Windows NT for Workcubes

[lifning]

https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes

I took a swing at setting it up on my Wii, but no luck. So I did what any reasonable person who encounters an issue with Windows would do, and installed Linux instead.

I do wanna try to get it working, though! Maybe I just need to try a different SD card, the Wii hardware can be picky about those.

Somewhat relatedly, someone is trying to port Android to the Wii: https://github.com/PPCDroid-Revival/device-nintendo-wii

[lifning]

update: got it installed! keyboard isn't working though neither USB nor gamecube-serial.

edit: got the GC ASCII keyboard working! USB mouse likes to give out as soon as i use anything GC though. it looks like they've been working on fixing IOS-USB issues in the firmware, so hopefully that shakes out soon

[lifning]

there is something oddly refreshing about trying to get things working on this.
the limitations are pretty tight:

• ~80MB of RAM
• a 3.9GB C: drive (limited by the FAT32 SD card on which the HDD image lives)
• video signal limited to 640x480
• Visual C++ 4.0 "RISC Edition" (just about any source code you find that ships .dsp/.dsw files requires VC6 or higher)
• Motorola SoftWindows 32 for running x86 programs
• Internet Explorer 3 for PowerPC (required for WININET.DLL)
• no hardware accelerated OpenGL (yet? perhaps making an NT4 ICD out of gl2gx is viable)
• no DirectX (yet? perhaps dropping in bits of wine/ReactOS a la One-Core-API is viable)
• most .exe files you find in the wild either require either XP or newer or 9x's KERNEL32.DLL / DOS
• many things that do support NT4 require Service Pack 3 or newer, and the last for PowerPC was SP2
• no audio or network yet
• no USB hotplug

"refreshing? lif, that sounds overconstrained as hell."
look, hear me out.
i just ran flatpak update and it pulled in gigabytes upon gigabytes of dependencies for programs i hate that i have no choice but to use, on a host with 192GB RAM and 96 CPU cores and several terabytes of NVMe SSD, which still chugs on some commonplace workloads.
it's nice having a breath of fresh air of this bygone era being brought into the current age.
back when NT was New, Microsoft was touting their support for OpenGL as a selling point for an operating system that you'd actually want rather than begrudgingly accept, and building out all sorts of cool things like "hey, now that RISC architecture is catching on, let's come up with a way to support legacy x86 applications at the OS level" (which Intel monopoly only could put off for so long, but the SysWoW stuff that's doing this exact thing for ARM Windows today was created here).
being limited to a subset of software from the era in which keeping your system requirements in check was a thing at all, makes the idea of using a computer less overwhelming in some ways, even if there's very little practical use for it at the moment.
each time you get something new running on this extremely unusual configuration feels like its own little triumph!
i've been living in the under-supported margins of computing for many years now (desktop ppc64le Linux...), so maybe i've just got an acquired taste, i dunno.
but to me this feels like more than just a novelty, it's a reminder that things can be better.
(and it's probably no surprise that it's the only Windows install in my home)

here's SoftWindows32's version of Wx86 running an old Sonic fangame i made circa 2003, and Nocash's NO$GBA (which is handwritten in x86 assembly) running a 2024 freeware indie game you'll probably recognize. i bet if i manage to get a GBA emulator built for native powerpcle-pe-winnt it'll run quite smoothly!

[snow]

edit: got the GC ASCII keyboard working! USB mouse likes to give out as soon as i use anything GC though. it looks like they've been working on fixing IOS-USB issues in the firmware, so hopefully that shakes out soon

The GC ASCII controller finally gets its due!

being limited to a subset of software from the era in which keeping your system requirements in check was a thing at all, makes the idea of using a computer less overwhelming in some ways, even if there's very little practical use for it at the moment.
each time you get something new running on this extremely unusual configuration feels like its own little triumph!
i've been living in the under-supported margins of computing for many years now (desktop ppc64le Linux...), so maybe i've just got an acquired taste, i dunno.
but to me this feels like more than just a novelty, it's a reminder that things can be better.
(and it's probably no surprise that it's the only Windows install in my home)

That's always been the draw to retrocomputing for me. There's still a lot that can be done with older systems, as long as you're aware of the limitations.

That said, I'm really surprised how much you've been able to get running. I honestly expected it to be barely stable, but it seems to be doing okay!

[lifning]

That said, I'm really surprised how much you've been able to get running. I honestly expected it to be barely stable, but it seems to be doing okay!

yeah! 'course i'm still largely feeling like i'm banging rocks together, not having particularly deep arcane Windows knowledge myself as much as intuition about what might work from my experiences with box86 on Linux and the recent ARM64EC stuff in wine.

i'm not totally sure, but i sort of suspect that it'd be easier (at least long-term) to get their adaptation of Retro68's GCC 9 to powerpcle-pc-winnt building mingw32 and porting things that way, rather than trying to get stuff working in the ancient compilers of VC++4.

i haven't had time to really pursue either of these routes just yet, aside from simply clicking through the new-MFC-application wizard and hitting F5, just to kick the tires and for the novelty of compiling something on the Wii. (the native PowerPC build of devenv is shockingly responsive on this thing, which gives me hope for native ports of other stuff!)

[lifning]

tonight's oops-how-did-it-become-3AM adventure: SDL 1.2

bonus content: puyo running on a vintage pc98 emulator that's got a winnt-ppc build

[lifning]

and now, the motive for getting SDL 1.2 building...

(gameplay is sloppy cos i'm playing it with WASD controls in the middle of the gamecube ascii pad, since the sticks and buttons are mapped to mouse)

working on GBA next (VBA had too much fancy C++ and mGBA had too much modern C, so i went for what's in the next post instead...)

[lifning]

ported from Mega CD, to Windows_(Dino), to Windows_(DirectX), to Gamecube/PS2, and now finally to Windows_(Wii)

i mean yeah, i could just put my Gems Collection disc in, but then i wouldn't have a multitasking operating system

cheers to BenoitRen

[Skirmisher]

i mean yeah, i could just put my Gems Collection disc in, but then i wouldn't have a multitasking operating system

lol it never actually occurred to me that you could literally just play Gems Collection "natively" on the Wii if you weren't doing this,