When you hear “PS2” and “Windows 95,” you probably think someone forgot a slash and are talking about peripherals, but no — this hack is very much about the Sony PlayStation 2, the best-selling game console of all time. [MeraByte] walks us through the possibly ridiculous task of installing Windows 95 on the last hardware anyone at Microsoft would ever endorse in a video you can watch below.
Obviously, the MIPS-based Emotion Engine at the heart of the PS2 is not going to be able to handle x86 instructions Win95 is expecting, but that’s all solved by the magic of emulation. [MeraByte] is running a version of Bochs, an x86 emulator that has been built for PS/2 after trying and failing to install Windows (both 3.1 and 95) to an experimental DOSBox build.
As expected, it is not a smooth journey for [MeraByte], but the flailing about and troubleshooting make for entertaining viewing. Once loaded, it works surprisingly well, in that anything works at all. Unfortunately, neither the mouse nor Ultimate Doom 95 worked. We suppose that ultimately means that this hack fails since even Doom can run Doom. The mouse thing is also important, probably.
If you have a PlayStation 2, maybe skip Windows 95 and try running GoLang. If you do have DOOM running on the PlayStation 2, send us a tip. There was never an official release for PS2, but after 26 years, someone must have done it by now.
Now try OS/2 Warp on it.
PS”/”2 Warp?
IBM OS/2 Warp
I used to have it. A retail version. Bought it a Costco back in 1995
Pretty sure it is just a pun and not an error.
From memory: Windows 95 RTM runs (crawls) on something as low as an..
– 386SX PC/AT @16MHz
– EGA/VGA graphics (CGA hurts)
– 4MB of RAM (not recommended)
– ca. 80MB IDE/ATA, ESDI or WD1003 HDD..
And SCSI, of course. If it has int13h support
It’s not a good experience, though. I experienced it back then.
A 386DX-40/486DX-33 and 16MB of RAM were more realistic in real life.
Windows 95 did swap to disk quite quickly on low memory.
From memories! that’s impresive, I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday :)
The first time I used Win95 machine was a 60mhz Pentium I, it wasn’t particularly speedy, but it was OK. Ideally you’d want a 100mhz+ machine.
In my opinion, the RAM was a limiting factor at the time. Just as with Vista a decade later.
There used to be people with their hypercool 486DX4-120 hot-rod setup, but just 4 MB of RAM.
The less popular, but more elegant solution was to increase RAM instead.
16 MB of RAM was a common configuration found on system running Windows NT Workstation, for example.
Not just Pentiums, but also classic 486DX2-66 VLB systems.
The 386DX-40 platform was a popular, rock-solid budget system,
the processor often carried the Windows logo.
The money saved could be used to buy an reasonable amount of extra RAM.
It wasn’t popular among gamers, though, so many of you perhaps can’t relate to it.
https://www.redhill.net.au/c/c-4.php
Agreed, I think I wound up with an IBM 40mhz AMD 486 for quite a while. Now that I remember I wanted more mhz for early emulators.
The 386/40 and 8 or 16 meg of ram was the hot ticket prior to the pentium.
Then it became the 486/100 or 133.
+1
A Pentium 90 or 100 or a Pentium MMX makes for a fine little Windows 9x rig.
Such a rig doesn’t have the timing issues yet, that would require patching.
A Pentium MMX 166 was a common choice, I think.
I installed 98 on a 486 DX2 machine running at 33Mhz with 32MB. It was a painful enough process just getting it installed. The user experience was just as painful. I chocked it up as an experience, and left it to run SETI at home, until they kindly asked me to stop. Seems I was backing up their work flow.
Yes, was same here with Windows 98SE on a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 with 486DX2-66 CPU.
Windows 98 seems to want a Pentium, really.
Probably because of Windows Explorer with Active Desktop and so on.
It’s heavier than the original Windows 95, which still ran on Windows 3.x era hardware.
But memory-managment of 98 was/is more advanced, though.
No you didnt.
The dx/2 never did under 50 mhz.
From wikipedia….
‘The first major update to the i486 design came in March 1992 with the release of the clock-doubled 486DX2 series.[10] It was the first time that the CPU core clock frequency was separated from the system bus clock frequency by using a dual clock multiplier, supporting 486DX2 chips at 40 and 50 MHz. The faster 66 MHz 486DX2-66 was released that August.[10]’
Maybe yours running like shit was due to the misconfiguration. A DX2 or DX4 486 was a screamer back then. Esp3cially with more than 8 meg of ram.
Something was wrong on your setup, especially the clock speed.
Disregard. I read your comment as a 486 dx2 40.
Time for coffee
My current PC has an original “Designed for Windows XP” sticker on the front. According to another sticker on it’s front it’s an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD. Gosh, I never realized that the XP time frame reached into the 256MB RAM era. I guess this was quite near the end of the XP era. I did upgrade this box a bit a few years ago. I put a Ryzen 5600G inside, and running Linux, and it became my new PC a few years ago. I bought it during the virus pandemic, when graphic cards were completely unobtainable, and the onboard graphics of this thing was pretty much the only thing you could buy. And it serves me well. I never even considered to put in a more power hungry video card.
Maybe we can get a native Windows NT MIPS port to the Playstation 2 ala the Wii PPC NT port – https://github.com/Wack0/entii-for-workcubes
Bochs in question was built for PS2, not PS/2! It’s ironic that in the first sentence you tell about someone possibly forgetting a slash, then a couple paragraphs later you insert an extra slash in the exact place. PS2 is from Sony, PS/2 is from IBM.