This honestly should have been much easier.

Or maybe I’ve just forgotten how absolutely hostile early OS X could be.

The mistake begins

It started, as these things always do, with someone mentioning the PowerBook G4 Titanium. One quick eBay search later and, well £30 later I owned one.

It showed up absurdly fast (Sunday delivery? really?), in surprisingly good condition, and I already had a charger. So naturally, the sensible thing to do was…

Install Tiger.
Which worked. Immediately. Of course it did.

But that wasn’t good enough

Tiger is fine. Great, even.

But it’s not Jaguar.

10.2 was always my favorite early OS X, that weird in-between era where it still felt experimental but usable. And according to basically everything online, early Titanium PowerBooks should run it.

So I grabbed a cheap “reproduction” 10.2 CD set.

And this is where everything went wrong.

Not a great start.

At first glance it looks like some kind of network address corruption, but in reality it’s just the kernel screaming because something is very wrong at a hardware level.

Time to go verbose.

Welcome back to Open Firmware

You can’t just hold C and Cmd+V like a normal person.

No, this is 2002.

So into Open Firmware we go:

boot cd:,\\:tbxi -v

Now we get actual output… and a much clearer failure.

FireWire: the red herring

The panic traces back to:

com.apple.driver.AppleFWOHCI

Ah yes — FireWire.

Because of course it is.

So the obvious thing to do is disable it from Open Firmware:

dev /pci@f4000000/firewire
" disabled" encode-string " status" property

And… it works.

Kind of.

The system gets further. No panic. Progress!

And then: the stop sign

Instead of a crash, we now get a

The classic “this OS is not supported on this Mac” symbol.

Which is when it finally clicks:

This machine is a PowerBook3,5 (867MHz)
And 10.2.0 predates it

So no, this was never going to work.

The FireWire panic wasn’t the root problem; it was just the first thing new enough hardware broke.

At this point, a normal person would stop

I did not stop.

If Apple won’t build it, we will

If 10.2.0 won’t run, then clearly the answer is:

• build a 10.2.8 install manually
• using QEMU
• on a completely different machine
• then sneak it onto the laptop

Perfectly reasonable.

Building Jaguar in exile

QEMU can emulate a G4 well enough to:

1. Install Tiger
2. Install Jaguar
3. Update Jaguar → 10.2.8

Something like:

qemu-system-ppc \
  -M mac99 \
  -cpu G4 \
  -m 512 \
  -drive file=macosx_6gb.vmdk \
  -boot c

From there:

• swap disks around
• update Jaguar
• boot back into Tiger
• use Disk Utility to create a compressed image

Eventually producing:

osx-10.2.8.dmg

Of course it’s not that easy!

First off is to get ISO images. I actually started this process with the Tiger I already have in hand. To grab an ISO under macOS 26 it’s a simple command:

hdiutil convert /dev/disk4 -format UDTO -o OSX_Tiger_10.5.iso

And about 20 minutes of the DVD drive spinning around I got my ISO image.

 % file OSX_Tiger_10.5.iso 
OSX_Tiger_10.5.iso: Apple Driver Map, blocksize 512, blockcount 5531738, devtype 0, devid 0, driver count 1, contains[@0x200]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 4, start block 1, block count 63, name Apple, type Apple_partition_map, valid, allocated, contains[@0x400]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 4, start block 64, block count 8, name Macintosh, type Apple_Driver_ATAPI, boot arguments DMMY, valid, allocated, real driver, chain driver, contains[@0x600]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 4, start block 72, block count 5531656, name Mac_OS_X, type Apple_HFS, boot arguments goon, valid, allocated, readable, writable, mount at startup, contains[@0x800]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 4, start block 5531728, block count 10, type Apple_Free

Now to run it under qemu:

qemu-system-ppc \
    -L pc-bios \
    -M mac99,via=pmu \
    -cpu G4 \
    -m 512 \
    -prom-env 'auto-boot?=true' \
    -prom-env 'boot-args=-v' \
    -drive file=tiger.iso,media=cdrom,format=raw \
    -drive file=macosx_6gb.vmdk,format=vmdk,cache=unsafe \
    -boot d \
    -net none \
    -no-reboot

And in a minute or so on my mac mini running “QEMU emulator version 10.1.2” from homebrew I was up and running. yay. I don’t need or care about audio/networking as this is just to get a PowerPC OS up and running, using the media I have in hand. Bring up the disk util, partition the VMDK, the install the OS. You’ve probably seen/done it a dozen times so nothing to really see here.

Once my 10.2 reproduction media arrive, I went through the hardware boot to only find out that 10.2.0 just won’t run on my PowerBook G4. This is where we use the emulation route. Could I simply grab an ISO using hdiutil?

NO

Of course not. Why would it work? It comes down to the older versions of OS X being very MacOS 9 style disks, which hdiutil simply will not grab. You end up with meaningless data. What about ‘dd’ on /dev/disk4? /dev/rdisk4? did you set bs=2048? YES YES YES… none worked.

So back in homebrew I got the cdrutils from Joerg Schilling which gives me the readcd command, which finally let me grab the ISO’s

% file OSX_Jaguar_10.2-disc1.iso
OSX_Jaguar_10.2-disc1.iso: Apple Driver Map, blocksize 2048, blockcount 331264, devtype 1, devid 1, driver count 4, contains[@0x200]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 1, block count 63, name Apple, type Apple_partition_map, valid, allocated, in use, readable, contains[@0x400]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 64, block count 56, name Macintosh, type Apple_Driver43, boot arguments ptDR, valid, allocated, in use, has boot info, readable, writable, pic boot code, real driver, chain driver, contains[@0x600]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 120, block count 140, name Macintosh, type Apple_Driver43_CD, boot arguments CDrv, valid, allocated, in use, has boot info, readable, writable, pic boot code, real driver, chain driver, contains[@0x800]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 0, block count 0, type Apple_Void, contains[@0xA00]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 260, block count 56, name Macintosh, type Apple_Driver_ATAPI, boot arguments ptDR, valid, allocated, in use, has boot info, readable, writable, pic boot code, real driver, chain driver, contains[@0xC00]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 316, block count 140, name Macintosh, type Apple_Driver_ATAPI, boot arguments ATPI, valid, allocated, in use, has boot info, readable, writable, pic boot code, real driver, chain driver, contains[@0xE00]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 456, block count 512, name Patch Partition, type Apple_Patches, valid, contains[@0x1000]: Apple Partition Map, map block count 10, start block 0, block count 0, type Apple_Void

As you can see it’s a lot of partitions, and various bits that it’s expecting. Kind of annoying that the system utils cannot grab these kinds of images, but in the end we got there.

Naturally, Jaguar has to be run differently as it’s just more tied to older hardware:

qemu-system-ppc \
-machine mac99 \
-cpu G4 -m 1G \
-name "Mac OS X 10.2" \
-hda "macosx_6gb.vmdk" \
-cdrom "OSX_Jaguar_10.2-disc1.iso" \
-device pci-ohci,id=usb1 \
-device usb-mouse,bus=usb1.0 \
-device usb-kbd,bus=usb-bus.0 \
-device usb-audio,bus=usb1.0,audiodev=audio \
-audiodev id=audio,driver=coreaudio \
-device sungem,netdev=network \
-netdev id=network,type=user \
-no-reboot \
-accel tcg \
-boot d

The next catch is that the diskutil just hangs partitioning the hard disk. I’ve no idea why.

So, the solution is to boot back into Tiger, add a second disk, partition it there, and then use that disk in the Jaguar boot. After that it installs just fine. I enabled the sound and network just to setup NTP so at least my image isn’t too stuck in 2002.

Oh, one trick I found out decades too late, is that you can cloverQ the named registration, so you don’t have to make up bogus phone numbers and a semi valid mailing address. I didn’t know is that, it’ll just kick you to the account creation screen, and you are good to go!

After that it’s just a matter of running the 10.2.8 combination patch, to bring the VM up to 10.2.8

From there the final hurdel is to create a RAW disk image to transfer the Tiger diskutil ‘disk image’ to. This way you can easily mount the RAW image by renaming the extension to .dmg and OS X (thankfully) still supprots HFS+ so you can simply use finder or ‘cp’ to copy off the compressed disk image onto a USB drive, and now we are ready to image the PowerBook using our updated OS X Jaguar!

The USB betrayal

Naturally, the Tiger installer refused to mount USB.

Because of course it did.

The final workaround

So instead:

1. Repartition internal disk
   • small staging partition (~4GB)
   • main target partition (remainder of the disk)
2. Install Tiger (again)
3. Copy 10.2.8.dmg to staging partition
4. Boot Tiger installer
5. Use Disk Utility → Restore image onto main partition

And finally…

Success

Jaguar 10.2.8.

On a machine that absolutely refused to run 10.2.0.

With Office 2004, because why not.

Lessons learned

• Early OS X is tightly hardware-bound, not just “older”
• Kernel panics are often symptoms, not causes
• FireWire was innocent (this time)
• USB support in installers was… optimistic

And most importantly:

Just because you can reconstruct a historically accurate install pipeline via emulation and disk imaging…
doesn’t mean you should.

The obvious solution (that I ignored)

A single FireWire cable.

Target Disk Mode.

Done in 20 minutes, by using my B&W G3 PowerMac that is currently running Windows NT, but it wouldn’t matter as I could just hold option and select the FireWire target disk to boot to/from as it’ll happily boot/install 10.2.0 without a hitch. It being a G3 makes no difference as the same kernel works on G3/G4 processors.

But where’s the fun in that?

For those brave enough to get to the end of the post, I uploaded all my Jaguar images onto archive.org. I’m sure it’s been preserved before, but since I was in the mood, I also uploaded Office 2004.

It appears that up until just now we did not have archived copy of MS Word 6.0 for PPC. There were copies floating for Alpha and MIPS, for example https://archive.org/details/ms-word60-nt. However PPC version was nowhere to be found…

Until Term24 pointed me to this eBay auction:

Since it clearly said PowerPC on the box I got it… and here it is:

Now thanks to Rairii you can enjoy it on a PowerMac or WII!

Download ISO or RAR

First, I have to say it works incredibly well!

The biggest gotcha seems to be that the MSDE/Visual C++ 4.0 studio crashes. And pinball doesn’t work. Very possible some issue with the dingus PowerMac emulator.

For anyone wanting to follow along, I put the CD-ROM Image on archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/nt40wks-en_grackle_0.05

Along with everything needed for dingusppc:

https://archive.org/details/dingusppc

And I run it simply run it as:

dingusppc.exe -r -m imacg3 -b imacboot.u3 --rambank1_size=128 --hdd_img=2000.disk --cdr_img=nt40wks-en_grackle_0.05.iso

I did add some quality-of-life updates including:

• Service Pack 2 for Windows NT
• Internet Explorer 3.0
• Wx86 (run limited x86 binaries on PowerPC)
• Info Zip/Unzip
• Neko 98
• DooM
• Neko Project II 
• Command line Visual C++ 4.0

I’ve tried to port MAME 0.36 & Fallout1-RE, but both I’m having some DirectX issues. I’m honestly surprised MAME links. It’s getting harder and harder to find those old win32 update packages for MAME. Not sure anyone saved them?

Windows NT 3.51

And as a bonus, for those wanting 3.51, I’ve also setup a CD-ROM with SP5:

Windows NT 3.51 Workstation for PowerPC with maciNTosh/grackle 0.05

Installation is about the same, just use the 3.x framebuffer driver.

Patreon

I also want to give a huge thanks to the fine folks over on my Patreon for helping to finance stuff like this:

With any luck, it’ll get me to a native experience, and allow for some debugging!

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!

On the back of the unit there is a video out port, so you can hook up an external monitor, and now you have a chunky G5.. minmaxie.

Sadly the OS was a bit messed up, and had a bunch of user files, and I just wanted to do a fresh install. And the hard disk was LOUD and slow. Naturally I thought I’d install a SSD. I had forgotten what amazing luck I had with the Grandpa G5 back in the day, and did I just get lucky with that?

First I got this super cheap 2-Power SSD.

Of course it didn’t work, nothing shows up at all.

I had this fancy Kingston SSD, surely it’ll work?

NOPE, nothing from that either.

So I went ahead and ordered the cheapest Samsung I could find.

And yeah, whatever it is the Apple SATA controller does, that annoys all the other brands, the Samsung pulled through.

I did get an iMac G5 10.3 restore CD set, but sadly it didn’t want to work with this iMac. However I did get a deal on a boxed copy of OS X Tiger.

And yeah I was able to do a clean install, and patch it up. I’m still impressed that Apple keeps stuff up like the update servers & all the combined patches. I guess one thing worth mentioning is that the WiFi wouldn’t join the home LAN at all, but the 10.4.11 patch fixed that right up.

I should try some much newer Samsung SSD’s to see if it’s just this one generation, or are they just that much better? Also what about NVMe/SSD bridge?

I did want one thing which was KOTOR.

So I looked up eBay, and yeah turns out it’s a collectors thing?

£147!! No way!

I saw this for far less, the Star Wars Mac Pack!

vBut at the flip side had this ominous warning….

I thought I’d just try the disc anyway.. nothing to lose?

and yeah, not only is KOTOR is PPC, but yes it does run on OS X 10.4!

granted it’s on steam, gog and of course available for pretty much anything modern. And sure yeah, it was originally PC/Xbox, but for some odd reason I’m feeling nostalgic for that last gen PPC.

So after basically facing defeat, I thought I’d give Linux on the PS3 another shot. Last time things just didn’t work for some reason, and although I could boot Linux from the USB, I couldn’t get it to partition the hard drive. And running from USB 2.0 is just insanely slow.. Especially when it’s trying to run X11.

I followed the instructions here: psx-place.com.

Having already installed CFW 4.90 Evilnat Cobra 8.4 [CEX] on my PS3, I downgraded to the suggested REBUG_4.81.2_REX_EMER_INIT_PS3UPDAT.PUP version of the firmware.

Loading is a bit weird requiring you to load, then entering safe mode, re-installing, then recovering again.

One silly thing to note, is that although a USB keyboard got me through the majority of this, you ABSOLUTELY NEED a PS3 controller to his the PS button to continue in safe/recovery mode. I ended up buying a new controller for £12 on eBay. Used ones were selling for the comparable price, so why buy something with ick on it? Sadly, this did double my budget to £24.

But rest assured just keep pushing through.

Although my FLASH was clearly re-partitioned, with it not changing as I had expected the recovery boot didn’t work, so I had to jump the instructions, and install REBUG_TOOLBOX_02.03.02.MULTI_.16.pkg and select boot into safe mode from there, and re-apply the firmware.

over and over….

But eventually success!

Finally on enough reboots, I got to the setup screen for a clean system!

Re-installing the toolboox took me to repartitioning the flash (again), powering off, then loading petitboot for NOR flash (well mine is NOR), powering off, then prepping the USB, and this time booting with the ‘use current’ option.

While I had busybox & running from initrd/USB before so far so good, nothing looks different.

HOWEVER:

This time the create_hdd_region.sh actually did what it should do! Excited I rebooted back to ‘gameos’ and checked the system status

I’m not sure why it kept failing before, but this time it did what it should have done. Obviously, I screwed up something before, and I’m not sure what.

Booting back to the USB drive, Red Ribbon booted up in X11, allowing me to run run the installer.

The volumes by default are fine.

It does give the ability to set locale, region, and machine name. I don’t know why but I tried it twice and it failed every time.

So I just hit defaults, just setting input & language to EN-us for American English in Alaska. I mean why not. I gave up on just fighting and just let it go with defaults.

And with that I had the PS3 up and booting!

Sadly it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, I was noticing some important software like m4, unzip, gdb, autoconf/automake/libtool file, htop/ncurses to say a few!

Compiling however lead me to kernel crashes & panics.

Eventually it’ll hard lock.

I speculate its probably my PS3. The optical drive doesn’t work so I’ve never played a game on it, or done anything intensive until compiling software. I did find that disabling the swap space to video ram stopped it from crashing. As a matter of fact I disabled a bunch of things to get back some performance.

In the /etc/rc2.d just rename the S*** to K*** for the following to disable all of this stuff..

K01nmbd K01ps3-eyetoy K01ps3-rsx-swapon K01samba-ad-dc K01xrdp K02smbd K03bluetooth

The other thing was to just plain disable X11. I’m going to ssh across the network, so I don’t need the PS3 hogging my TV:

(live)neozeed@redribbon:~$ cat /etc/X11/default-display-manager
none
(live)neozeed@redribbon:~$

So yeah, not sure why I had goofed this up so bad, but in the end I got what I wanted, a big endian machine on a budget. What is interesting about this Red Ribbon thing, is that the kernel looks 64bit, but it’s all a 32bit userland. I don’t know if it matters so much. The place to get deb’s is long gone, so I guess Id have to find something with source this was based off of to build the missing stuff, or just keep going on, and building from source. I’m find with either, but I don’t need it as a desktop so my motivation is already waning. I can’t imagine even trying to use a 256MB PS3 as a desktop. It’s just pain.

Again I’m not sure why the swap to video ram thing kills the PS3, but I can live with avoiding it.

Thanks to dazzaXx, for the instructions.

There is a LOT of warnings about breaking your system, bricking things, so of course I’m not going to buy something nice, and I found this beauty on eBay

What a beauty! Only £23 with shipping! The way inflation is going its like McDonalds money.

Anyways a mere 3 days later, and it showed up!

The cover promptly fell off, and I was a bit worried. I hooked up the power, and the red light came but but it didn’t turn on. The power switches are these weird sensors, and it looked like the power one was pushed in. I guess its more of an antenna rather than closing a circuit, so I genitally bent it apart, and it sprang to life. There was no video, but it did chirp pretty loudly so I assumed it was working. I figured there was no disk, so I found the process to reset the video (turn on, holding power and it’ll power off. Power on again, and wait for it to do 2 chirps while holding power down, then let go, and it’ll hopefully lower all video to minimal levels on both composite and HDMI. And yeah, it sprang to life!

The PS3 had version 4.50 loaded, and the first step to bringing back otheros was to update to 4.90. The last version that had otheros was 3.16, so sadly it’s long gone.

Updating was pretty uneventval.

But now starts the real fun.

It’s scratched pretty bad, but you can make out it’s a CECHK03.

, meaning it’s NOR type flash. This matters as the launch devices used NAND, and a heck of a lot more too! And of course totally incompatible. So yeah be careful!

So the first thing to do is to patch the flash. And shockingly this is VERY very easy… It’s so scary it’s easy! Just open the browser after you’ve flashed to 4.90 and go to

https://www.ps3toolset.com/bgtoolset/

Yep it’s a web browser exploit that should terrify you.

Using FLASH buffer overflows we’re going to reprogram the FLASH. WOW could you imagine a world where iPhones ran Adobe Flash?

From the web page, it’s a snap to backup the flash to USB, and then you can download and merge the flash patch right from the UI

With the image loaded and merged, we can now re-flash the PS3.

It’s really this easy.

wow.

Now you need to power it off.

Next up is to install the Evilnat CEX 4.90 hacked firmware. It’s pretty simple, much like the production image, it installs from the XMB after copying the file to USB in the appropriate directories. I downloaded “CFW 4.90 Evilnat Cobra 8.4 [CEX].rar“.

And now you are a reboot away into modified OS

There was a bunch of users, and installed games, I removed the users, deleted the games, and formatted the disk. I’m not going to be playing games anyways.

Now it was a bit more things to do.

Partition the flash, and re-program it again with the otheros support. And then now finally you can boot to the BusyBox ramdisk.

I’ll have to touch on this part a bit more, it’s involved, and again you can brick your PS3. If you worry about it, now is the time to do it, as many are being sold effectively as garbage.

For the heck of it, I exploded out an old Red Ribbon ISO, and was able to ‘live image’ boot it from USB.

So this gets me part of the way here.

The next thing to figure out is if I can downgrade the OS to something where I can partition part of the hard drive for Linux. And how to get that installed.

So I’m going to have to leave it here, at least for my usage case I may have to just be happy using the slow USB for the root filesystem. I’m pretty sure when it comes to partitioning the disk you need the lower OS version to do so. Obviously for me I can leave it there if it runs, as I don’t care about playing games on this one anyways.

Which I’m sure won’t be as bad once I turn off X11 and everything ‘nice’ for a user.

Also you probably want to get a PS3 controller, as at any point you need to do a recovery you need to be able to hit the ps3 button. And that’s where I am currently stuck, but not bricked.

Preparing for Windows NT RISC Exhibition for VCFW 2023, I wanted to have Windows NT running on an IBM RS/6000. This was previously covered in this excellent article by Shoutmon as well in this a video by NCommander. However both are missing some crucial information that I had to go through and learn myself the hard way. I hope it will help someone in the future.

Windows NT PowerPC was designed to run on PReP machines. Which of the RS/6000 models are REeP is coincidentally answered by NetBSD/prep supported system models.

Firstly there are “IBM PC” Power Series. Yes IBM PC but with PowerPC CPU, and not to be confused with RS/6000 which is a different IBM product. However the IBM Power Series have equivalent RS/6000 “counterpart” models. WTF IBM.

IBM PC Power Series 440 6015 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7020 40P
IBM PC Power Series 830 6050 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P
IBM PC Power Series 850 6070 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P

There are also other models mentioned by Windows NT 4.0 HCL, namely E20, E30 and F30, and PowerPC ThinkPads. To summarize here is a more definitive list of IBM RS/6000 models supported by Windows NT 4.0:

Model 7020 40P
Model 7248 43P
Model 7043 43P-140 (with a big asterisk)
Model 7024 E20 and E30
Model 7025 F30
ThinkPad 820, 850
ThinkPad 860 (with a big asterisk)

Important: 7043 43P-150 is CHRP and will NOT run NT!
43P-140 = PREP NT OK
43P-150 = CHRP NO NT

If you could pick any RS/6000 machine, the 40P would probably be the most recommended. 40P can also run OS/2 PowerPC, if you are in to this thing.

Unfortunately all I had on hand was 43P-140, which is PReP, but it’s not Power Series based and not supported by NT out of the box. WTF IBM. Also WTF is 7248-43P and 7043-43P. Chances are that you will run in to this as well as 7043 43P-140 are way more popular and easier to acquire than any other hardware listed above. 43P-140 semi regularly pop up on eBay for decent prices.

The main trouble with 43P-140 is that the onboard GPU and NIC will not work with ARC and NT. Yes, you can hack in some generic S3 card. It will work in ARC/NT but not for PROM and AIX. I wasn’t happy. Upon some collaboration with Shoutmon and NCcommander and my own research, I was able to find the one and only graphics card that will work in both the RS/6000 PROM as well as ARC BIOS, AIX and Windows NT. The lucky winner is:

IBM FRU 40H5838 aka GTX110P

Update: It’s been tried, tested and verified to use IBM ROM with a regular/stock S3 Trio64V+. You can download it here and program yourself. It will work with both AIX and NT.

Also I have came across FRU 93H7983 for GTX110P. Not verified.

As for the NIC, there are way more options as it’s not used by PROM, ARC or AIX, just NT. In my case I opted for a standard Etherlink III card.

Windows NT Installation

Once you have the correct hardware bits, NT installation is pretty straightforward with some caveats. You start by booting the ARC 1.51 floppy disk. Then you need to go to Installation and Setup Services, Advanced Installation and then Disk Partition Management Services.

There are 3 types of partitions. Confusing, skipping on creating or trying to merge them in to one partition will not get you far.

• Boot (ARC) Partition – aka PowerPC Boot partition. This is where ARC loader will be copied from the floppy, so you can boot ARC directly from HDD without the floppy disk. Has nothing to do with Windows NT.
• System Partition is a small FAT partition where \os\winnt\osloader.exe will reside.
• OS Partition is a large FAT or NTFS partition that will have \WINNT folder.

First you create the Boot (ARC) Partition and copy data from ARC floppy disk to the ARC Partition on the hard disk. This will allow booting ARC firmware directly from HDD. At this point you may want to remove the floppy disk, reboot, get to SMS and change boot device to HDD.

Secondly go to FAT Data or System Partition. Make it small like 5MB, then answer Yes to System Partition. This will create the partition for osloader.exe. This is an equivalent of arcinst.exe on Alpha and MIPS. Arcinst is not present on PPC.

Note that OSLOADER is on SYSTEMPARTITION. The OSLOADPARTITION is where \WINNT folder is located.

Or you can just select Standard Setup which will do everything for you.

Lastly go back to the main menu and select Run Maintenance Program. Then type cd:\ppc\setupldr. Once Windows NT setup boots, you will have an unpartitioned space left. create the Windows NT partition, preferably as NTFS and continue with install as normal.

Installation on PowerPC ThinkPads, specifically the 860 is covered here.

I was inspired by NCommander’s MinGW to Solaris cross compiler so I thought I’d dig out the one that got me started decades ago, cross compiling to the RS/6000 from Linux some time back in 1993. For this experiment I was able to beg/borrow a copy of /usr/lib & /usr/include from AIX 3.2.5 and wanted to use that as a base. I decided to use GCC 2.7.2.2 and Binutils 2.11.2 as these were old enough t build somewhat easy enough from MinGW/MSYS 1, but I figured they also had the best luck of being able to parse the headers without needing ‘fixinc’.

I was able to build both binutils and GCC with this simple incanation

sh configure --target=ppc-ibm-aix325 --prefix=/aix3

One weird thing was that binutils completely sidestepped ld, so I had to configure that manually like this:

--target=powerpc-ibm-aix --prefix=/aix3

Also ‘eaixppc.c’ didn’t generate properly I had to rebuild binutils from Linux to get it to pick up and build that file, copy that back in to get a working cross linker. Older stuff has some issues with CR/LF from time to time, and sometimes it’s easier to deal with builds from other systems and pluck files as needed.

Surprisingly things built, and transferring the to my Qemu AIX image gave me this fun error:

exec(): 0509-036 Cannot load program /cdrom/demo/hello/hello because of the following errors:
0509-150 Dependent module libc.a(shr.o) could not be loaded.
0509-022 Cannot load module libc.a(shr.o).
0509-026 System error: A file or directory in the path name does not exist.

Surprisingly IBM has a fix!

# export LIBPATH=$LIBPATH:/usr/lib
# /cdrom/demo/hello/hello
hello world, compiled by GCC 2.7.2.2!
#

Amazing.

Of course it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, bigger programs like the ‘87 Infocom interpreter bomb like this:

C:\aix3\demo\infocom>gcc -v -o infocom file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o
gcc version 2.7.2.2
ld -T512 -H512 -btextro -bhalt:4 -bnodelcsect -o infocom /aix3/lib/crt0.o -L/aix3/lib file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o /aix3/lib/libgcc.a -lc /aix3/lib/libgcc.a
ld: section .data [0000000000000000 -> 00000000000007ff] overlaps section .text [0000000000000200 -> 0000000000009b0b]
ld: section .loader [0000000000000000 -> 00000000000014a8] overlaps section .text [0000000000000200 -> 0000000000009b0b]
gcc: Internal compiler error: program ld got fatal signal 1

Initially I thought this was a problem with the GCC Linker, but after copying the objects to Qemu, and linking from there, I found out that the GNAT gcc driver calls the linker in a different manner:

ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o infocom /aix3/lib/crt0.o file.o funcs.o infocom.o init.o input.o interp.o io.o jump.o object.o options.o page.o print.o property.o support.o variable.o term.o /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libc.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a

Reformatted for my cross, but this produces a running executable.

And finally phoon which heavily relies on floating point math:

C:\aix3\demo\phoon>ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o phoon /aix3/lib/crt0.o phoon.o date_parse.o astro.o /aix3/lib/libc.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libm.a
/aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x308):atan2.c: undefined reference to __itrunc' /aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x33c):atan2.c: undefined reference to__itrunc'
/aix3/lib/libm.a(atan2.o)(.pr+0x3c4):atan2.c: undefined reference to `__itrunc'

I thought first I could just tack -lm onto the end. However remembering years ago, linkers ARE position dependent, and on AIX libm must come before libc.

C:\aix3\demo\phoon>make
ld -bpT:0x10000000 -bpD:0x20000000 -btextro -bnodelcsect -o phoon /aix3/lib/crt0.o phoon.o date_parse.o astro.o /aix3/lib/libm.a /aix3/lib/libgcc.a /aix3/lib/libc.a

And yep it runs!

Sadly networking is a bit goofed on 4.3.3, and Im unable to upload more than a few hundred bytes before a stall on the console so slip/ppp would be a bit useless.

Speaking of useless, if anyone is crazy enough, you can follow here: MinGW-AIX325.7z