- #Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported full#
- #Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported Pc#
- #Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported windows#
Supposedly one option is to use PPCBUG to read the image file into memory and overwrite your existing firmware manually using hex location or some other wizardry, but this was nowhere within my ability.
#Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported windows#
What they don’t tell you is the utility will only execute in Windows NT PowerPC, and trying to simply raw write the image with a modern application doesn’t work. While I found that itself to be neat, I wasn’t going to settle for anything other than Windows NT.Īfter seeing reference to a new firmware image released by Motorola for NT booting, I was linked to an copy of a Motorola PowerPC support page from 1997 which included the NT firmware file along with a utility needed to write it to floppy.
I tested this by finding a PowerPC boot disk for Solaris 2.5.1 (the only PowerPC release) designed for the Motorola system and watching it actually start booting. One important thing to note here is that PPCBUG is required to boot any OS that ISN’T Windows NT, such as AIX or Solaris. OK great, so now what? From the small bits of information I was able to find online, your system cannot use PPCBUG firmware to boot Windows NT. You can actually see the label on the firmware chips in one of the pictures above indicating version 1.5 of PPCBUG.
When I first powered on this board, it would display the failure to boot notices and drop me into something called PPCBUG which seems to be what Motorola used on their PowerPC boards in the mid-90s. Trying to figure out how the board firmware functioned was probably the most unpleasant aspect of this project. One notable issue with the Atlas board is the use of the RTC style battery which is required to maintain firmware settings such as your bootloader configuration. Much like the x86 boards of the time, the Atlas features both PCI and ISA expansion slots. The memory I’m using is also FPM, though I’m not sure if this is a requirement. For memory, it uses 72-pin SIMMs with or without parity. Compatibility seems good but it looks like there’s an 8GB limit in the firmware for visible hard disk space. Since my working SCSI gear is reserved for my old Mac collection, I’m going with a standard IDE hard disk and CD-ROM.
#Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported Pc#
The Atlas board follows the PC AT form factor and features on-board IDE and SCSI controllers. Everything I could find online relating to the PowerStack line makes it seem like the Atlas board is potentially an early version of what they eventually used in production. It was extremely difficult digging up any information about this board as it seems different from the Motorola PowerStack, which was Motorola’s PowerPC based system released sometime in 1995. This is important as the hardware I used for this project includes the Motorola Atlas board with an IBM PowerPC 604 processor. One of the companies developing computers under the PReP standard was Motorola. Those with IBM PowerPC systems more than likely used AIX, and those with Apple PowerPC systems used MacOS (with the exception of the Apple Network Server which only ran AIX, but that system isn’t classified as a Macintosh).
#Internet explorer for mac powerpc not supported full#
Aspects of PReP and CHRP can be found in later PowerPC systems, but that dream of full OS compatibility across vendors never came to light. Eventually the PReP concept was dropped and the Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) standard popped up in its place, though for the most part this also failed to gain traction. This wasn’t the direction Apple seemingly wanted to go with for their PowerPC systems, and the major differences in how the system firmware operates is why the previously mentioned PowerPC operating systems cannot work on a PowerPC Macintosh. The standard was based on a PC clone type logic board with a PowerPC processor. The apparent goal of PReP was to create a PowerPC standard among the companies manufacturing those systems allowing operating systems such as Windows NT, OS/2, Solaris and AIX to run. For any curious vintage Apple fans, I’ll state right now this does not work on any Macintosh systems.Įnter the PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP).
The focus of this article will be the PowerPC release and what type of hardware it would run on, along with the specifics about my Motorola hardware. Though the MIPS and PowerPC support was later dropped leaving Alpha and Intel x86 as the only options by the release of Service Pack 6, you could enjoy Windows NT 4.0 on quite the variety of systems. The widely popular Windows NT 4.0 release carried initial support for Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC in addition to the Intel x86 platform. If you were a fan of Microsoft Windows NT, you didn’t even need an Intel x86 based computer to run it. The 1990s were truly an interesting time for computing.
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