9 ms·

Windows 95 in Electron

137 points by modinfo 4y ago

marcodiego 4y ago
I'd be more impressed by Electron in Windows 95 or DOS. This would allow modern software on ancient OS's. EDIT: Of course, the project IS impressive. Never wanted to demote it.
- timw4mail 4y ago
  Quite unlikely to happen, though. The Chromium project is quite unfriendly to legacy platforms.
- StevePerkins 4y ago
  Hacker News is the worst. You could kill yourself for two years on personal project, that is a towering achievement of innovation and technical accomplishment, and the Show HN thread will fixate on the font kerning in your announcement blog post.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  I would bet that by porting a x86 emulator to electron it actually runs on _less_ platforms than native x86 emulators. I mean, emulators are practically one of the most ported software and as a consequence one of the most portable software overall.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Good luck. Windows 95 (despite it's best attempt at being a "32-bit" OS) has a limit of somewhere < 512MB of RAM.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I’m old enough to remember jokes about it when it was new: "Windows 95: a 32 bit shell for a 16 bit patch for an 8 bit OS originally written for a 4 bit processor by a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- gtk40 4y ago
  There are some fairly recent versions of Gecko that have been backported to Windows 95. I played around with RetroZilla a few years ago on Windows 95 and was able to get many modern sites to work. The K-Meleon project has even more recent work in this regard. It'd probably be easier to start with Gecko for this work than Chromium.
- creativenolo 4y ago
  If everyone would stop shipping on electron I could carry around 1 floppy disk per app rather than the 100+ for each electron app.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Maybe I'm just going insane, but I have extreme deja vu about this comment and its replies. Did this post and its comments get refreshed or something to look new? I swear I read all of these verbatim a while ago.
  - lioeters 4y ago
    I've had the same sense of deja vu on various topics, like Electron. I'm pretty sure the HN crowd revisits favorite themes regularly, and repeats basically the same arguments back and forth, usually adding new information or ideas on every iteration.
rvnx 4y ago
In the README it says in a trolling way "should it have been a native app?" but actually it's not a bad concept at all. The reason to use Electron is to not have to take care of app portability and also to limit the number of expensive C++ developers you need to hire. That's also why doing a mobile website / Progressive Web App / Bundled Web App is a hack that makes sense, though the "right" way is to develop a native app with one or two additional developers (which is absurd, because then you have roadmaps that get out of sync between platforms). Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company.
- rahen 4y ago
  I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'm thinking the same for my fictive automotive manufacturing corporation. Engineers are expensive; I'd rather quickly cobble up something with chinesium parts that somewhat rolls and gets 50MPG with a terrible safety record, so I can transfer the costs to society. Gas and insurance policies are cheap, especially if you're not the one paying for them. Engineers are not. Let's do the same with aircraft and software and everything else and see how things turn out.
  - djbusby 4y ago
    It's maybe trolling. > Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company. This is true and MBAs love to put the costs somewhere else. The software only has to work well enough for my next bonus and line item on my CV.
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Is he wrong though?
      - alxlaz 4y ago
        Ask the guy who tried to call 911 from a phone whose software was just good enough for an MBA's next bonus ;-).
simias 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand what it is exactly, the page mentions QEMU so I assume it's emulating a PC and booting Windows on it? So does it mean that they've compiled QEMU for a Javascript target and packaged it in Electron? If so, does it mean that it's a generic PC emulator in electron that can run any kind of PC-compatible software, including other OS?
- jchw 4y ago
  It’s based on v86, so yeah, pretty much. https://github.com/copy/v86 https://github.com/copy/v86
ape4 4y ago
Wow, its based on v86 which "emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance."
el_oni 4y ago
This is great, can you install other software on it? If so it would be actually quite useful in science where old computers are used because of old software used to run old instruments. The old GC-FID i used during my PhD ran on windows 95. If that software could run on electron they could actually get some modern hardware to run those old machines
- mysterydip 4y ago
  You can already run win95 under several different emulators (pcem, dosbox-x to name two).
mysterydip 4y ago
Fun project! Recommended RAM to run Windows 95 was 8MB, curious to find out how much this uses to emulate everything around the OS.
- mherrmann 4y ago
  2GB for Electron, 8MB for Windows.
- jchw 4y ago
  Just ran it to find out. On my machine, about 292 MiB, with the default machine, which seems to give about 128 MiB to the VM. That's measured using the sum of private working sets of all processes, since Electron/Chromium is multi-process. This actually doesn't seem like such a bad outcome, though, I don't know how it will scale if you increase the amount of RAM available to the VM.
  - AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    So ~35 times overhead seems like an OK outcome... This what development has become!
    - jchw 4y ago
      I know replying to this is wrong, but what the hell. 1. The underlying machine has 128 MiB of RAM, not 8 MiB. Windows 98 can run with 8 MiB of RAM, but that's not what they did here. My family had a Windows 9x computer when I still lived with my parents, and before we retired it, it had 512 MiB of RAM. 2. Dividing the memory usage by the guest machine's amount of memory does not seem like a good approach to calculate the overhead. There may be some per-byte-of-RAM overhead, but I bet it's more likely that the memory overhead does not scale much with guest machine RAM, since it is probably just a giant arraybuffer. 3. Compared to what? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most virtual machine software has RAM overhead of some kind, so we need to establish at least some reasonable baseline if we're really going to try to figure out how within reason this is. (Expounding on the last point, people are happy to spend a lot of resources on emulation, certainly well exceeding "35x overhead" in some cases. And at that point, we are talking about overhead that would scale.)
snickerer 4y ago
From the technology point of view running-real-software-as-JS-in-your-browser is always impressive and entertaining to watch. Cheers to the developers for such fun projects! When we talk about efficiency of (other) electron apps made for productive use… the web page says this project does run Doom (cool) at a resolution of 640x480. So electron cripples my 2022 machine down to something like a 100 Mhz Pentium. That is totally fine for a funny tech demo, but I hate the need to use such programs for my daily work. But, sorry, Pentium, I must take that crippling stuff back. I had chat apps in 1998 that had much higher responsiveness and faster start-up time than the electron chat apps I need to use for work today. You, dear reader, may have already guessed my point here. Today software development is done often with many layers of bloat and glue, just to save some developer time and necessary developer expertise in the short term. The price we pay for this is a tremendous waste of resources.
- iasay 4y ago
  I can see the mountains of coal being used to power electron apps in my head…
- jeffhuys 4y ago
  > just to save some developer time That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so popular. But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.
  - AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
    Exactly this. I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams. Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype! How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?
    - 4y ago
isoprophlex 4y ago
> You can also run windows95 in Electron, in a virtual X server, in a JavaScript VNC client, in a Kubernetes workspace. It's turtles all the way down
jdthedisciple 4y ago
Does it run Age of Empires I?
AndrianV 4y ago
Hello, so occasionally you might get this white screen that prevents you from being able to stop, restart, or reset. I'm shocked that no one else running Windows 95 noticed this problem.
merricksb 4y ago
First seen here as a Show HN in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797
davibu 4y ago
I had the opportunity to do some modest contributions to the underlying project (v86). I wanted to implement the full SIMD instruction sets, but it was almost impossible due to the current limitations of javascript. The only way to do it properly would have been to wait for the support of SIMD instructions in webassembly. I had a chat with the main contributor Fabian, he had plans to port v86 in webassembly. I wonder if he ever succeed. So this not a complete emulation as far I know, there is room for improvements.
thedougd 4y ago
In the mid-2000s I used Lotus Sametime at work. We could send text, emoji, pictures, and more. It had a plugin system that would extend the client side to do things like automatically look up issue numbers found in the chat and expand them into hyperlinks with full descriptions. It was cross platform with a native UI thanks to Eclipse RCP, Java, and SWT. We moaned at the time that it sucked up 200 megabytes of memory and had a long startup time. I use Microsoft Teams daily and sometimes chuckle that in some areas we seem to only reinvent the wheel with dubious outcomes.
racl101 4y ago
Wanna get this just for minesweeper.
smm11 4y ago
The NeXT OS is all but running on your iPhone now. Sort of a reverse resource waste.
divbzero 4y ago
I’m installing this just to play Minesweeper.
- daveslash 4y ago
  I'm holing out for Electron Windows 3.1 so I can bust out Chip's Challenge and Ski Free.

137 points by modinfo 4y ago

I'd be more impressed by Electron in Windows 95 or DOS. This would allow modern software on ancient OS's. EDIT: Of course, the project IS impressive. Never wanted to demote it.

timw4mail 4y ago
Quite unlikely to happen, though. The Chromium project is quite unfriendly to legacy platforms.
StevePerkins 4y ago
Hacker News is the worst. You could kill yourself for two years on personal project, that is a towering achievement of innovation and technical accomplishment, and the Show HN thread will fixate on the font kerning in your announcement blog post.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
AshamedCaptain 4y ago
I would bet that by porting a x86 emulator to electron it actually runs on _less_ platforms than native x86 emulators. I mean, emulators are practically one of the most ported software and as a consequence one of the most portable software overall.
bluedino 4y ago
Good luck. Windows 95 (despite it's best attempt at being a "32-bit" OS) has a limit of somewhere < 512MB of RAM.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I’m old enough to remember jokes about it when it was new: "Windows 95: a 32 bit shell for a 16 bit patch for an 8 bit OS originally written for a 4 bit processor by a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
gtk40 4y ago
There are some fairly recent versions of Gecko that have been backported to Windows 95. I played around with RetroZilla a few years ago on Windows 95 and was able to get many modern sites to work. The K-Meleon project has even more recent work in this regard. It'd probably be easier to start with Gecko for this work than Chromium.
creativenolo 4y ago
If everyone would stop shipping on electron I could carry around 1 floppy disk per app rather than the 100+ for each electron app.
seanw444 4y ago
Maybe I'm just going insane, but I have extreme deja vu about this comment and its replies. Did this post and its comments get refreshed or something to look new? I swear I read all of these verbatim a while ago.
- lioeters 4y ago
  I've had the same sense of deja vu on various topics, like Electron. I'm pretty sure the HN crowd revisits favorite themes regularly, and repeats basically the same arguments back and forth, usually adding new information or ideas on every iteration.

rvnx 4y ago

In the README it says in a trolling way "should it have been a native app?" but actually it's not a bad concept at all. The reason to use Electron is to not have to take care of app portability and also to limit the number of expensive C++ developers you need to hire. That's also why doing a mobile website / Progressive Web App / Bundled Web App is a hack that makes sense, though the "right" way is to develop a native app with one or two additional developers (which is absurd, because then you have roadmaps that get out of sync between platforms). Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company.

rahen 4y ago
I'm not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'm thinking the same for my fictive automotive manufacturing corporation. Engineers are expensive; I'd rather quickly cobble up something with chinesium parts that somewhat rolls and gets 50MPG with a terrible safety record, so I can transfer the costs to society. Gas and insurance policies are cheap, especially if you're not the one paying for them. Engineers are not. Let's do the same with aircraft and software and everything else and see how things turn out.
- djbusby 4y ago
  It's maybe trolling. > Hardware is cheap, especially when you are not the one paying for it. Engineers are expensive for your company. This is true and MBAs love to put the costs somewhere else. The software only has to work well enough for my next bonus and line item on my CV.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Is he wrong though?
    - alxlaz 4y ago
      Ask the guy who tried to call 911 from a phone whose software was just good enough for an MBA's next bonus ;-).

simias 4y ago

I'm not sure I understand what it is exactly, the page mentions QEMU so I assume it's emulating a PC and booting Windows on it? So does it mean that they've compiled QEMU for a Javascript target and packaged it in Electron? If so, does it mean that it's a generic PC emulator in electron that can run any kind of PC-compatible software, including other OS?

jchw 4y ago
It’s based on v86, so yeah, pretty much. https://github.com/copy/v86 https://github.com/copy/v86

ape4 4y ago

Wow, its based on v86 which "emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance."

el_oni 4y ago

This is great, can you install other software on it? If so it would be actually quite useful in science where old computers are used because of old software used to run old instruments. The old GC-FID i used during my PhD ran on windows 95. If that software could run on electron they could actually get some modern hardware to run those old machines

mysterydip 4y ago
You can already run win95 under several different emulators (pcem, dosbox-x to name two).

mysterydip 4y ago

Fun project! Recommended RAM to run Windows 95 was 8MB, curious to find out how much this uses to emulate everything around the OS.

mherrmann 4y ago
2GB for Electron, 8MB for Windows.
jchw 4y ago
Just ran it to find out. On my machine, about 292 MiB, with the default machine, which seems to give about 128 MiB to the VM. That's measured using the sum of private working sets of all processes, since Electron/Chromium is multi-process. This actually doesn't seem like such a bad outcome, though, I don't know how it will scale if you increase the amount of RAM available to the VM.
- AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  So ~35 times overhead seems like an OK outcome... This what development has become!
  - jchw 4y ago
    I know replying to this is wrong, but what the hell. 1. The underlying machine has 128 MiB of RAM, not 8 MiB. Windows 98 can run with 8 MiB of RAM, but that's not what they did here. My family had a Windows 9x computer when I still lived with my parents, and before we retired it, it had 512 MiB of RAM. 2. Dividing the memory usage by the guest machine's amount of memory does not seem like a good approach to calculate the overhead. There may be some per-byte-of-RAM overhead, but I bet it's more likely that the memory overhead does not scale much with guest machine RAM, since it is probably just a giant arraybuffer. 3. Compared to what? I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most virtual machine software has RAM overhead of some kind, so we need to establish at least some reasonable baseline if we're really going to try to figure out how within reason this is. (Expounding on the last point, people are happy to spend a lot of resources on emulation, certainly well exceeding "35x overhead" in some cases. And at that point, we are talking about overhead that would scale.)

snickerer 4y ago

From the technology point of view running-real-software-as-JS-in-your-browser is always impressive and entertaining to watch. Cheers to the developers for such fun projects! When we talk about efficiency of (other) electron apps made for productive use… the web page says this project does run Doom (cool) at a resolution of 640x480. So electron cripples my 2022 machine down to something like a 100 Mhz Pentium. That is totally fine for a funny tech demo, but I hate the need to use such programs for my daily work. But, sorry, Pentium, I must take that crippling stuff back. I had chat apps in 1998 that had much higher responsiveness and faster start-up time than the electron chat apps I need to use for work today. You, dear reader, may have already guessed my point here. Today software development is done often with many layers of bloat and glue, just to save some developer time and necessary developer expertise in the short term. The price we pay for this is a tremendous waste of resources.

iasay 4y ago
I can see the mountains of coal being used to power electron apps in my head…
jeffhuys 4y ago
> just to save some developer time That's actually the #1 reason to use any of these bloated development environments. And it's also the reason why it's so popular. But I agree, here we are, getting angry at bitcoin because it uses so much energy, but if I would need to guess, could it be that Discord and Slack _alone_ use more energy world-wide than the entire bitcoin network? Those are on 100% of the time on most PCs.
- AndrewThrowaway 4y ago
  Exactly this. I have a brand new laptop and I could swear I had much more responsiveness in any other chat app 15 years ago than I have now in MS Teams. Everything is delayed and "not immediate" while 15 years ago it was in Skype! How much power is being wasted, CO2 generated globally because of this?
  - 4y ago

isoprophlex 4y ago

> You can also run windows95 in Electron, in a virtual X server, in a JavaScript VNC client, in a Kubernetes workspace. It's turtles all the way down

jdthedisciple 4y ago

Does it run Age of Empires I?

AndrianV 4y ago

Hello, so occasionally you might get this white screen that prevents you from being able to stop, restart, or reset. I'm shocked that no one else running Windows 95 noticed this problem.

merricksb 4y ago

First seen here as a Show HN in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17827797

davibu 4y ago

I had the opportunity to do some modest contributions to the underlying project (v86). I wanted to implement the full SIMD instruction sets, but it was almost impossible due to the current limitations of javascript. The only way to do it properly would have been to wait for the support of SIMD instructions in webassembly. I had a chat with the main contributor Fabian, he had plans to port v86 in webassembly. I wonder if he ever succeed. So this not a complete emulation as far I know, there is room for improvements.

thedougd 4y ago

In the mid-2000s I used Lotus Sametime at work. We could send text, emoji, pictures, and more. It had a plugin system that would extend the client side to do things like automatically look up issue numbers found in the chat and expand them into hyperlinks with full descriptions. It was cross platform with a native UI thanks to Eclipse RCP, Java, and SWT. We moaned at the time that it sucked up 200 megabytes of memory and had a long startup time. I use Microsoft Teams daily and sometimes chuckle that in some areas we seem to only reinvent the wheel with dubious outcomes.

racl101 4y ago

Wanna get this just for minesweeper.

smm11 4y ago

The NeXT OS is all but running on your iPhone now. Sort of a reverse resource waste.

divbzero 4y ago

I’m installing this just to play Minesweeper.

daveslash 4y ago
I'm holing out for Electron Windows 3.1 so I can bust out Chip's Challenge and Ski Free.