At the 1996 MacWorld held in Boston in August, FirmWorks added the Motorola Computer Group's "Viper" CHRP demonstration platform to the list of CHRP machines using Power Firmware(tm) to support the dual booting of Mac(tm) OS and Windows NT®. The Viper performed its dual boot using only a single graphics adapter/display, keyboard and mouse.
At the 1996 PC Expo held in New York City on June 18 - 20, FirmWorks and its technology partners IBM and VLSI Technology demonstrated the ability of a CHRP reference platform to boot Mac OS and Windows NT on a single machine with a single ATI 264VT graphics adapter/display, keyboard and mouse.
While additional work remained to be done to create product quality machines, this demonstration showed the continuing commitment of the AIM alliance and its strategic partners like FirmWorks to bring the CHRP technology to the marketplace as rapidly as possible. Current expectations are that complete CHRP systems/reference designs will be available in November, 1996 when all of the final hardware and operating systems to support dual booting will be available.
The Common Hardware Reference Platform (CHRP) Specification describes a family of machines based on the PowerPC(tm) processor that are capable of booting multiple operating systems including Mac OS, Windows NT, AIX® and Solaris(tm). The CHRP Specification requires the use of Open Firmware. Power Firmware(tm) boot firmware source code with CHRP support is available for product development now!
The CHRP specification and the CHRP Binding to Open Firmware are readily available.
At this moment in time, CHRP-compliant reference platforms and systems are being created. FirmWorks is enabling the creation of these first generation machines by adding CHRP enhancements to Power Firmware(tm). One such reference design is the IBM Long Trail. The enhancement of Power Firmware to provide complete support for CHRP is well underway and full support will be available coincidentally with CHRP-compatible operating system availability as shown below:
| Run Time Abstraction Services (RTAS) | Done |
| CHRP NVRAM support | Done |
| CHRP memory map and addressing support | Done |
| Apple Hydra FCode driver | Done |
| Apple ADB keyboard and mouse FCode drivers | Done |
| Apple ADB keyboard and mouse Windows NT run-time drivers | Done |
| Open Firmware-to-ARC CHRP veneer | Done |
| Generic CHRP Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) | Done |
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