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

[Natalia Portillo]

Hi Programmingkid,

The link I sent you seems to be cut,
ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/rs6000/technology/spec/

Here is PReP specification 1.1, download srp1_1.exe and just unzip it.
Ignore the independent .ps.Z files, the first one is corrupt.

Also http://remote.org/sven/ppc.html you can find information about the
40p, one specific chrp computer that supports Windows NT.

On 31/07/17 01:47, Programmingkid wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 30, 2017, at 7:49 PM, Natalia Portillo <claunia at claunia.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Programmingkid,
>>
>> You're very very out of the way.
>>
>> First of all you don't need to implement PE support on firmware for
>> Windows NT, on any platform.
>>
>> The firmware for RISC machines was used to load <ARCH>/SETUPLDR in the
>> installation disk or /NTLDR on the system disk. Those, are COFF
>> executables (that afaik, are already supported on OpenBIOS).
>>
>> Second of all, Windows NT is for PReP that in QEMU currently has not
>> been adapted to OpenBIOS at all, still running the archaic and abandoned
>> OHW.
>>
>> And last but not least, you need all the PReP hardware emulated. Last
>> time I checked it was very far from complete. But that was in qemu's 0.7
>> age, so, eons ago.
>>
>> If you want to get WinNT/PPC running on QEMU you should do things in the
>> following order:
>>
>> 1.- Get OpenBIOS running on qemu -M prep
>> 2.- Make OpenBIOS support whatever SETUPLDR expected in Motorola or IBM
>> OpenFirmware implementations
>> 3.- Put the miscellaneous "PC" components from qemu -M pc to qemu -M
>> prep (as PReP is mostly a Pentium 1 motherboard with a PowerPC processor)
>> 4.- See how NT crashes (or works :p)
>>
>> The good side, is that when those 4 steps are done you've done ~90% of
>> what is needed to emulate OS/2-ppc, Solaris 2.5.1 for ppc, and some
>> versions of AIX, and about ~70% of CHRP emulation (sam4x0yy for AmigaOS
>> and efika for MorphOS, those are CHRP computers).
>>
>> Here you got the specifications:
>> ftp://ftp.fit.vutbr.cz/pub/doc/PREP/srp1_001.ps.gz
>>
>> Regards,
>> Natalia Portillo
>>
>> On 30/07/17 17:22, Programmingkid wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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
>>>
> 
> 
> Thank you for all this information. It looks like step one is changing QEMU so the -M prep machine starts OpenBIOS. 
>