Today we will be looking at how to run Windows NT 4 for MIPS on the Qemu emulator. I didn’t really have a reason to try this but it seemed like a fun weekend project. In the process I’ve learned a lot about how some systems booted, got even more angry about how awful BIOS boot was on PC, and probably found a 25 year old bug in the ARC boot firmware. While I’m sure all MIPS server admins of yore knew about this I could not find any documentation on the problem, nor any solution to it. I suspect that most people playing with this today are totally fine installing Windows NT on a FAT partition. It is however very puzzling to me that this problem exists at all. What am I talking about? Read on!
I find the non-x86 versions from the early days of Windows NT fascinating, and I definitely want to buy some old hardware at some point to run on of them on bare metal. In the meantime, this is a nice substitute.
I don’t think I would have the patience to get through that whole process. Interesting read, though!
Agreed. I downloaded and ran the prepared image. The pwd is password btw. It runs faster in emulation on my i7 that it would ever have on bare metal 😀
I wonder how was the market share of this version in its heyday.
Not too much as I recall. I think the Alpha version did a bit better. I worked at a company that used it heavily and used NT/Alpha machines in the core product. Oh why does the web not look like this anymore?
https://web.archive.org/web/20140910110843/http://www.alphalinux.org/
I did have the patience to try. Did it on a Mac as well. Had to install Homebrew first, which ate up a few GBs of space. First reboot after installation froze and then took down the system. Restarting Qemu after rebooting ended up in another frozen system. I gave up after that.
> I don’t think I would have the patience to get through that whole process.
I did go through the entire process. And I put the screen recording on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQMfGTMeeaA