Windows 95 as an Electron application? Sure, why not. Of course, this is a VM running Windows 95, but it’s a simple downloadable package you can install and run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Nothing groundbreaking, but still a fun application of Electron. It’s pretty much a joke according to the developer, the code quality is “accordingly”, and it’s probably deeply illegal since it’s not approved by Microsoft at all.
This is what emulation is good for.
Similar to:
https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/play/3-demon/
However I doubt that the networking stack is operational.
You can install everything up to I would say Windows ME on a new raspberry pi 3B+ in dosbox with small tricks however there will be no networking. Dosbox only provide a sort of ipx emulator which interfaces with apps directly, it does not implement a fully functional virtual network card like AMD PCnet or E1000 in vmware
It would be nice to see that code being added.
It is actually quite cool to run old OS-es this way on a computer fits in your palm. Not to mention one of DOSboxes major advantage to scale your display which will work with new monitors which long don’t support modes such as 640×480 or lower.
They don’t? (my few years old Samsung works fine with lower resolutions / upscales them… though it doesn’t handle more than 60 Hz; so much for “SyncMaster” brand…)
I’ve been watching this on and off for a while now. I find it rather comical how many people seem to think it’s absolutely amazing that it only uses about 200MB of RAM. It’s kind of sad how much our society has come to expect any interesting program to be a severe memory hog.
My first PC, which ran Windows 95b only had 32MB of Memory, a 166Mhz Pentium (with MMX!), a massive 2.5GB hard drive, and a Matrox Millenium II PCI video card. And that thing ran Photoshop 3.0 like a boss!
Yeah, it’s kind of sad how much memory is needed these days to even start current versions of software like Photoshop.
Of course, I also run a bunch of VM’s not much bigger than what you’re quoting, and regularly deal with other systems with less than 256MB of RAM (like the HP 9000 system I had up until about two weeks ago (it finally died after 20 years), with only 192MB of RAM, which I ran diskless with the entire system in RAM), so I’m kind of pedantic about not wasting memory.
There is also em-dosbox and several other tools that use pre-built dosbox images and let you run them directly in a browser.
Lack of support from devs is to be expected but it’s “do-able” nevertheless.
“deeply illegal” makes about as much sense as “light treason”. Where does that leave 1st degree murder? Ultra-double illegal?
For comparison and fun:
AmigaOS MockUp in a browser – this is legal, as it is only fakes the appearance – no real OS:
http://www.taws.ch/WB.html?preset=OS_3.5_XEN
(you can choose older and newer Versions vie “Presets”)
If the intent is to mockup an OS, i still prefer to be a dino park sysadmin
http://jurassicsystems.com/
I can remember waiting outside of Best Buy in a long line to buy Windows 95 on the day it was launched. It really did revolutionize computing and make it easy for the masses. Sure it wasn’t perfect but it was easier to get hardware working on Win95 than on previous versions of Windows including Windows NT which many professionals used at work at the time. What I can envision this little app doing is giving us old timers a means of appreciating the powerful operating systems and hardware we have today and also to show the young people what primitive computing looked like! There is really no realistic reason to run a bonafide Windows 95 implementation because it isn’t compatible with modern hardware and nobody uses it anymore. OS/2 Warp I can understand since it is still used to this day in some ATM machines and other embedded environments. If one were developing for that then they would be interested in eComstation or the newer ArcaOS.
Not the same, but I’ll just leave this here: http://www.osnews.com/story/28013/Try_Windows_93_Today