Windows 95

Hey guys I am planinig on buiding a cheep computer to put windows 95 on. Do you think it will work with newish hardware?

Why you would want to do this is beyond me, but I would say no, drivers are not made for that OS anymore thus you would likely not be able to get it going. On the other hand, you can look into virtualization, where you can run a virtual computer within another OS.

i have old ass hardware that would work :P 

Thanks CloudScorpion, It was just somthing that crossed my mind as my 95 machine is getting rather old and parts are getting hard to find as time goes by.

I'd rather buy a vintage system and install 95 on it.

ok fyi widows 95 has a cpu cap of 2.1 ghz and can only use 1 core. (you can hack it and boost the cap up to 3ghz)

95 becomes unstable if you are using more thatn 512mb of ram "Generally, 512MB is said to be the limit for Win95/98...the limit is actually 2GB. But before you can install that much, you have to edit the vcache setting in the system.ini file." if you do go down this path i would get ECCram and going over 1gb of ram will be very hard.

it looks like you can get derect x 9 for win95 and if you have a "newer" copie of 95 you won't be limited to 2gb hardrives(fat16) the "newer" copies support fat32 and good luck finding a usb add in card. you will have to also get a PCI gpu

 EDIT: windows 95 will support usb. I dont think that the usb on a mb will work but you could get lucky. I think agp gpu's will work but I would just go with a 5000 series card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814139074 this should have 95 drivers But you will have to check.

lol, just use xp

for what purpose do you need 95 for?

Showing how retro we can go?

well if what he needs to be acomplished can be done on 2000/XP then he'll have better driver support for things like USB, PCI Express, Sata, dual cores, higher than 2.1Ghz, it would be more expensive sticking with hardware that has 95/98 support (and slower) just about all manufactuars still support XP and 2000, although I do remember seeing a windows 05 folder in a biostart AM3 boards Driver disc

 

If you want to go another retro step go to 3.1 :p.  

Here are a bunch of the windows startup sounds. Brings back computer memories.. BBS's, Doom, Duke3D.

Remember, USB support comes with second edition of Windows 95, you're looking at a Pentium-Pentium 3 era machine.  You might not want to stuff your computer full of RAM when installing 95, prolly you wouldn't get even that much, finding old hardware is hard, but if you're lucky you can get a motherboard with onboard graphics so you will have 1 less item to worry about, the graphics card.  Anyways: You're best off with a Pentium 3 system i guess, ebay still sells parts form that era. Mind you that you'll need an update to use processors faster than 350Mhz, maybe that update is included in windows 95Second Edition. I would reccommend a processor with architecture codenamed Coppermine, its not as fast as Tualatin but you can find more motherboards with Coppermine supprot rather than the other one. But bee careful, get a Coppermine CPU under 1ghz. The 1.2ghz processor wasn't very popular back then  thanks to the infamous Gigahertz race with AMD.  The gigaherz race meant two things: Firstly, the the Coppermine processors(@1.2Ghz) were buggy and had to be revised, secondly Intel was pursuing a newer architecture to get more clockspeed so they came out with NetBurst, te infamous Pentium4-pentiumd era oven-like processors. To conclude, yes you can get a system for windows 95, and you'll be able to use more than 512mb ram with tweaking. But using Coppermine is my personal reccommendation. Finding an motherboard with onboard graphics saves you some hassle aswell.

Also, i'd reccommend Windows 98SE over Windows 95. 

the SSD and heatsink are overkill but you can reuse them if you ever decide to get out of the 90s

Read this entire page and its comments, the whole thread preffered

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/107001-compatible-hardware-with-windows-9x/

I have a DOS 6.22 machine running on a Pentium 233mhz and more memory than DOS can handle.   it's old hardware.. but insane overkill for DOS.

I have it running with an old Network Card, and it can log into a Windows Domain if need be.  It also has the Arachne Web browser for the Graphic happy inclined browsing types.

It's my Retro Gaming machine.   I wrote this huge Batch file that interfaces with it all.... Maybe I should demo my Retro Gaming box.... hmmm.....

I just have a lot of games that I still play in my 95 machine and was thinking about a repacement for it so I could use it less. 

Yes please!

im thinking of the same thing, but im going 98, going to relive the old days of been poor as and also playing epic games! but dont use new hardware some games cant run with it, i cant run grim fandango on my i5 propperly also it has CPU based puzzles which work with the clock speed, which would probs be too fast now to complete. go retro and dont look back!!!

Couldn't you just run the old games on a Windows 7 based machine? I mean, if it doesn't work natively just change the compatibility settings in the properties menu.

Do it! I know i would be interested.

Not all games can run properly in compatibility mode.

I use DosBox for my old games on Win7. 

Currently playing The Pandora Directive, the six CD's i made into ISO files, and via the cfg file in DosBox, i mounted the six ISO files as six CD-rom drives. 

In the game I set the game to use the 6 CD-ROM drives, 1 for each "CD" Works like a charm.

I would go for an older laptop with a reasonably strong graphiccard and then install Win95 on that for the old games.

I have an old Thinkpad T23, and T30, and T41p, I am planning on getting one of them up and running with either Win95, or Win98SE.