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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poiihy
macrumors 68020
bunnspecial
macrumors G3
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.
Needs ARC to boot from. Macs have Open Firmware instead. There is next to no software to run on the PPC or MIPS versions. Only the Intel or Alpha flavours are worth bothering with.
Anonymous Freak
macrumors 603
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.
