quake on the Dec Alpha
I know it’s not much to ‘look’ at, but the pallet is correct, because it’s a real Alpha!.. Unlike the MIPS thing.
Hi,
Very interesting article!
I also recently purchased a fairly old Alphastation 200 4/233 with 192Mb of RAM. It came with Digital UNIX preinstalled, but I deleted it and installed WinNT 4.0 SP6a and the SDK.
The problem is, the SDK does not include the C++ compiler and linker and you are forced to install Visual C++ RISC Edition to be able to develop for the machine.
I looked for it on most abandonware sites on the Internet with no luck at all, it looks like it’s an extremely rare piece of software right now…
Would you care to share your copy of the software, please?
Thank you.