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Author Topic: Windows on power PC?  (Read 972 times)

floakster

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Windows on power PC?
« on: 5 November 2003, 13:20 »
According to this article, Microsoft is planning to use PowerPC chips in the next XBox.

http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,61065,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

What do you think the chances are that we will see a shift in other Microsoft products to running on PowerPCs, i.e. Windows?

Would this then mean that you could eventually run windows on Apple hardware?? And would PC manufacturers start making cheap PowerPC boxes that could run OSX??

Sounds like the old OSX on x86 debate the other way around to me...
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Laukev7

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #1 on: 5 November 2003, 17:52 »
There has already been versions of Windows NT for PPC. The last version was NT 4, which was supported by SPARC, MIPS, PPC and x86 processors, becore Microsoft dropped support for every architecture exept x86 in Windows 2000.
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hm_murdock

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #2 on: 6 November 2003, 01:57 »
has anybody ever made NT 4 install on a PPC machine? what do you need to make this happen?
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flap

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #3 on: 6 November 2003, 02:10 »
quote:
Originally posted by Laukev7:
There has already been versions of Windows NT for PPC. The last version was NT 4, which was supported by SPARC, MIPS, PPC and x86 processors, becore Microsoft dropped support for every architecture exept x86 in Windows 2000.


Are you sure? I don't think there was ever a sparc version of windows.
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Laukev7

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #4 on: 6 November 2003, 05:00 »
quote:
Originally posted by flap:


Are you sure? I don't think there was ever a sparc version of windows.


Oops. Nope, I meant to say Alpha, not SPARC. My bad.

But it appears there was an effort to port Windows NT on SPARC at one time, though.

http://luna.havk.org/mail/luna__2002_02/0228.html
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Laukev7

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #5 on: 6 November 2003, 05:11 »
It appears that there has been, in fact, a SPARC version of Windows NT, at least for a short period of time.

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=2426

 
quote:
Yes MS did make a version of NT for SPARC. IIRC Intergraph briefly sold it for their SPARC based systems. Sun ended up purchasing exclusive rights to NT for SPARC so they could sit on it.


http://www.intergraph.com/ingrhistory90s.htm

 
quote:
In August 1993, Intergraph entered into an agreement with Sun Microsystems to co-develop the next generation Sun SPARC high-end microprocessor, develop a SPARC-based desktop system, and port Windows NT to that system.  Sun hired the employees of Intergraph
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Laukev7

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Windows on power PC?
« Reply #6 on: 6 November 2003, 10:26 »
quote:
has anybody ever made NT 4 install on a PPC machine? what do you need to make this happen?


That I would like to know. I assume you would just need to pop any Windows NT 4 CD in a PPC machine, since it contains the binaries for all four architectures (excluding the SPARC version, which was third party). It was probably designed to run on PPC servers, but it should be able to run on old 601-603 Powermacs, since Apple was part of the CHRP initiative at the time.

[ November 06, 2003: Message edited by: Laukev7 ]

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