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Wack0 / maciNTosh

PowerPC Windows NT ported to Power Macintosh systems
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Will it support Power Macintosh with PowerPC 601 processor in the future? #21

Open Alpa7000 opened 1 month ago

Alpa7000 commented 1 month ago

Since NT 3.5 for PowerPC can only run on PowerPC 601 processor, it's necessary to have support Power Macintosh with PowerPC 601 processor.

Compgeke commented 1 month ago

601 macs are "Old World" firmware machines. It'd require a re-write of everything to support that.

Wack0 commented 1 month ago

it would require a port of the ARC firmware to the old chipset and a new HAL and some drivers.

I have an idea as to how old world systems boot, you just write a raw image to the drive and set it up in the partition table. The easiest to support would be Gossamer old world systems, then when I have something working on old world I can move to Bandit, the main issue there is I don't have a bandit system and I'm not sure how the Bandit PCI bus little endian mode works exactly, whether it's the same as Grackle's or it has some slight differences that could affect drivers/etc.

There's a rumour of the PowerPC 601 systems having had an unreleased official port of NT 3.5, so I guess the nubus systems can properly switch endianness too, although how that's supposed to work I'd have no idea, probably whatever random bit in the memory controller or whatever for that is absolutely not used by any released software.

NJRoadfan commented 1 month ago

The Powermac 7500 came with a 601 CPU card, so at least Old World PCI OpenFirmware TNT/PowerSurge platform machines should support it.