NeXTstep 3.3 on VMware and Virtual PC
This article is incomplete, it misses transcripts and screenshots of the installation session.
This page summarizes several previous articles about running NeXTstep 3.3 on various emulators (like VMware and Virtual PC).
NeXTstep can be installed on both VMware and Virtual PC normally following Nicolai Leymann’s description. There are two things I’d add to his write-up. First, it is essential that the CDROM is not attached to the secondary IDE controller, but attached to the primary as the slave device. Second, the disk container files should not exceed a capacity of 2GB. While the maximum size can be specified for VMware, it necessary to recreate the container file for Virtual PC.
The fundamental workaround concerns the lack of a SCSI controller supported by NeXTstep’s installer. As soon as the normal driver disk is loaded, proceed to load the beta driver’s disk, arbitrarily select the Adaptec controller (choice 2), and further select the dual-channel IDE driver. From this point on, the install on either VMware and Virtual PC proceeds normally (since no network driver is installed initially, a timeout while initially starting network services is expected behaviour).
Both Virtual PC and VMware support networking and full-screen display with additional drivers.
Networking:
DECChip21x4xNet (beta) - Virtual PC
AMD PCNET32 (beta) - VMware
Graphics:
S3 Generic (beta) - Virtual PC
Atomic OBjects VMware driver - VMware
I haven’t tested sound with either VMware or Virtual PC.
NeXTstep is as stable as it is slow on Virtual PC. The performance on VMware is significantly higher, but the emulated PS/2 mouse behaves very erratically and for any serious work it is almost a necessity to attach an additional serial mouse.