OK, I may be pooping far too much acid but here's my plan:
While installing NT 4 onto a crappy compaq I picked up for free I noticed that there was a folder on it with stuff for ppc, alph and mips. After doing a little bit of googling I managed to find refrences to installing it on various bits of ppc hardware, mainly IBM servers. However, what I want to do is to install it onto a powermacintosh, but have found absolutly no references whatsoever anywhere. Does anybody know if it can be installed onto a ppc macintosh?? Here's what I reckon would need to be done:
-A bootloader like bootx
-either drivers for hardware or loads of pc compatable boards
whadd'ya think??
moros
Back when I was in the printing industry, the dawn of digital prepress, all the RIPs we had were NT4 machines. I remember this guy who used to service them said he used to work for Microsoft, and he said he saw NT running on a PowerMac. He also said something like Apple would never let it happen.
It seems that all that anybody seems to know is that its been done, and that it doesn't run very well…
I did hear that it ran on powersurge models but not very well…
moros
It was mainly for PReP PPC RS/6000 machines, IIRC. I've got a CD of 3.51 and 4.0, but I've never tried either on a PPC, even when I still had a IBM RS/6000 7248 100MHz 604 workstation...
I have done quite a bit of research.
When I worked at MS I talked to a few of the engineers and they told that it can be done but it is not easy. They also that I would likely never find the correct HAL to make it work. It does exist but it is not in the wild.
From all of the research I have done I concluded that the B&W G3 would be the most likely canidate to make it work. Since the B&W has a newer version of Open Firmware that works a lot better. Also you could rewrite the firmware if you needed to as it is flashable. I don't have my notes any more but I did find that the New World machines are the closest to PrEP as the PowerMacs get. Of course the NT does not have ADB or USB support so you would pretty much be out of luck there.
It might also be possible to get it to work on an ANS, as those ran AIX. But I have no idea as I never looked into it.