Developer Wack0's Project Allows Windows NT 4.0 to Run on Old PowerMacintosh Computers

TapTechNews July 13th news, if you own an older PowerPC-based PowerMacintosh computer, there may now be an unexpected new way to play.

A developer named Wack0 has recently set up the "maciNtosh" project on GitHub, which contains the ARC firmware and its loader that allows you to run Windows NT 4.0 on a PowerMacintosh.

Although Microsoft ported Windows NT 4.0 to the PowerPC architecture years ago, the PowerMacintosh did not use the same firmware required by Windows NT. As far as TapTechNews knows, the PowerPC version of Windows NT only supports IBM and Motorola systems using PowerPC and has never officially supported Apple's PowerPC computers.

The project supports NewWorldPowerMacintosh systems of the Gossamer architecture, that is, using the MPC106 "Grackle" memory controller and PCI host, as well as the "Heathrow" or "Paddington" super I/O chip on the PCI bus.

This means that if you own the following PowerMacintosh computers, you can install the Windows NT 4.0 system according to this project:

iMac G3 (tray type)

PowerMacintosh G3 (blue and white, "Yosemite")

Macintosh PowerBook G3 with copper-colored keyboard ("Lombard")

PowerMacintosh G4 PCI ("Yikes!")

The author said that the ARC firmware can also run on older systems, such as the beige PowerMacintosh G3 and the Macintosh PowerBook G3 series, but these systems do not currently have a boot loader.

Wack0 also admitted that the project is still in a very experimental stage and has only been tested on the Lombard system so far.

In addition, some drivers (such as the Cuda driver) have not been tested on real hardware; and the loader only supports ATI graphics chips, and ATI hardware with an Fcode version lower than 1.69 may have problems.