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Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 5:38 pm
by AntialiasedPixel
I was doing the usual Youtube rabbit hole last night and came across a video on running Nextstep OS 3.3 on a 486. Never realized they released it for Intel PCs. Got me thinking that it might be a fun project for Mister, but upon some further research, it looks like it only installs from a CD which I assume has to be accessible at the hardware level since you can't boot into dos and use something like software .iso mounting to access.
Maybe somehow installing to a vhd via parallells/fusion/pcem, then moving that over to the Mister. I've never used nextstep, but I assume that is unlikely to work. Any other ideas on how to play around with Nextstep on the Mister?
All this is of course assuming that if I could get the CD accessible to install that it would even make it through the installer driver/hardware wise, but seemed like a potentially cool way to try out the OS and see where it all began for OSX on the Mac.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 6:29 pm
by tlaloc
AntialiasedPixel wrote: ↑Sat Aug 08, 2020 5:38 pm
I was doing the usual Youtube rabbit hole last night and came across a video on running Nextstep OS 3.3 on a 486. Never realized they released it for Intel PCs. Got me thinking that it might be a fun project for Mister, but upon some further research, it looks like it only installs from a CD which I assume has to be accessible at the hardware level since you can't boot into dos and use something like software .iso mounting to access.
Maybe somehow installing to a vhd via parallells/fusion/pcem, then moving that over to the Mister. I've never used nextstep, but I assume that is unlikely to work. Any other ideas on how to play around with Nextstep on the Mister?
All this is of course assuming that if I could get the CD accessible to install that it would even make it through the installer driver/hardware wise, but seemed like a potentially cool way to try out the OS and see where it all began for OSX on the Mac.
It is possible to mount ISO images in the *-DOS environment, check this post out:
viewtopic.php?p=7380#p7380
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 6:50 pm
by AntialiasedPixel
Sorry, I should have been more specific. I realize you can mount .iso files in dos, but I think to install Nextstep, you have to boot from a Nextstep boot floppy, and then from there it loads cdrom support and installs from the CD. I don't think you can run an installer directly from the CD after mounting the .iso via dos, but I could be wrong.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 10:31 pm
by rhester72
You could theoretically put the files from the ISO onto a vhd (and give it a valid boot record) and try to boot from that, and use that to install to a second vhd.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sat Aug 08, 2020 11:36 pm
by Caldor
Yes, you can take the boot record from a CD and put it on a floppy or... afaik... a VHD. That should get around that problem.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2020 6:34 pm
by abbub
I was able to get it installed in VirtualBox, then move the VHD over to the ao486. It bootstraps, but on boot it can't seem to find the drive:
'ATA drive 0 is not present.'
Possibly a driver issue, but I was only able to get the VM to install with one of the two IDE drivers that I found.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2020 1:26 am
by rhester72
Does NeXTStep assume a SCSI controller? (I think it might from my VirtualBox days.) If so, ao486 only implements a very basic IDE controller.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2020 1:40 am
by abbub
rhester72 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 10, 2020 1:26 am
Does NeXTStep assume a SCSI controller? (I think it might from my VirtualBox days.) If so, ao486 only implements a very basic IDE controller.
As I mentioned, there are two IDE drivers that come with NextStep. One is an Intel driver, one is a more generic driver. I could only get the VM to install on the more generic driver. It's possible that the ao486 might be happier with the Intel driver, but I haven't figured out how to install onto a VHD with it.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Thu Aug 13, 2020 6:54 pm
by sjuswede
NeXTstep for x86 (so called white hardware) supports generic IDE, or Intel 440 chipset IDE for better performance. It is very picky with this, unless it's a 440 chipset it will be very slow. SCSI works as well, of course, and will get excellent performance.
There are drivers for various graphics cards, including some still supported (by third party hobby developers).
Sound will work through a Sounblaster 16.
A good summary of drivers is available. I link it below. It's for OpenSTep 4.x, but in practice the support for NeXTstep 3.3 and OpenStep 3.3 is pretty much identical. Drivers can also in some cases be moved between versions.
http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/ ... ity_1.html
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2020 4:09 am
by kathleen
Thank you for the link @sjuswede, a lot of valuable pieces of information and downloads for this amazing OS. I did not try to run it yet on Mister as it seems to be not so easy but I tried it and used in on PC wia Virtualbox, I found it a very interesting OS, thanks to the Apple touch maybe
.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 6:19 pm
by no_myrealusername
Did you get anywhere with this kathleen?
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2022 7:10 pm
by kevind
I’ve played around with this off and on for a bit with Openstep 4.2. The main issue is that the current IDE driver for NeXTstep does not work correctly with ao486. The openstep system would never properly read the SPT value and would always set it to 0, causing the system to not find any writable drives. I had done a little bit of debugging, but never enough to track down the underlying issue.
One thing of note: The Openstep4.2 CD is a nonstandard format to allow it to be sparc bootable but contain the data for intel and sparc installs. I had to convert my copy from ISO to CHD before the system would accept it. It fails virtually silently if you just try to use a non-standard ISO— it will complain on the console, but if you don’t have access to the console you won’t see anything.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2022 1:31 pm
by clarkkent
Having a NeXTstation Turbo Color on my desk.
Also an image on VMware.
Re: Nextstep on ao486?
Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2023 12:07 pm
by TuffyDK
Hi.
Does anyone has a "how to install" Nextstep 3.3, so the rest of us can follow to install it correctly??
