The submitted URL (http://web.archive.org/web/20090209050149/http://www.etek.ch...) is crashing due to an "internal error", so I've changed it to a different URL which isn't - at least for now.
Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
101–110 of 140 posts
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#102Hellz yes. I remember buying this and hacking together my own Win 98 distros: https://www.litepc.com/98lite.html
Can't believe that their product page is still up. I believe it came about after the 90's MS anti-trust cases. MS argued that IE was integral to Windows, so these devs made a product to strip IE out, just to show that it wasn't as integral as MS claimed. Then they built on it and it became a legit product for slimming down Windows installs.
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#103Love this. Now someone show me how to make a nano Windows 10 installation without all the telemetry BS. Essentially the kernel only with custom explorer.exe. Experimented with modding Hyper-V Server (the free one) with some success, but too many DLLs missing and multimedia functions don't work.
I wanted to create a similar "from scratch" installation by adding the bootloader and the kernel to a virtual disk image, then connecting the kernel-mode debugger from the Driver Kit to a virtual machine COM port, and checking what files the kernel expects to see before it falls over (as it doesn't find them). My end goal would have been to add MSYS2 and launch an init system and ultimately a terminal. Unfortunately there were a lot of steps before the system gets to a usable state, I don't think I was anywhere near that point even after a whole lot of reboots & debug sessions.
The summary in this Wikipedia article about the startup process helped a lot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_startup_process
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#104In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…
You could also do a slipstream build and make a windows iso that had all your programs and drivers pre-installed. It was very handy in the days when windows seemed to require reinstalling every few months.
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see how using a BMP would've taken a hit on RAM; it needs to decompress the JPEG to display on the screen anyway, after all.
Well, maybe you have to remember the capacities of these days. If my memory serves me right, a "good" computer for win98se was 64 MB of RAM. But of course, there were plenty of "less powerful" ones still running, with 32 or even 16 MB of RAM. With such limitation, I can see how a 800x600 BMP image can become a drain on RAM. The swap engine tries to make up for it transparently by using swap space on spin-disk HDD, bu…
I think the parent is saying that the jpeg will need to be stored uncompressed in ram - likely in exactly the same format as the bmp is stored in memory - for the graphics system to actually render it out to screen. Not that any "extra" cost of a BMP would be trivial.
So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly the same memory amount.
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#106My first PC I ever owned was scrap gathered from my friends. My only HDD was 120MB Conner Peripherals HDD that fell on asphalt out of jacket pocket of my friend while he was riding a bike (no kidding!) and was crisscrossed with bad sectors. I put up an ambitious (back then) plan to map out all broken sectors and then try to fit Windows 95 and Delphi2 onto the rest. I remember I was left with something like 70MB of us…
> Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than (https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html)
> The Wikipedia page for C++ (214,251 bytes).
$ wget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal
$ wc Turbo_Pascal
668 10672 164349 Turbo_Pascal
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, maybe you have to remember the capacities of these days. If my memory serves me right, a "good" computer for win98se was 64 MB of RAM. But of course, there were plenty of "less powerful" ones still running, with 32 or even 16 MB of RAM. With such limitation, I can see how a 800x600 BMP image can become a drain on RAM. The swap engine tries to make up for it transparently by using swap space on spin-disk HDD, bu…
I think the parent is saying that the jpeg will need to be stored uncompressed in ram - likely in exactly the same format as the bmp is stored in memory - for the graphics system to actually render it out to screen. Not that any "extra" cost of a BMP would be trivial. So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly the same memory amount.
> So, after they're loaded and (possibly) scaled to fit the screen, I'd expect every background image to use exactly the same memory amount.
Well, not centered or tiled backgrounds, which I recall Windows did support, and upscaling could be done on a per-pixel basis (although I don't know if that was supported), but yes, the image format shouldn't matter.
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#108In the days when Windows was easier to crack, it was not uncommon to find very small, specialised ISOs of "miniature windows" designed specifically for running a certain task -- typically some form of data-recovery app, system repair/maintenance or similar -- and they would fit on a single CD-R, have almost no system requirements, and, if I recall successfully, be bloody useful to my school's computer administrators…
I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world. Windows just struggles so much to be independent from its user, that I realized that I have to give up. I hope that many did the same and now nurture their talent where at least they don't have to swim dead against the current.
I found this same hacker spirit in the FOSS world.
Unfortunately that "hacker spirit" seems to end at "must have the source code"; the same can't be said of those customising Windows and such, who definitely didn't have the source but succeeded nonetheless.
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hehe, neat! I remember doing something similar, albeit once accidentally. Instead of changing the shell (e.g. to LiteStep), I forced an old DOS game to be executed before windows. Exiting the game would result in shutting down the PC. I was terrified that I removed my OS and replaced it with a shareware point and click adventure game. It was a great learning experience though (esp. for my German: https://moorhuhn.fan…
I remember running Winamp in the background along with various games (Diablo, Age of Empires, Red Alert). They would always lag terribly.. but not if you didn't log in first! win+R before login was pretty useful - albeit insecure!
Happy times. With single-digit RAM, every megabyte counts!
Re: Nano98: Windows 98 that boots and runs under 5MB (2003)
#110> I have only tested this with Windows 98se. Win98SE the last windows i actually enjoyed using and believed it was an improvement over the its predecessor. Nowadays im afraid to run modern windows without a VM and a firewall.
Windows 98 Second Edition is terrible in many ways. I could probably hit the comment limit listing them. Yet it remains my favourite operating system of all time, because everything else (yes, even precious Debian!) is just worse . Worse UI, worse memory use, worse hackability… In Windows 98 SE, there was a button next to “minimise” that would give every widget a tooltip explaining what it did and how to use it; most…
Windows 98 SE included its own kernel-based virtual machine system, which it used for multi-tasking DOS and “sandboxing” DOS drivers. (They had a global lock and full privileges, though, so it's not really much of a sandbox.)
This is one aspect of the Win9x series which is little-mentioned and little-understood, but IMHO actually represents a huge technical achievement in comparison to NT (which is more of a "traditional" OS design) --- it's really a hypervisor for DOS VMs with all hardware passed-through by default. A similar architecture wouldn't be seen on the PC until KVM, over a decade later.
Yes, you could log in as the system user by clicking “cancel” on the “enter your username and password” box.
Win9x being thoroughly a single-user OS, that login dialog was designed only for authenticating to the network.