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dingusdev / dingusppc

An experimental emulator
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Emulating winnt and os/2 powerpc #36

Open wyf180 opened 1 year ago

wyf180 commented 1 year ago

When will this emulator emulating nt3/4 and os/2 powerpc?These systems was transported to powerpc version of ThinkPad and still can't emulate by qemu until today .

dingusdev commented 1 year ago

While MacOS and BeOS rely on CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Platform), NT 3/4 and OS/2 rely on PREP (PowerPC Reference Platform). I think the first major hurdle is getting the ROMs for the machines these would have run on, of which I don't think any dumps are available.

NT 3/4 is the more likely to be emulated. It can run on a wider variety of hardware like the Motorola Atlas 603/604, which has a manual available, and RS/6000 40p (which doesn't seem to be documented).

OS/2, by contrast, seems to only be supported by the IBM Personal Power Series, of which not much documentation seems to exist. The server equivalents of these computers do have a long manual available (~1,000 pages).

At the least, the hardware on these is somewhat closer to that of x86 PCs (i.e. more off-the-shelf hardware) and documentation for which is probably easier to find, but memory maps for the motherboards used by these PowerPC machines will still be somewhat enigmatic.

Lethaltail commented 3 months ago

This might have been discussed outside of the issue, but there is a ROM dump of the RS/6000 40p up on the Internet Archive. Not sure if any documentation has surfaced, though.