I’ve got to find a way to build Qemu for Win64, it looks like the only way for it to produce anything other than trivial hello world applications is to cross compile on linux.. which no doubt will need a billion dependencies…

But in the interim the MIPS emulator in Qemu 1.1.1 has made a bunch of progress and can install & run NT 4.0 without any issues!

There are a few things to look out for, the first is that you have to specify a NVRAM image file to keep it persistant across instances. And you need to ‘expand’ it beyond the definition size to get things like the MAC address to be stored.

./qemu-system-mips64el  -L . -M magnum -hda MIPS.disk -net nic -net user  -global ds1225y.filename=nvram  -global ds1225y.size=8200

And by default the Qemu MAC address to configure within the Magnum BIOS is 525400123456 ..

I’ve been able to download & install Internet Explorer 3, and Quake World.. And even connect up to quake.xs4all.nl and it worked!

One thing I’d advise is to copy the directory OS\WINNT40 on the system partition to OS\NT to make it that much easier to re-add the boot statement, if you have to go down that road.

As always, special thanks to Herve Poussineau for making all of this possible.