New es40 emulator fork lets you run Windows 2000 for DEC Alpha

A new fork of the es40 emulator — a program that reproduces the architecture of DEC AlphaServer ES40 machines built around Alpha processors — has surfaced online. The fork's developers report that it can be used to run the Alpha edition of Windows 2000.

DEC Alpha is a line of RISC processors that Digital Equipment Corporation produced in the 1990s and early 2000s. Microsoft supported the architecture in Windows NT at the time, including a separate build of Windows 2000 for Alpha, which never gained wide adoption and today is of interest chiefly to retrocomputing enthusiasts.

The es40 emulator itself has been around for a long time and is used to run systems originally written for DEC Alpha hardware on modern computers. The arrival of the fork broadens the project's capabilities and lets anyone who is interested reproduce a rare configuration — the combination of the Alpha architecture and a little-known version of Windows — without having to track down the original hardware, which has long been discontinued.

Projects like this have historical and research value above all: they help keep old software running and make it possible to study the peculiarities of architectures that have fallen out of commercial use. For the retrocomputing community, such emulators become practically the only way to get acquainted with systems that would otherwise be out of reach.

Details on the technical implementation of the fork and instructions for using it are available via the link to the source.

Source: Lobsters