Emulating winnt and os/2 powerpc

[wyf180]

When will this emulator emulating nt3/4 and os/2 powerpc?These systems was transported to powerpc version of ThinkPad and still can't emulate by qemu until today .

[dingusdev]

While MacOS and BeOS rely on CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform), NT 3/4 and OS/2 rely on PREP (PowerPC Reference Platform). I think the first major hurdle is getting the ROMs for the machines these would have run on, of which I don't think any dumps are available.

NT 3/4 is the more likely to be emulated. It can run on a wider variety of hardware like the Motorola Atlas 603/604, which has a manual available, and RS/6000 40p (which doesn't seem to be documented).

OS/2, by contrast, seems to only be supported by the IBM Personal Power Series, of which not much documentation seems to exist. The server equivalents of these computers do have a long manual available (~1,000 pages).

At the least, the hardware on these is somewhat closer to that of x86 PCs (i.e. more off-the-shelf hardware) and documentation for which is probably easier to find, but memory maps for the motherboards used by these PowerPC machines will still be somewhat enigmatic.

[Lethaltail]

This might have been discussed outside of the issue, but there is a ROM dump of the RS/6000 40p up on the Internet Archive. Not sure if any documentation has surfaced, though.

[memsom]

Someone just ported the bootloader to Mac, so it might now be possible to use it under emulation, assuming hardware support is there.

[MaddTheSane]

Looks like the new boot loader is only for New-World Macs. As DingusPPC is currently targeting Old-World machines, more work would need to be done on the boot loader or to DingusPPC to emulate New-World Macs.

Edit: Oh, they mentioned that the G3 Beige as maybe working.

[joevt]

The new dingusppc fork created for NT adds a Bondi Blue iMac machine type.
https://github.com/Wack0/dingusppc-nt
My fork can boot B&W G3 to Mac OS 8.5 (though I have some stuff to commit still).

[Wack0]

regarding dingusppc-nt, hopefully the little endian support (and other changes like IDE emulation improvements that NT's driver requires, and fixing tlbie instruction properly (not the hacky solution i put in my tree) so NT memory mapped files can work), can eventually be fixed up into a shape suitable for merging in. this probably won't be done by me, (for example, all DMA-related code would need to be refactored for correctness there) but hopefully the initial implementation can help anyone wanting to work on something better.

(also, it broke old world systems booting for some reason, i have no idea why)