Now that I’ve got the cool QEMU emulator running on my Linux box, I’ve been in the mood to experiment with different OSs. One of the first was Windows 95, which runs just fine inside QEMU.
I created a ~200MB disk image file for the Win95 install. After I confirmed it ran, I wanted to figure out how to reduce the size of that disk image. It was then that I remembered this very cool page telling how to whittle down Windows 95 to under 10 MB. I’ve followed the instructions to create a Windows 95 image just over 7 MB in size! Granted, it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking, but those pieces can be added in as needed.
One interesting hack I’ll try is copying my Win95 image over to my USB keychain drive. The combination of my USB drive and QEMU is like carrying a whole computer on my USB drive. I can take it to any host computer with QEMU installed (Windows, OS X, Linux) and boot it like it was its own machine.
I also discovered a Zaurus port of QEMU last night, but haven’t tried that yet. I can only imagine how glacial Windows would be running inside an i386 emulator on a PDA!
(Incidentally, if you wish to create your own “Micro95” disk image, you’ll need to ensure the msdos.sys file gets copied from the host installation to the micro installation. The creation script missed this file and my Micro 95 wouldn’t boot without it.)
“it won’t run MFC apps nor do networking…”
Those things are overrated.
Sincerely,
Calc, Notepad, Paint and MineSweeper
“those can be added in as needed.”
The Micro95 recipe gives you a bare-bones Win95 desktop. It’s the minimum you can have and still call it Windows 95.
But it will run solitare, so it’s definitely usable. 🙂
On a related note, I booted it from my USB key drive just fine. Pretty cool.