Ever wanted to run Windows NT on your old PowerPC Macintosh? No, me neither, but now it's possible thanks to amazing FOSS work.
Install Windows NT on a PowerPC Mac!
The recently released maciNTosh project brings Windows NT version 4, the latest operating system circa 1996, to the iMac G3, PowerMac G3 "Blue and White", PowerBook G3 "Lombard" and PowerMac G4 "Ouch" state-of-the-art in personal RISC computing circa 1997 .It's a hugely impressive feat of engineering that, we suspect, will polarize people into shocked amazement, or leave them asking "huh? Why?"
From the first release, Windows NT was a multi-platform operating system: in addition to x86-32, it also ran on computers with DEC Alpha, MIPS and on Apple/IBM/Motorola PowerPC processors. Intel kits aside, of these three RISC platforms, PowerPC was by far the most common and easiest to find, thanks to the success of Apple's PowerMac machines. But as always, there was a catch, and that was stupidity.
The problem was that NT needed a specific type of firmware to run on RISC computers: specifically firmware compatible with the ACE consortium's ARC specification. This is long gone, but not forgotten: for example, the UEFI forum's history, A Tale of Two Standards [PDF] discusses it.
