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You can run Windows 95 on any current x86-64 PC. They are basically backwards compatible all the way to 8088. The problem is you will have no drivers for any
by paulmd 7y ago
You can run Windows 95 on any current x86-64 PC. They are basically backwards compatible all the way to 8088. The problem is you will have no drivers for any OS that old.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2BSLkQLDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2BSLkQLDA
- jplayer01 7y agoWhich is the point, no? What good is a PC where nothing works? Cool video though.
- userbinator 7y agoThe standard PC peripherals will still work, and although you can only use one core, it's one core of a very fast CPU (relative to what was around when it was released and designed to run acceptably on), and gives you an idea how much "modern bloat" there is.
- jplayer01 7y agoWell, ignoring the fact that WLAN/Ethernet won’t work without drivers (since internet is a bad idea with XP anyway), Sound and graphics don’t work either. So games are out, which is really the only reason I have for running XP. It’s too limited without working drivers and can’t be considered a working system.
- throwaheyy 7y agoYou likely wouldn’t find DIMMs small enough to boot it though. When I tried to prank my boss by replacing the HDD in his machine with one loaded with W95 it would not boot with even 512mb.
- paulmd 7y agoThere are command-line options to limit the amount of memory Windows sees. See the video.
- jasomill 7y agoWhile "any current x86-64 PC" is an exaggeration — UEFI-only systems, in particular, won't boot any version of DOS or Windows 9x — drivers may be less of a problem than you think: - Even fairly recent systems with hybrid UEFI/BIOS still provide an IDE-compatible mode for onboard SATA controllers that should work with Windows 95. - Windows 95 supports 16-bit MS-DOS drivers and BIOS disk access, so any storage controller with BIOS boot support and/or 16-bit MS-DOS drivers (disk, optical, ASPI) should work. - Modern video cards still provide SVGA-compatible modes that should work. - PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports should work. - Serial and parallel ports should work. - USB devices with legacy emulation provided by the system's BIOS (floppy, mass storage [hard drive, flash drive], keyboard, mouse, [optical?]) should work, assuming they're plugged in at boot. Likely problems: - non-emulated USB devices - network adapters - audio - large amounts of RAM For network and audio, your best bet would probably be to find a (still relatively recent) machine with pre-Express PCI slots for an older NIC and sound card (some not terribly old workstations and servers have these); while PCIe-to-PCI, and even PCIe-to-ISA, expansion boxes exist, the ones I've seen are both expensive (>$1,000) and hard to find on the used market.
- gambiting 7y agoThat's not true - Windows 95/98 will crash on startup if you have more than one CPU core present. You could make it work on Pentium D/CoreDuo/Core2Duo cpus by disabling the second core, but nowadays with modern CPUs there's no option to limit the CPU to a single core. Unless there is some workaround for it that I'm not aware of.
- vwuon 7y agoI've seen many BIOS that allow you to do that
- paulmd 7y agoI've never seen a BIOS not allow that. Often called "multi-processing" or something similar in BIOS.
- gambiting 7y agoI've haven't seen a bios that would allow disabling all cores except for one since at least intel 2xxx series - there is almost always a switch to disable hyperthreading, but a switch to disable all cores bar one?
- vwuon 7y agoFrom my own computer. Haswell CPU https://i.imgur.com/5xPvoPA.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5xPvoPA.jpg