Has anyone been able to successfully install Windows NT for PowerPC on one of their older PPC Macs? I'm curious to see if it has been done / can be done -- and if so: does it have something akin to Rosetta for transcoding x86 - PPC on the fly?
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Windows NT 4.0 PPC on a Mac - Anyone?
- Thread starter im_to_hyper
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I've not attempted it, but picked up a copy of NT 4.0 a while back specifically for this reason.
I did some internet searching, and as per the interwebz NT 4.0 requires a BIOS to work correctly. Essentially the only PPC computers it will run on are the couple of IBM workstations and Thinkpad laptops that were made in the mid-90s that had PowerPC processors.
I have to admit that I did get really excited when I found the NT 4.0 install disk at Goodwill and saw the words "PowerPC" on the install disk.
I did some internet searching, and as per the interwebz NT 4.0 requires a BIOS to work correctly. Essentially the only PPC computers it will run on are the couple of IBM workstations and Thinkpad laptops that were made in the mid-90s that had PowerPC processors.
I have to admit that I did get really excited when I found the NT 4.0 install disk at Goodwill and saw the words "PowerPC" on the install disk.
NT4 required a PReP reference design machine. IBM and Motorola made compatible machines, Apple (in the dark Spindler days) did not.
As with everyone else - it cannot be done. Wrong firmware/bootloader.
NT for PowerPC was very short-lived, introduced in NT 3.5, discontinued with NT 4.0 SP3. I have it running on my PowerPC ThinkPad, but there just isn't any useful software for it.
One nice bonus, it does run 16-bit x86 software via emulation, appearing completely native. So I do have Microsoft Office 4.1.2 and Internet Explorer 5 running on mine. (The Windows 3.1 version of IE5, not the Windows NT/95 version of IE5.)
Similarly, Mac OS doesn't run on my PowerPC ThinkPad - just the wrong bootloader for Mac OS.
NT for PowerPC was very short-lived, introduced in NT 3.5, discontinued with NT 4.0 SP3. I have it running on my PowerPC ThinkPad, but there just isn't any useful software for it.
One nice bonus, it does run 16-bit x86 software via emulation, appearing completely native. So I do have Microsoft Office 4.1.2 and Internet Explorer 5 running on mine. (The Windows 3.1 version of IE5, not the Windows NT/95 version of IE5.)
Similarly, Mac OS doesn't run on my PowerPC ThinkPad - just the wrong bootloader for Mac OS.