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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

I'll just leave this here to stoke the flames of nostalgia:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Winamp2.PNG

I've said this a few times on here but I'll say it again. Starting from 86Box, archive.org, and winworld, I've been building a VM of my 1996 Gateway 2000 with Windows 95 and re-installing all the old goodies. I also did a find on my mp3 library and found everything last modified before 1999 and loaded them up on there as well. So now I can actually go into a super realistic VM experience in full screen and use Winamp 2 just like I remember. It's a very satisfying type of active nostalgia.

I have Encarta 96, MS Bob, Windows Entertainment Pack (including SkiFree), Arcade (Asteroids/Missile Command/Centipede/Tempest), MS Golf 2, Cooking with Julia Child, Tonka Construction, Winamp, Netscape Navigator, Space Cadet Pinball, MS Works, etc. Even My Briefcase is there!

I turned on a sound profile so there are little jungle clicks everywhere. Mystify your Mind works great as a screensaver. The Microsoft Windows Sound still is clicky when it runs during boot. Great times.

Anyway Winamp 2 works like a charm and the j-hotkey still is unsurpassed in my experience for rapidly searching a music collection.

How is 3D acceleration for things like ATI Rage?

Oh I haven't gotten quite that far yet. Will need to get into it soon to get Descent II and stuff working.

Man I'd love to get a copy of that vm!

Oh man - can you share a screenshot or video? I'd love to see this!

Ah, the WEP. Loved me some Chip's Challenge and JezzBall.

I’ve considered setting up an old OS VM for various types of serious usage, but as snappy and responsive as they are you can feel a certain reduced crispness compared to real hardware, probably due to latency increases coming from the hardware and software layers involved.

I’ll have to try with Windows but it’s apparent when running Mac OS 9 and early releases of OS X in qemu-ppc or SheepShaver — despite the machine the VM is running on being vastly more powerful the old Powebook G3 Pismo in my closet (modded with an SSD of course) feels more snappy.

What’d I’d really like to see is reproduction old hardware on modern process nodes with a modern port outlay, screen, etc. Something like that Pismo could easily fit on a card the size of an rPi compute element which would make it easy to fit in just about any laptop chassis imaginable.

I have something similar as well - basically reliving my childhood computing experience when computing felt so exciting. I got all my childhood games (Age of Empires, Midtown Madness, etc.) installed as well as software from the day as well. I found Digital Blasphemy wallpapers which capture the late 90s/early 2000s feelings as well. It feels good to power the VM on and just listen to an old MP3 collection as well as play some games.

Or a few more: https://skins.webamp.org/

WinAmp really whips the llama's ass.

https://webamp.org/

Nostalgia? I still use winamp v2 every day...

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