Yes.

AlaricD wrote:

Yes.

FAANTASTIC!

Note though that there were two different types of Alpha firmware, the "PC like" ARC firmware and the "minicomputer like" SRM firmware. Some Alpha platforms could run both, but many could only do one or the other. Windows NT and 2k could only run on ARC, and ARC definitely can use PC VGA cards. As for SRM... no idea.

I only once had an Alpha with SRM, a huge fridge-size early 21064 beast (Alphaserver 2100A iirc), with mainly EISA slots and a terminal connection rather than a video output, so can't comment on what it might have done with a VGA card. I swapped it rather quickly as it was huge (and slow and butt-ugly)

Depending in the OS and firmware type (SRM vs AlphaBIOS(MS ARC)) you will need to check the old HQL lists for DigitalUNIX, OpenVMS and/or Windows NT /Windows 2000 RC1 (which is the last windows to support alpha processor) in order to check what is the appropriate card for each OS.

Incompatible cards can have an important impact in OS system usage. Is important to remark the AlphaPC ATX boards have improved compatibility at firmware level for both ISA and PCI PC cards, in both SRM and AlphaBIOS, but still the Alpha OSs running on them would lack it, specially XWindow and Windows display drivers.

Why did Windows 2000 drop support for this architecture?

Errius wrote:

Why did Windows 2000 drop support for this architecture?

Well... Compaq told MS they wouldn't fund this work, or at least not all of it, any more (since NT sales were a tiny fraction of […]
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Well... Compaq told MS they wouldn't fund this work, or at least not all of it, any more (since NT sales were a tiny fraction of Alpha sales) -- they wanted MS to bring the HAL development in-house. MS said that they wouldn't pick it up either (since Alpha sales were a tiny fraction of NT sales). So Compaq pulled the plug on that staff.

Alpha NT HAL support WAS fairly expensive. It was a more complex HAL in some ways -- for example, the platforms included real hardware mapping registers between PCI space and physical address space, allowing DMA scatter/gather even for devices without s/g abillity. But the main reason was that Alphas needed a lot more HALs, and more differences among HALs, than x86.

The 64-bit NT project (codename "Sundown") started shortly after NT4 RTM, long before CPQ dropped their ball, and was originally targeting both Alpha and ia64. Even after Alpha NT was dropped as a product they continued work on the 64-bit Alpha port, because they had a LOT of Alpha hardware around in the labs to test it on, while ia64 silicon was still years away.

And, they always had the idea that maintaining two different ports would help prevent ia64-specific stuff from getting into places where it wasn't supposed to be. But instead of supporting all the various HALs they just picked one Alpha reference platform and did the HAL for that.

Last I heard, davec (Dave Cutler) still had an Alpha box in his office. Not sure what version it's running. But I'm sure it's running very fast.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p … b9b332#p7217559

AlaricD wrote:

Yes.

Yes, provided it has the ARC (AlphaBIOS) firmware and you have Alpha NT driver's for it. Some will not work if the ARC BIOS emulator fails to run the VGA BIOS. A Diamond Stealth64 will probably run. I've had good experience with Permedia based cards (Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro, ELSA Synergy) and some professional cards (ELSA GLoria XL, 3Dlabs, E&S cards). If you don't need top 3D performance but want a compatible card I definitely can recommend the Permedias - I've run both NT and Linux with them, they support reasonable resolutions (1280x1024, even managed to get 1680x1050 on Linux).