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Running Windows 98 in the Browser

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Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#141

Post by creshal »

makeitdouble wrote: post #109
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 2000 was memory protected, and still had very modest hardware requirements. IMO the pinnacle of Windows UX, everything after that was downhill.

It is true, yet multi language support was near non existent, you had a special version for CJK, digging the registry was a common thing, good luck trying to read a linux partition and an emulation of a bash shell would be the best you'd get. All in all I respect the nostalgy, and see how many people would still be fine with these restrictions. I personally wouldn't want to go back to these day short of being paid a…

Windows 2000 has

- full UTF-16 support, l10n was painful on purpose for licensing / differential pricing — Microsoft simply didn't want people in rich countries to grab MX/PH licenses and swap over to English/Japanese/other G7 languages. With the far more aggressive licensing schemes of XP and later that was less of a problem.

— Full IFS support, to allow arbitrary, high performance filesystem drivers. Win2k was just obsolete by the time those were mature enough to really use

— A full NT kernel with support for swappable userspaces. The POSIX subsystem was deliberately crippled by MS to fulfil federal requirements without allowing real interoperability, but nothing would've stopped them from doing a WSL1-equivalent BSD/Linux subsystem. (WSL2 would've been impossible simply because hardware virtualization for x86 didn't exist)

None of those features really need the full array of modern bloat, where even hitting the start button can take seconds to refresh all the adverts.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#142

Post by opan »

p3n1s wrote: post #139
rahen wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, but this shell still ran in a 32 bit VM on top of DOS (16 bit). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_9x#Virtual_Machine_Man...

No, what they are referring to: you could actually just exit Windows entirely, or just skip booting into it and what you would be left at is a plain real mode DOS environment. From your own reference: To end-users, MS-DOS appears as an underlying component of Windows 95. For example, it is possible to prevent the loading of the graphical user interface and boot the system into a real-mode MS-DOS environment. You can…

>you could actually just exit Windows entirely, or just skip booting into it and what you would be left at is a plain real mode DOS environment.

That sounds handy. A bit like the TTYs on most unix-like systems (I don't think macOS has them).

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#143

Post by Trixter »

avlevy-ms wrote: post #135

I tried out the bootchess implementation on the website, and while it is very impressive to fit a chess-playing program in under 512 bytes, fair warning that it is not a complete implementation of chess. I tried castling and it didn't work, then found this comment explaining more: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64962#c715279

A more complete chess that fits in a boot sector is Toledo Atomchess: https://nanochess.org/chess6.html

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#144

Post by toast0 »

calamari4065 wrote: post #122
userbinator wrote: post #97

Run a DOS box inside that, and you actually have a VM running inside that VM. Win9x (and I believe it started with Windows/386) are based on a hypervisor architecture with minimal protections. The Win32 environment is essentially a protected-mode DOS application that also runs its own application format, and is itself a VM, along with each "DOS box" that gets created.

95 and prior were literally running on top of DOS. If you exited the Windows environment, you were left on a real DOS shell. 98 is when they changed to what you're describing, AFAIK

95 starts from dos and can exit to dos (maybe? my memory isn't reliable back then, I seem to remember it having a shut down screen and I thought reboot into dos rather than exit to dos?), but that doesn't mean dos runs under it. When a 386 mode Windows runs, it subsumes DOS; the DOS becomes virtualized on top of the Windows kernel, and when Windows exits, it puts things back to how they were.

It's messy and weird, but progress. Windows NT operates differently and I don't think ever started from DOS.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#145

Post by guestbest »

peterhull90 wrote: post #78

Bravo! Was there anyone used the 'Briefcase' back in the day? I'd forgotten about that. In fact I got so in the zone that I pressed ALT-F4 to close Win98 notepad and shut down my whole web browser instead!

Briefcase is as handy for portable drives such as Zip drives. Yahoo also had an online version was much more restrictive

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#146

Post by toast0 »

liotier wrote: post #15
tonoto wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still, during the time of Windows 95/98 I could hardly play even a 128kbps MP3 with WinAmp in my Pentium 133MHz with 12MB of Ram where I had got rid of lots of bloatware. At the same time I could play it smoothly in Linux with a full blown desktop environment (Window Maker) running. So it was a bad performer in comparison even back then.

Let's not exaggerate: Winamp .mp3 playback was just fine on any Pentium running Windows 9x - though I concede that even my Pentium 75 had 16 MB RAM and I have never seen a Pentium with less than that. On the other hand, extracting a CD and compressing it's .wav to .mp3 was a whole day of computing, and sending the files as attachments through SMTP was enough to elicit flowery vehement objections from my university's…

My Pentium 75 definitely shipped with less than 16MB. I can't remember if we had 4 or 8, but I think we had 16MB when we junked it.

Either way, I played mp3s in winamp while on IRC and sometimes even running netscape. Took at least an hour to get a mp3 though, and I had to throw them all out when I got decent speakers and could hear how terrible they sounded.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#147

Post by p3n1s »

opan wrote: post #142
p3n1s wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what they are referring to: you could actually just exit Windows entirely, or just skip booting into it and what you would be left at is a plain real mode DOS environment. From your own reference: To end-users, MS-DOS appears as an underlying component of Windows 95. For example, it is possible to prevent the loading of the graphical user interface and boot the system into a real-mode MS-DOS environment. You can…

>you could actually just exit Windows entirely, or just skip booting into it and what you would be left at is a plain real mode DOS environment. That sounds handy. A bit like the TTYs on most unix-like systems (I don't think macOS has them).

It's really nothing at all like that. TTYs are the core interface of all terminals in *nix including the one you would use in any X11, Wayland or other graphical environment, those specific incarnations using something called psuedo-ttys but its all the same stuff in the kernel.

What you really mean are plain text mode consoles for which most UNIX likes further extend this to allowing multiple "virtual" consoles to share one display. And MacOS does have text consoles (see video_console.c in the darwin source), they are just not usually used and very hard to get to especially in Apple Silicon era macs (older macs can easily be booted in single user mode with Cmd+S)

But this is still not at all analogous since it's still the same OS underneath. Windows 95 family was a virtual machine manager launched from DOS so booting into DOS means not loading it at all. The issue for compatibility wasn't so much the graphical shell part as the VMM (virtual machine manager).

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#148

Post by userbinator »

toast0 wrote: post #144
calamari4065 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95 and prior were literally running on top of DOS. If you exited the Windows environment, you were left on a real DOS shell. 98 is when they changed to what you're describing, AFAIK

95 starts from dos and can exit to dos (maybe? my memory isn't reliable back then, I seem to remember it having a shut down screen and I thought reboot into dos rather than exit to dos?), but that doesn't mean dos runs under it. When a 386 mode Windows runs, it subsumes DOS; the DOS becomes virtualized on top of the Windows kernel, and when Windows exits, it puts things back to how they were. It's messy and weird, bu…

The interesting part is that "subsumes DOS" actually happens in the style of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Pill_(software) in that DOS isn't aware that a hypervisor has inserted itself under it and is now running it inside a VM.

NT is very much a traditional OS architecture in comparison.

Re: Running Windows 98 in the Browser

#150

Post by taspeotis »

whoopdedo wrote: post #120
taspeotis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one of the first screensavers in the dropdown. Worked for me, albeit slowly.

Oh, the screensaver. I confused myself and thought you were talking about the 3D hovercraft game. Oops.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover!
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