Windows NT on IBM RS/6000 – Definitive Guide

Posted on August 30, 2023 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

Preparing for Windows NT RISC Exhibition for VCFW 2023, I wanted to have Windows NT running on an IBM RS/6000. This was previously covered in this excellent article by Shoutmon as well in this a video by NCommander. However both are missing some crucial information that I had to go through and learn myself the hard way. I hope it will help someone in the future.

Windows NT PowerPC was designed to run on PReP machines. Which of the RS/6000 models are REeP is coincidentally answered by NetBSD/prep supported system models.

Firstly there are “IBM PC” Power Series. Yes IBM PC but with PowerPC CPU, and not to be confused with RS/6000 which is a different IBM product. However the IBM Power Series have equivalent RS/6000 “counterpart” models. WTF IBM.

IBM PC Power Series 440 6015 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7020 40P IBM PC Power Series 830 6050 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P IBM PC Power Series 850 6070 == IBM RS/6000 Model 7248 43P

There are also other models mentioned by Windows NT 4.0 HCL, namely E20, E30 and F30, and PowerPC ThinkPads. To summarize here is a more definitive list of IBM RS/6000 models supported by Windows NT 4.0:

Model 7020 40P
Model 7248 43P Model 7043 43P-140 (with a big asterisk) Model 7024 E20 and E30 Model 7025 F30 ThinkPad 820, 850 ThinkPad 860 (with a big asterisk)

⚠️ Important: 7043 43P-150 is CHRP and will NOT run NT!
43P-140 = PREP NT OK 43P-150 = CHRP NO NT

If you could pick any RS/6000 machine, the 40P would probably be the most recommended. 40P can also run OS/2 PowerPC, if you are in to this thing.

Unfortunately all I had on hand was 43P-140, which is PReP, but it’s not Power Series based and not supported by NT out of the box. WTF IBM. Also WTF is 7248-43P and 7043-43P. Chances are that you will run in to this as well as 7043 43P-140 are way more popular and easier to acquire than any other hardware listed above. 43P-140 semi regularly pop up on eBay for decent prices.

The main trouble with 43P-140 is that the onboard GPU and NIC will not work with ARC and NT. Yes, you can hack in some generic S3 card. It will work in ARC/NT but not for PROM and AIX. I wasn’t happy. Upon some collaboration with Shoutmon and NCcommander and my own research, I was able to find the one and only graphics card that will work in both the RS/6000 PROM as well as ARC BIOS, AIX and Windows NT. The lucky winner is:

IBM FRU 40H5838 aka GTX110P

Update: It’s been tried, tested and verified to use IBM ROM with a regular/stock S3 Trio64V+. You can download it here and program yourself. It will work with both AIX and NT.

Also I have came across FRU 93H7983 for GTX110P. Not verified.

As for the NIC, there are way more options as it’s not used by PROM, ARC or AIX, just NT. In my case I opted for a standard Etherlink III card.

Windows NT Installation

Once you have the correct hardware bits, NT installation is pretty straightforward with some caveats. You start by booting the ARC 1.51 floppy disk. Then you need to go to Installation and Setup Services, Advanced Installation and then Disk Partition Management Services.

There are 3 types of partitions. Confusing, skipping on creating or trying to merge them in to one partition will not get you far.

Boot (ARC) Partition – aka PowerPC Boot partition. This is where ARC loader will be copied from the floppy, so you can boot ARC directly from HDD without the floppy disk. Has nothing to do with Windows NT.
System Partition is a small FAT partition where \os\winnt\osloader.exe will reside.
OS Partition is a large FAT or NTFS partition that will have \WINNT folder.

First you create the Boot (ARC) Partition and copy data from ARC floppy disk to the ARC Partition on the hard disk. This will allow booting ARC firmware directly from HDD. At this point you may want to remove the floppy disk, reboot, get to SMS and change boot device to HDD.

Secondly go to FAT Data or System Partition. Make it small like 5MB, then answer Yes to System Partition. This will create the partition for osloader.exe. This is an equivalent of arcinst.exe on Alpha and MIPS. Arcinst is not present on PPC.

Note that OSLOADER is on SYSTEMPARTITION. The OSLOADPARTITION is where \WINNT folder is located.

Or you can just select Standard Setup which will do everything for you.

Lastly go back to the main menu and select Run Maintenance Program. Then type cd:\ppc\setupldr. Once Windows NT setup boots, you will have an unpartitioned space left. create the Windows NT partition, preferably as NTFS and continue with install as normal.

Installation on PowerPC ThinkPads, specifically the 860 is covered here.

Slacktivisim + IA

Posted on August 24, 2023 by neozeed

Can You Chip In?

I guess not surprising, Internet Archive is under fire yet again, and needs help. Again.

For more than two and a half decades, we have collected, preserved, and shared our digital cultural artifacts. Thanks to the generosity of our patrons, the Internet Archive has grown from a small preservation project into a vast library that serves millions of people each year. Our work has impacted the lives of so many of our users who value free and open access to information.

From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people. Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That’s why we don’t charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects.

If you can’t imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million books and texts, and 14 million audio recordings.

If you find our site useful, please chip in! Your support will help us build the web we deserve.

Thank you for joining me.

Brewster Kahle
Founder & Digital Librarian

And how can I support them by doing not much? BING!

Turns out that BING / Edge(ium) has this point thing for using it, and a tip jar to get Microsoft to fund IA. Every 1,000 points you tip will be $1 in real life?

Maybe it helps, I don’t know, I’d like to think it does. I figure 10,000 points let’s me feel like I’ve done something.

Yay slacktivisim.

Oh, and follow me on archive.org as neozeede! I try to upload strange and interesting things as I find them. Or remember to find them.

Peter’s Sun3 Zoo (restored)

Posted on August 7, 2023 by neozeed

Sometimes there is a great seemingly timeless resource on the internet, and you pull from it from time to time, make giant compilations, but never really reach out to the creator, or just archive the entire thing.

Then the unspeakable happens and it just up’s and disappears.

I never reached out to Peter Koch, to even thank him for preserving so much, or to apologise for not preserving his site, for some reason it felt like someone else would have done a better job. But then sometimes you find out you were that one person, and you didn’t do it, so you didn’t do it.

I don’t know the story, but it seems Peter did know that it was coming to and end.

May 01 2010 – Ending

Dear friends!

I have to give up my collection.

So if you’re interested in some pieces or know someone who might, please send me an e-mail.
Peter – Sun3 Zoo

So I’ll put in a call for help for the world at wide? Did anyone save anything more comprehensive than what was in archive.org, or what was in the ‘Titor Special‘?

In the meantime, the site has a new owner, and it’s been restored.

Peter’s Sun3 Zoo – sun3zoo.de

If anyone has any stories or anything preserved it’d be appreciated. There was at least a few parties, and party3, with party2 missing.

Thanks.

Building MS-DOS 2.11

Posted on August 6, 2023 by neozeed

I thought I’d slap together some github thing with MS-DOS 2.11 that’s been made buildable thanks to a whole host of other smart people. The default stuff out there expects you to build it under MS-DOS using the long obsoleted ‘append’ utility which can add directories to a search path. Instead I created a bunch of makefiles that take advantage of MS-DOS Player, and let you build from Windows.

dos211: just the MS-DOS 2.11 sources, I re-aranged stuff and made it (slightly) easier to rebuild on Windows. (github.com)

building should be somewhat straightforward, assuming you have the ms-dos player in your path. JUST MAKE SURE YOU UNZIP as TEXT mode. If you are getting a million errors you probably have them in github’s favourite unix mode.

D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>..\tools\make
msdos ..\tools\masm ibmbio.asm ibmbio.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83


Warning Severe
Errors  Errors
0       0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysimes.asm sysimes.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83


Warning Severe
Errors  Errors
0       0
msdos ..\tools\masm sysinit.asm sysinit.obj NUL NUL
The Microsoft MACRO Assembler , Version 1.25
 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1981,82,83

DOSSYM in Pass 2

Warning Severe
Errors  Errors
0       0
msdos ..\tools\LINK IBMBIO+SYSINIT+SYSIMES;

   Microsoft Object Linker V2.00
(C) Copyright 1982 by Microsoft Inc.

Warning: No STACK segment

There was 1 error detected.
msdos ..\tools\exe2bin.exe IBMBIO IBMBIO.COM < 70.TXT
Fix-ups needed - base segment (hex): 70
del -f ibmbio.obj    sysimes.obj   sysinit.obj ibmbio.exe

D:\temp\dos211-main\bios>

As an example building the bios by running make. For the impatiend you can download dos211.zip, which includes a bootable 360kb disk image, and a 32Mb vmdk!

Come meet Tenox & check out the NT RISC collection over at VCF

Posted on August 5, 2023 by neozeed

Billed as “NT RISC: Windows NT on RISC machines. Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, Itanium.”, the exhibit demonstrates a lot of work in sourcing & restoring the machines. The exhibit features:

DEC AXPpc 150 “Jensen” running Windows NT 3.1 AXP
DEC PWS 500 “Miata”, running W2K axp64 (64bit!)
DEC UDB “Multia”, running NT 3.51 AXP
Motorola PowerStack, 4unning NT 4.0 PPC
Motorola VME 1600 running NT 4.0 PPC
NetPower Fast MP NT 4.0 running NT 4.0 MIPS
DeskStation Tyne, running NT 4.0 MIPS
DeskStation Raptor Reflex

And yes, we’ve even had a few celebs pass by!

Dave Plummer and Chris Walker (ex-Microsoft)

Tenox will be there all day Saturday at the The Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA 94043.

H’es located at tables 37-38, exhibit 16.

Update: big thanks to @amarioguy and @ryaxnb for help during the exhibit!

OS/2 2.0 Technical Library on archive.org

Posted on August 5, 2023 by neozeed

It’s certainly one of those things that I’m surprised I didn’t buy when it was current, but glad binipafruc scanned the set.

PDF’s look nice on an iPad, but maybe that’s me being old.

It’s crazy that once uppon a time, corporations thought developer documentation was a revenue stream to their upstart Operating System. It went as well as you can imagine it would.

Joining NT 4 to a SAMBA Domain Controller

Posted on July 24, 2023 by neozeed

or the Unbridled rage of living on the trailing edge.

I hosted a Porting Party last where where I setup my Dec Alpha as a terminal server allowing people from all over the world to connect in and cross compile software for the 64bit version of Windows for the Dec Alpha. While many problems were overcome, and many more remain, I have to say the most annoying thing was joining a domain hosted by a SAMBA server.

In my mind, I though the easiest way to get files in & out of the Alpha was not to use something like IIS/FTP where it would probably lead to end-less issues with text/binary/active/passive modes, but rather I should rent a VPS, install the OS default SAMBA and just map drives. The benefit of the VPS is that it has a public address, so no NAT is required. The VPS had an option for either CentOS (no) or Debian 10. I went with the Debian, and did an in place upgrade to 11, then 12. Nothing special.

I’d never actually used SAMBA as a domain controller before, but I thought this would be a fun experiment. So the idea is then that the VPS running SAMBA is the Domain Controller, and my Alpha joins it as a member server. Everyone else can use Windows or any SAMBA client and map drives, and then copy files to the VPS, and then copy back and forth from the Alpha to the VPS. This part worked fine.

What didn’t work was SAMBA version 4.

I had come up with this config, based on the fragments of the default config, and and hints from samba.org.

[global]
    netbios name = PDC
    passdb backend = tdbsam
    server max protocol = NT1
    username map = /usr/local/samba/etc/username.map
    workgroup = ALPHAPARTY
    server string = Samba Server
    security = user
    hosts allow = 127.0.0.1, <<<peoples networks...>>>
    load printers = yes
    log file = /usr/local/samba/var/log.%m
    max log size = 50
    passdb backend = tdbsam
    local master = yes
    os level = 33
    domain master = yes
    preferred master = yes
    domain logons = yes
    wins support = yes
    dns proxy = no
    add user script = /usr/sbin/useradd %u
    add group script = /usr/sbin/groupadd %g
    add machine script = /usr/sbin/adduser -n -g machines -c Machine -d /dev/null -s /bin/false %u
    delete user script = /usr/sbin/userdel %u
    delete user from group script = /usr/sbin/deluser %u %g
    delete group script = /usr/sbin/groupdel %g
[homes]
    comment = Home Directories
    browseable = no
    writable = yes
[printers]
    comment = All Printers
    path = /usr/spool/samba
    browseable = no
    guest ok = no
    writable = no
    printable = yes
[public]
    comment = share for everyone
    path = /public
    public = yes
    writable = yes
    printable = no
    creaet mask = 0777

I had endless issues with the machine account not being either created correctly or not being authenticated. I tried manually creating it, to no avail. No matter what I tried it didn’t work.

Working with NT 4.0 must be depreciated or something but no matter what I tried IT JUST DIDN’T WORK.

Feeling outraged, I purged the old Samba, downloaded the source code to 3.6.25, built that, and using the same configuration I had tried to put together, it just worked.

Adding users was somewhat straight forward:


useradd -M -s /bin/bash neozeed
passwd neozeed
/usr/local/samba/bin/smbpasswd -a neozeed
/usr/local/samba/bin/smbpasswd -e neozeed
mkdir /home/neozeed
chown neozeed /home/neozeed/

Creating both a Linux user & directory, and the SAMBA credentials. On the terminal server, all that remains was assigning a local home directory & profile directories, as you really don’t want those over the WAN.

I have no idea if this is a warning to others, or whatever the larger issue is.

Porting Party II

At any rate I’ll be running another porting party this coming weekend. I can host cross compiling fine, but we need people with the 64bit Whistler beta installed to test. The best way to get details is over on discord. Lately the IRC bridge is down more than it’s up, and I can’t effectively send out passwords & get your network block to allow access to the RDP, since I’m not going to open up worldwide access to a Windows NT 4.0 SP5 machine.

So for anyone interested in porting their C/C++ to either the 32bit Alpha Windows, or 64bit Alpha Windows come join us on discord!

I’ll fire up the Alpha on Friday afternoon GMT and expect the event to run all weekend!

Monitoring temperature of ancient hardware

Posted on July 20, 2023 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox)

I’m preparing a Windows NT RISC exhibition for VCF West 2023. While the CHM building is air conditioned, it’s far far from ideal and we have a rather hot summer. Most of the vintage machines lack CPU power management. Some, such as Alphas, are notorious for overheating. Despite installing modern fans and heatsinks, this still makes me uneasy. I wanted to come up with some thermal monitoring system to see whats going on in real time. Maybe alert or shut down if things go out of hand.

For a while now I been thinking about using Arduino with a thermistor. It would read the temperature sensor and send the data via serial port to the host. This should universally work for most old computers, as they commonly have serial ports. However, upon some prototyping I realized that between custom pcb/wiring, power requirements and TTL to RS232 converter, the whole thing was becoming a little too complicated for what I really wanted. Fortunately I came across a rather ingenious solution – someone sells this item on eBay:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/231213936167

It’s basically a thermal probe with RS232 interface, emitting a plain text ASCII string output. No drivers or software required. They are a little bit pricey. Perhaps readers can find a cheaper version. However it’s absolutely a perfect solution for what I really wanted. Note that the seller can make shorter cables on request. The default 3m is insanely long for this purpose.

With help of some thermal glue, installed the probe in to the CPU heat sink and routed the cable to a COM port in the back.

Above pictures are from Multia and PWS.

You can simply read the temperature as an ASCII string from the COM port:

However since this is a prestigious event I wanted something fancier. Also a simple terminal can’t really tell when was the data received and therefore is current. I banged out a simple Win32 app to have something nice on the screen:

If there is no update from serial port in last 10 seconds, “no data” will be shown. The text label changes color if the temperature goes over a threshold to warn if things are getting too hot.

I even added a thermal shutdown, if it goes over a critical value. However this only works on Windows 2000 and above. Earlier Windows NT versions lacked ACPI HAL support to invoke power down. Fortunately this will work nicely for 2210 build on PWS 500 and Windows XP on Itanium!

After VCF I’ll make something for Unix and VMS as well. Perhaps also a service / daemon version that can run in the background and doesn’t require GUI.

Source code and binaries: https://github.com/tenox7/readtemp

Connecting NT 4.0 clients to a SAMBA 4.17.9-Debian server

Posted on July 16, 2023 by neozeed

This is a brief but annoying thing.

I want to have an internet server that people can map drives to, for copying data in/out for the upcoming Dec Alpha AXP64 building extravaganza! I wan tot use my Dec Alpha for building since it’s got a gigabyte of RAM. One of the hard parts is that NT 4 is beyond obsolete, and twice as much on the DEC Alpha. I was figuring renting a VPS, and using it as a SAMBA server so people can simply map a drive from home, copy files to the VPS, terminal server to the Alpha, and copy files to & from the internet. Easy right?!

I was non stop getting this error:

System error 1326 has occurred.

Login failure: unknown user name or bad password.

Except I knew the username & password was correct.

The key part involved a few parameters to get it working. Although many people reported success by simply setting the protocol level, for me I had to set that and the lanman/ntlm auth to yes. Trying to enable NT4 compatible encryption didn’t work either.

[global]
   workgroup = WORKGROUP
   server min protocol = NT1
   client min protocol = NT1
   lanman auth=yes
   ntlm auth=yes

I’m not sure if it’s all that helpful to the world at large, or if it’s just super common knowledge, but I haven’t setup SAMBA in like forever. I guess I could go one further and join it to the domain but that doesn’t seem like it’s all that needed or all that smart.

Installing Windows XP on a Lenovo S20

Posted on July 15, 2023 by neozeed

This was a silly side project that got out of hand, building an XP physical machine to run some old software. Over in the UK, there is this fantastical store, CeX that sells all kinds of retro crap, often for cheap. Normally I wouldn’t care but with pc titles going from £0.50 to £3 it seemed like some fun 1990’s computing value right there!

I had been slowly amassing a collection of bargain bin, garbage tier games ‘from back in the day’ and while I had been running a few on VMware on Windows 10, with that sub £5 copy of Windows XP home, it sadly didn’t help with so many games being copy protected.

I would need a physical machine, and that is where this hunk of junk the S20 fell into place.

When it comes to Windows XP, the S20 is no slouch. With 12GB of RAM, a Nehalem 3Ghz Xeon W3550 @3Ghz, 2x 120GB SSD drives, and a functional optical disk, this makes for a great system. Rounding out the absurdity is a Nvidia Quadro 4000 with 2GB of VRAM. I’m pretty sure when XP was new I was still using a PII 233Mhz with 256Mb of RAM. So yeah, this is way overkill.

Since all the disks are SATA, the default install CD won’t work. As a matter of fact, not much works on the retail CD-ROM. I tried to use rufus but…

Setup cannot find the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA).

I got this strange error from the USB stick. It appears after some searching it’s seeing the CD-ROM and trying to load the rest of the installer from there. Further searches said don’t use Rufus, instead use “WinSetupFromUSB-1-10“. I figured if I was going to use something like this, that I’d want some crazy pirated/hacked up to date version of XP to compliment the whole hacked up experience, so I went with the seemingly reputable “Windows XP SP3 Integral Edition 2022-6-16“.

Options seemed to be somewhat straightforward, make sure it targets your USB drive! not any external backups. It does recommend you reformat with NTFS & set the alignment for a much needed speed improvement. Other than checking a few boxes to make sure it’s got the BTS driver pack & it’s a 2000/XP/2003 from USB install it pretty much worked.

After rebooting to the USB, be sure to select the

By selecting this option it’ll inject the needed ‘modern’ disk drivers. Otherwise it just wont work (EULA error or inaccessible boot device).

If everything goes well it’ll have injected a tonne of drivers, allowing the install to work.

Once the text part of setup is completed, be sure to boot off the USB again, again choosing option 1 to Auto-detect and use SATA/RAID/SCSI, but then choose option 4 for the Second part of the Windows XP setup.

From here the setup feels very Windows PE. I suspect it is, but it’ll continue basically unattended and on it’s own. From here you can just boot directly from the hard disk, once it’s finished installing. It will prompt for the USB stick again to add all the additional options

I didn’t know what to exclude or pick, So I just chose them all.

It did take about 20 minutes, but at least by the end I did have a very usable XP install.

Trying the first Quadro Driver I could find, and I got knocked down to 640×480 in 4bit colour. It sucked. I don’t know what the deal was.

320.92 is the version that worked for me!

With video working, the next step is all the reaming device drivers. Ohver on Phils Computer Lab, he had mentioned snappy driver installer, but the first link I hit on google was some virus loaded thing. Luckily since this is a fresh install it wasn’t at all painful to shove the USB back in and format the machine. I think I was also spared a lot of damage as it was constantly failing with a “bcrypt.dll missing” error. Saved by being obsolete!

Instead, I found the one on sourceforge.net, and it was working as expected.

Adding the audio drivers took a few attempts at installing stuff, rebooting, trying the windows auto-detect, rebooting, re-running snappy driver, and a few more reboots, and I got the NVIDIA audio and the built in audio working.

One thing is that some games fail entirely on XP. While GTA: Vice City had been running on Windows 10, it fails to do anything on XP. Older games with Win16 setup programs do run but Games like Links LS 1999 fail completely to run. I think the system has both too many cores, too much RAM, and it’s just plain too fast.

With all the talk of abandoning 8086/286/386 modes of operation, I thought it’d be a good time to build a box explicitly for 32bit gaming out of cast aside parts. The Lenovo S20 list price was an eye watering $3,645 USD, and the Quadro 4000 clocking in at $1,199 USD. This was not a casual machine for playing Mahjong Escape: Ancient China. But it’s kind of funny to know it does.

I have to throw some more stuff at it, but one could have only wished for a PC this fast in 2002.

Virtually Fun

Fun with Virtualization