USB installer and some ramblings.

[mantheman]

I had some time available so I've made a usb installer for Windows XP on the Apple TV.
Takes about 3 mins to install (with a 2.5' IDE to MSata adapter, could be more with the original HDD). It also partitions the disk dynamically to use the whole disk, and puts the boot partition first instead of last, so no need to resize the Windows partition.

But Device manager as of v0.3 of your image shows yellow exclamation on
Audio Device on High Definition Audio Bus, IR Receiver, PCI Device, SM Bus controller.

It would at least be great to have the IR stop blinking yellow, which seems to be possible with the (unfinished) driver you've written.

Did you know the Linux kernel already has a driver for the IR Reveiver? Maybe it would be easier to reuse this for a Windows driver instead of atvclient? (And just use the led-control part of atvclient) I've used this driver in Linux instead of atvclient because it's much more responsive and supports native long press. (I also modified the code so that the buttons corresponds to kp_ up,down,right,left,enter, and esc for menu, and f1 for the play/pause button on the silver remote.
This also makes it perfect for Retroarch. I can't program this myself so I'm just putting it out there.

It would also be great to have analog audio work properly.

If I have some time I'll try to package everything and release it to the community in the not so distant future.

[DistroHopper39B]

I had some time available so I've made a usb installer for Windows XP on the Apple TV.

I created one based on @ages2001's awesome Universal-NT-Installer project a while back. I've used it a few times for reinstalls myself though.

But Device manager as of v0.3 of your image shows yellow exclamation on
Audio Device on High Definition Audio Bus, IR Receiver, PCI Device, SM Bus controller.

I never bothered fixing this since it has no (at the moment) solvable negative affects on performance. The High Definition Audio Bus is the HDMI audio which doesn't work even if drivers are installed, and the remote driver doesn't work beyond a proof of concept yet. The other 2 are fixable by installing some drivers from the Boot Camp bundle but I've never bothered with them as there doesn't seem to be any real negative effects.

Did you know the Linux kernel already has a driver for the IR Reveiver?

Found that out not long ago. That would probably be a better choice but harder to port. The issues I've experienced with my driver (ie nothing happening at all until you press a button on the remote) I don't have any other explanation than bugs with libusb, so my plan is to eventually rewrite the driver using the native Windows USB API (I'm looking for help with that btw, so if anyone reading this knows how to write a Windows USB driver let me know!)

It would also be great to have analog audio work properly.

I'd have to rewrite the whole audio driver. The problem is with Realtek and doesn't seem like something I can just modify the registry to fix.

[mantheman]

I created one based on @ages2001's awesome Universal-NT-Installer project a while back. I've used it a few times for reinstalls myself though.

I wish I knew about this as it would save me some time. I first tried to apply 7z archives of the files on Windows partition but found out Linux just doesn't support extracting NTFS metadata, and after some googling and further experiments I had to basically apply wim images directly to a block device partition, just like the Universal-NT-installer does I presume. (Which is fine, I just wasnt familiar with it at first)

As you probably know, the Apple TV will boot from a hfsplus formatted boot partition on a internal MBR disk, so there's really no need to use FAT/FAT32 for that. Windows XP will just ignore this so it won't mess up with the hard driveemumeration (C: suddenly becoming D: and so on), which means you can safely put the hfsplus boot partiton first on the hard drive, which does make life a bit easier if you for some reason need to resize the Windows partition later on.

I never bothered fixing this since it has no (at the moment) solvable negative affects on performance. The High Definition Audio Bus is the HDMI audio which doesn't work even if drivers are installed, and the remote driver doesn't work beyond a proof of concept yet. The other 2 are fixable by installing some drivers from the Boot Camp bundle but I've never bothered with them as there doesn't seem to be any real negative effects.

Yeah I found out the PCI Device required the Apple Null driver. And SMBIOS was the Intel Chipset driver. I know it probably doesn't do anything, other than giving piece of mind by not having to see those exclamations in Device Manager.

I came across this : https://github.com/FlyGoat/CSMWrap and wonder if it could somehow be adopted for the ATV to either use DOS mode within Windows XP, or even run Windows 98?
There are some modded nvidia drivers floating around but not sure if it's possible to make the the PCI based go 7300 in the Apple TV work in Windows 98.

There's also a few other things I experimented with. The CrystalHD driver works with MPC-HC (either the original 1.7.13)
or an XP version of the forked version, to playback up to 1080p/30fps H264 mkvs.
MPC-HC 2.1.2 for XP:

The backported NVME driver should work with a minipcie/m.2 adapter, along with the backported SATA/AHCI and USB3 drivers if you get the right minipcie/m.2 adapters. I haven't tested any of those though, but it might be a cool project with a 3D printed bottom enclosure :)
The minipcie 1x in the Apple TV should have a bandwidth of 250MB/s minus 10% overhead or so, so it should be fine for most tasks. The IDE port seems to top out at a little over 80MB/s in all the benchmarks I've done, so using a NVME for the virtual memory might give a nice boost for both speed and latency.

Basically at this point we just need a proper IR driver to suspend the yellow blinking status LED ;)

[DistroHopper39B]

Windows XP will just ignore this so it won't mess up with the hard driveemumeration (C: suddenly becoming D: and so on), which means you can safely put the hfsplus boot partiton first on the hard drive, which does make life a bit easier if you for some reason need to resize the Windows partition later on.

The only reason I didn't do this is because that would make bootloader updates much more complicated. You'd need to boot the Apple TV into Linux to do one. It would also make initial installation much more annoying, as you'd again need to boot into Linux.

I came across this : https://github.com/FlyGoat/CSMWrap and wonder if it could somehow be adopted for the ATV to either use DOS mode within Windows XP, or even run Windows 98?

I actually attempted this, could never get VESA to work correctly. Newer versions of CSMWrap have things that could help with that. DOS applications will likely work if I (or someone) manages to get CSMWrap working with XP (there are apparently compatibility issues with it). Windows 98 doesn't work with CSMWrap as it is as there is no emulated PIRQ table IIRC.

The backported NVME driver should work with a minipcie/m.2 adapter, along with the backported SATA/AHCI and USB3 drivers if you get the right minipcie/m.2 adapters. I haven't tested any of those though, but it might be a cool project with a 3D printed bottom enclosure :)

The device would be detected by Windows, but wouldn't be usable as a boot drive since the Apple TV's firmware can't boot from NVMe (or likely anything on the mPCIe bus) and FreeLoader only has a driver for IDE drives (meaning that it couldn't find the kernel)