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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

There should be some practical purpose for this, like some Win-95 only app I loved from my childhood that I can now experience again. But I struggle to think of any.

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If Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility. After all, Windows is the operating system running old nuclear codes, hospital monitors, army navigation systems, etc unchanged from the 90's. So your retro games will play just fine on the latest version.

VirtualBox or QEMU will run Windows 95 more "natively" if you need serious Windows 95 emulation.

> Microsoft does one thing right, it's backward compatibility

Except for games. Between XP and 7 many games broke, and the same thing happened again between 7 and 10. There are numerous examples out there.

In fairness, they painted themselves into a corner with intracate APIs designed to skip the normal hardware abstraction layers. It probably takes a ton of effort just to keep old DirectX APIs working through architectural changes.

Also, supporting 16 bit software in long mode requires emulation, and they chose not to.

They completely changed the driver architecture, it was bound to cause some incompatibilities.

I dunno about broke, if they had backported the DirectX stuff to XP there would not have been a breakage. But MS tried to use DX10 as an upsell of Vista, thus making DX9 the last directX version on XP.

What we ended up with was a whole host of game engines that stuck with DX9 to try to reach the largest possible market.

True, but compared to game console backward-compatibility or that you often have to recompile things to get them to work between linux distros made the same year, Windows is pretty damn good about backwards compatibility.

I really with the FOSS world would take backwards compatiblity more seriously, but all i hear is "we lack resources" when it is more correct to say those rainbow haired devs think C and such stale and boring.

What FOSS projects have you improved the backwards compatibility of?

This isn't a discussion of C verses another language. The issue with backward compatibility on Linux (for example) is mostly the versions of glibc, libstdc++, ALSA, X11, OpenGL, etc. which are all C APIs. Backwards compatibility isn't much of a problem with open-source software, because you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself, and API issues by deriving the source code yourself (or using someone else's patch.)

> you can solve ABI issues by simply compiling yourself

As much as I would love it to be, not all Linux software is open-source (or even source-available). Especially in the (disgusting) world of enterprise software, ABI compatibility is crucial because the word "update" basically isn't in their vocabularies. Recompiling isn't backwards compatibility. It's essentially an update. Backwards compatibility implies it Just Works™.

We're talking about open-source software. And in most cases, open-source software is delivered and installed by source, and there's no such thing as an ABI issue in this case. Only API issues remain.

The best game in the Star Wars franchise, "Yoda Stories."

Might not be '95-only, but still worth it for the authentic experience.

For me it's this game: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordor:_The_Depths_of_Dejeno...

It is only playable on Windows 95 (and probably 98 and ME) and I have a Windows 95 virtualbox just for playing this game! I can't wait to test it!!

As for the game itself? It's an old style dungeon crawler. Very primitive but after you play it a little you just get stuck and want to keep improving your character!

Have you played Divinity: Original Sin? I think you’d enjoy it a lot if Dejenol is up your alley.

Not yet but I know the game. I'll definitely try it thanks!

I also have a virtualbox Win95 that I only use for Mordor! It had a great mindless grind sort of appeal.. and the music still gets itself stuck in my head.

I'd love to try out some old 16-bit and/or MS-DOS games on it. But I don't see a way to copy files into its sandbox. Anyone had any luck doing this?

I think you would be better off getting Windows 3.x going in Dosbox.

Yeah you can add drive to the array at the top of https://github.com/felixrieseberg/windows95/blob/master/src/... So build an ISO using imgburn or something and then mount it?

Source: https://twitter.com/felixrieseberg/status/103265669554824806...

Pinball?

Diablo 2, Anno 1607

Diablo 2 runs just fine under Wine.

They also have Mac version so you're covered.

The late 90s and early 2000s had a slew of fantastic PC games that I would love to be able to play again

I might try to play LEGO Loco on this. I know I've been unable to on Win 10

MS Paint

Old versions of Excel?

Odell Down Under?

Starcraft

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