[OpenBIOS] [Qemu-ppc] Windows NT 4.0 for PowerPC

[Programmingkid]

> On Jul 30, 2017, at 11:25 AM, Mark Cave-Ayland <mark.cave-ayland at ilande.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> On 28/07/17 02:27, Programmingkid wrote:
> 
>>> On Jul 27, 2017, at 12:36 PM, Răzvan Corneliu C.R. VILT <razvan.vilt at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Andrei Warkentin managed to get as far as booting veneer.exe but it crashes at the NT Kernel using his prephv build (https://github.com/andreiw/prephv/).
>>> 
>>> OpenBIOS cannot load PE Images and I believe that even if PE loading was added to it, it wouldn't help since you also have some special >> requirements for little endian booting and some for the load-base.
> 
> I'd be very interested to discuss some of this over on the OpenBIOS
> mailing list - writing a PE driver should be fairly simple these days.
> 
>>> Veneer.exe is basically an emulator for the ARC Firmware needed by the NT OSLoader.exe on top of the openfirmware environment.
>>> 
>>> About one year ago I did some digging into this documented on Artyom's blog.
>>> http://tyom.blogspot.ro/2014/09/open-firmware-for-qemu-system-ppc-m-prep.html
>>> 
>>> If you want, you can write a minimal MZ-PE Loader in Forth and we'll take it from there.
> 
> All of the other OpenBIOS loaders are written in C, so I don't see why
> the same couldn't be done for MZ-PE, especially as most people find that
> considerably easier than Forth.
> 
> 
> ATB,
> 
> Mark.

Hi Mark. I was just thinking about asking you about this. It would be fun to make Windows NT 4.0 PowerPC work in QEMU. For anyone who is interested I found this page on the PE format. It might be helpful: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms680547(v=vs.85).aspx