Windows 95 On PlayStation 2 Works As Well As You Expected

June 29, 2025 by 21 Comments

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. Continue reading “Windows 95 On PlayStation 2 Works As Well As You Expected” →

Celebrating 30 Years Of Windows 95 At VCF

April 6, 2025 by 78 Comments

It’s been 30 years since Windows 95 launched. [Ms-Dos5] and [Commodore Z] are celebrating with an epic exhibit at Vintage Computer Festival East 2025. They had no fewer than nine computers — all period-correct machines running versions of Windows 95. The pictures don’t do it justice, so if you are near Wall, NJ, on Sunday, April 5, 2025, definitely go check out this and the rest of the exhibits at VCF.

An exhibit like this isn’t thrown together overnight.  [Commodore Z] and [Ms-Dos5] worked for months to assemble the right mix of desktops, laptops, and peripherals to showcase Windows 95. Many of the computers are networked as well – which was no easy task.

One particular Thinkpad 760e required pliers and force to remove a stuck PCMCIA modem card. After a struggle that was ultimately destructive to the card, the pair determined it was stuck due to a sticker that had effectively glued the card into the laptop. As the sticker finally gave up, the card popped itself out of the laptop.

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A Windows Control Panel Retrospective Amidst A Concerning UX Shift

September 3, 2024 by 154 Comments

Once the nerve center of Windows operating systems, the Control Panel and its multitude of applets has its roots in the earliest versions of Windows. From here users could use these configuration applets to control and adjust just about anything in a friendly graphical environment. Despite the lack of any significant criticism from users and with many generations having grown up with its familiar dialogs, it has over the past years been gradually phased out by the monolithic Universal Windows Platform (UWP) based Settings app.

Whereas the Windows control panel features an overview of the various applets – each of which uses Win32 GUI elements like tabs to organize settings – the Settings app is more Web-like, with lots of touch-friendly whitespace, a single navigable menu, kilometers of settings to scroll through and absolutely no way to keep more than one view open at the same time.

Unsurprisingly, this change has not been met with a lot of enthusiasm by the average Windows user, and with Microsoft now officially recommending users migrate over to the Settings app, it seems that before long we may have to say farewell to what used to be an intrinsic part of the Windows operating system since its first iterations. Yet bizarrely, much of the Control Panel functionality doesn’t exist yet in the Settings app, and it remain an open question how much of it can be translated into the Settings app user experience (UX) paradigm at all.

Considering how unusual this kind of control panel used to be beyond quaint touch-centric platforms like Android and iOS, what is Microsoft’s goal here? Have discovered a UX secret that has eluded every other OS developer?

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The Latest Windows 11 Release Might Not Work On Your Oldest Machines

February 16, 2024 by 80 Comments

Everybody knows you can’t install Windows XP on a 386, or Windows 95 on an original IBM PC. But for Windows 11, the goalposts seem to be changing with newer releases of the existing OS. As covered by The Register, it appears the latest Windows 11 24H2 update might be incompatible with older machines.

It’s all down to the POPCNT CPU instruction. As shared on Twitter by [TheBobPony], the instruction appears in a number of Windows 11 system files, including kernel and USB XHCI drivers. Thus, it appears that any CPU not able to run this instruction will not be able to boot Windows 11. POPCNT was first included in AMD’s Barcelona architecture in 2007, and Intel’s Core processors in 2008. It’s an instruction for counting set bits in a word.

Ultimately, the effect is that computers with older CPUs will no longer be able to run the latest version of Windows 11. It could be as simple as Microsoft engineers enabling more modern CPU instructions at compilation time. However, given affected hardware is more than 15 years old, it’s perhaps likely that Microsoft is perfectly willing to cut these machines off from using the latest versions of its main operating system. We’ve talked about this phenomenon before, too.

In any case, keep a close eye on Windows update if you’re running super-old hardware. Let us know if you’ll be affected in the comments.

Thanks to [Stephen Walters] for the tip!

Linux Fu: The Ultimate Dual Boot Laptop?

November 30, 2021 by 37 Comments

I must confess, that I try not to run Windows any more than absolutely necessary. But for many reasons, it is occasionally necessary. In particular, I have had several laptops that are finicky with Linux. I still usually dual boot them, but I often leave Windows on them for one reason or another. I recently bought a new Dell Inspiron and the process of dual booting it turned out to be unusually effective but did bring up a few challenges.

If you ever wanted a proper dual-booting laptop, you’ll be interested in how this setup works. Sure, you can always repartition the drive, but the laptop has a relatively small drive and is set up very specifically to work with the BIOS diagnostics and recovery so it is always a pain to redo the drive without upsetting the factory tools.

Since the laptop came with a 512 GB NVMe drive, I wanted to upgrade the drive anyway. So one option would have been to put a bigger drive in and then go the normal route. That was actually my intention, but I wound up going a different way.

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A Virtual Tour Of The B-17

September 24, 2019 by 98 Comments

The Boeing B-17 “Flying Fortress” is arguably the most recognizable aircraft of the Second World War. Made infamous by the daring daylight strategic bombing runs they carried out over Germany, more than 12,000 of these four-engined bombers were produced between 1939 and 1945. Thanks to the plane’s renowned survivability in battle, approximately 60% of them made it through the war and returned home to the United States, only to be rounded up in so-called “boneyards” where they were ultimately cut up and sold as scrap. Today there are fewer than 50 intact Boeing B-17s left in the world, and of those, only 11 remain airworthy.

One of them is Nine-O-Nine, a B-17G built in April 7, 1945. This particular aircraft was built too late to see any combat, although in the 1950s she was fitted with various instruments and exposed to three separate nuclear blasts for research purposes. It’s actually not the real Nine-O-Nine either, the original was scrapped after it completed eighteen bombing runs over Berlin. Without a combat record of its own, this bomber was painted to look like the real Nine-O-Nine in honor of its incredible service record of never losing a crewman.

Since 1986, Nine-O-Nine has been owned by the Collings Foundation, who operate her as a living history exhibit. The bomber flies around the United States with an entourage of similarly iconic WWII aircraft as part of the Wings of Freedom Tour, stopping by various airports and giving the public a chance to climb aboard and see the pinnacle of mid-1940s strategic bombing technology. History buffs with suitably deep pockets can even book a seat on one of the scheduled 30-minute flights that take place at every stop on the Tour.

I was lucky enough to have the The Wings of Freedom Tour pass through my area recently, and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to experience this incredible aircraft first hand. The fact that I’m equal parts a coward and miser kept me from taking a ride aboard the 74 year old Nine-O-Nine, at least for now, but I made sure to take plenty of pictures from inside this lovingly restored B-17G while it was safely on the ground.

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The Ultimate IPhone Upgrade

April 13, 2018 by 48 Comments

While Apple products have their upsides, the major downside with them is their closed environment. Most of the products are difficult to upgrade, to say the least, and this is especially true with the iPhone. While some Android devices still have removable storage and replaceable batteries, this has never been an option for any of Apple’s phones. But that doesn’t mean that upgrading the memory inside the phone is completely impossible.

[Scotty] from [Strange Parts] is no stranger to the iPhone, and had heard that there are some shops that can remove the storage chip in the iPhone and replace it with a larger one so he set out on a journey to try this himself. The first step was to program the new chip, since they must have software on them before they’re put in the phone. The chip programmer ironically doesn’t have support for Mac, so [Scotty] had to go to the store to buy a Windows computer first before he could get the chip programmer working right.

After that hurdle, [Scotty] found a bunch of old logic boards from iPhones to perfect his desoldering and resoldering skills. Since this isn’t through-hole technology a lot of practice was needed to desolder the chip from the logic board without damaging any of the other components, then re-ball the solder on the logic board, and then re-soldering the new larger storage chip to the logic board. After some hiccups and a lot of time practicing, [Scotty] finally had an iPhone that he upgraded from 16 GB to 128 GB.

[Scotty] knows his way around the iPhone and has some other videos about other modifications he’s made to his personal phone. His videos are very informative, in-depth, and professionally done so they’re worth a watch even if you don’t plan on trying this upgrade yourself. Not all upgrades to Apple products are difficult and expensive, though. There is one that costs only a dollar.

We sat down with him after his talk at the Hackaday Superconference last November, and we have to say that he made us think more than twice about tackling the tiny computer that lies hidden inside a cell phone. Check out his talk if you haven’t yet.

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