This was previously well covered by Gunkies and Neozeed, however as almost a decade passed, some improvements could be made and annoyances fixed.

Firstly NT MIPS now works in 1280×1024 resolution under QEMU. It previously had issues with mouse tracking, but this is now fixed. So the new image has a higher resolution.

Secondly the old images were made with FAT filesystem which I didn’t like too much. The reason for that is the infamous RISC NT osloader needs to be placed on a FAT partition. Then, if NT is installed on a second NTFS partition the default drive will be D:\, C:\ being the just the osloader drive. This was super annoying in practice. So a common procedure was to just have one FAT partition for both osloader and winnt. I have fixed it by supplying a pre-partitioned disk and specified the second partition for osloader and the first for NT.

Also I only had just a bare/vanilla image with no additional software installed. The new image includes most of the available apps, including IE3, some editors, Reskit and Visual Studio.

Lastly I wanted to figure out all the right settings and flags for qemu as they were discrepancies between different sources and nothing seem to work smoothly. The correct flags seem to be:

qemu-system-mips64el -hda nt4.qcow2 -M magnum -global ds1225y.filename=nvram -L . -rtc "base=1995-07-08T11:12:13,clock=vm" -nic user,model=dp83932

The -rtc flag is not really needed if you are ok with having the current date in the guest.

Thanks to Neozeed for figuring out the network settings! Unfortunately the old/legacy -net nic -net user is no longer working while the new -device doesn’t like dp83932. The documentation was quite helpful.

Thanks to reader Mark for pointing out the correct NVRAM settings! See comments below.

The new image with all the apps preinstalled is here and a plain “vanilla” here.

Curiously this now works right out of the box on QEMU 6.1 and is pretty smooth and stable compared to what it was before. Good job QEMU team and thank you! Just in case I still keep the old binaries for Windows made by Neozeed here.

Update: I built Yori for NT MIPS! You can download here!

• Version 0.14.1 (commit)
• virtio-blk: fail unaligned requests (commit)
• qed: Fix consistency check on 32-bit hosts (commit)
• exit if -drive specified is invalid instead of ignoring the “wrong” -drive (commit)
• vhost: fix dirty page handling (commit)
• Do not delete BlockDriverState when deleting the drive (commit)
• vnc: tight: Fix crash after 2GB of output (commit)
• lan9118: Ignore write to MAC_VLAN1 register (commit)
• Don’t allow multiwrites against a block device without underlying medium (commit)
• lsi53c895a: add support for ABORT messages (commit)
• virtio-pci: fix bus master work around on load (commit)
• fix applesmc REV key (commit)
• rbd: don’t link with -lcrypto (commit)
• net: Add the missing option declaration of “vhostforce” (commit)
• lsi53c895a: Update dnad when skipping MSGOUT bytes (commit)
• Revert “prep: Disable second IDE channel, as long as ISA IDE emulation doesn’t support same irq for both channels” (commit)
• isa-bus: Remove bogus IRQ sharing check (commit)
• virtio-net: Fix lduw_p() pointer argument of wrong size (commit)
• hw/sd.c: Add missing state change for SD_STATUS, SEND_NUM_WR_BLOCKS (commit)
• vnc: Fix fatal crash with vnc reverse mode (commit)
• qemu-char: Check for missing backend name (commit)

I’ve also included my patches to enable ctrl+alt+d for a quick control alt delete, ctrl+alt+r for reset, and the ISA Cirrus adapter.

As always, I’ll have win32 builds up in the usual spot.  i386/x86_64 and everything else.  I’ve tested these on Windows 7 x86_64, and they should work on XP & Vista i386 as well.

Also I’ve switched this to 7zip to save space.