Hacker News Reader

Comment by orra | Hacker News Reader

Gutted there's no emulator, even for a 32-bit OS.

There are emulators for DEC Alpha, but they only support Unix ‘PALcode’ firmware. Windows NT required different PALcode, for which there is no working emulator AFAICT.

View on HN

I have found an old branch of qemu that claimed to support ARC, but it didnt do anything. I'm at a loss on where or how to proceede.

https://repo.or.cz/w/qemu/es40.git

If you can try to help, as always much appreciated?!

Maybe you can have better luck contacting Tristan Gingold

https://lists.defectivebydesign.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/...

That's very interesting, and I don't remember seeing it before.

It does indeed look like it supports emulating PALcode more at the hardware level, than userspace (if that terminology makes sense). However, I am unsure at how to extend...

es40 also seems to use lot of the same ideas

I need to blog more on it but finding this 64bit alpha kind of was a big surprisie and has eaten more of my time.

Ive been trying to figure out how the clarcrom.exe is decompressed, and comparing it to the cl67srmrom.exe

I'm not entirely sure the es40 can even go into alphabios. it may all be a redherring.

I found an ascii string 'WimC' that seems to start the compressed data, but a simple copy/paste ended in the program terminating.

> qemu: fatal: Trying to execute code outside RAM or ROM at 0x000000001a45e5ec

Not sure I can help more but I'm easy enough to find @ virtuallyfun.com

Challenge accepted. I had been looking for my next emulation target

Hot damn, I love your enthusiasm.

I don't know whether you'd want to work from scratch, to do things entirely your own way, or whether you'd look to extend an existing project. Either is of course reasonable.

If the latter, I get the impression AXPbox is currently the best maintained Alpha emulator. There have been a LOT of Alpha emulators over the years: http://www.avanthar.com/healyzh/decemulation/Alpha.html

I usually do it myself from scratch. This is partly because I like to learn all the details of how something works, but also because I have a perverse habit of putting emulators of large machines unto microcontrollers, and most existing emulators are not targeted to a world with only a few K of RAM and limited cycles. eg:

http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard

http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=25.%20VMU%20Hacking

Going off thread, I discovered the uJ project from those links, looks quite cool.

I wonder if you may consider emulating PowerPC NT as well?

Dang, I didn't realise NT for PowerPC can't be emulated. That's also a shame.

Without wanting to sound entitled, my preference is NT for Alpha. That's because Visual Basic 6.0 for Alpha exists, but not for PowerPC. Of course, as a retro computing enthusiast, I'll gladly take any.

As of now there is only MIPS.

https://virtuallyfun.com/2021/11/10/revisiting-windows-nt-4-...

The OpenGL is more 1.0 than 1.1... so it makes for interesting ports. I need to touch on that one too. so much to do..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com