Free95: An open-source Windows-compatible operating system | Hacker News Reader

Free95: An open-source Windows-compatible operating system

github.com

28 pointsjnord17 comments

Sorry this is going to be more impolite than most HN comments, but this person doesn't know what they're doing. WriteFile returns hardcoded TRUE. NtReadFile() returns a char*. NtWriteFile does a string compare if the filename is "CON", and the entire functionality is a strcpy() otherwise. This is not what a replacement Windows kernel looks like.

Source: https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/blob/main/free95/...

I really despise people that commit .dll and .exe files to git, and https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/blob/main/free95/... isn't doing themselves any favors. However, https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/blob/main/free95/... makes me wonder if this whole repo is some kind of elaborate joke or something

Dang might need to manually review this post, because those files were wiped 8 minutes after you mentioned this.

Skunkworks folder is 404, too.

If you want a windows - like os there's reactos, right? You can compile it with itself.

Here's the diff :) https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/pull/3/commits/3f...

What would you suggest as an alternative to checking in DLLs?

In general I would expect a mixture of two things: since this is an open source project, it should be building those things from source (even if that source isn't in this specific repo), and/or [related to that one] if it has dependencies upon pre-built binaries then put those in the build script so a reasonable person could audit both what's in that .dll and where it came from. In this specific case it seems like it came from some rando spam site without any idea what is actually in the .dll

This situation seems to be on brand for a repo that has a file named malware.c but I am addressing the general case that you asked

Free95: "Free" as in "a free laugh".

Seems very WIP. Might be easier to start with something like ReactOS[0] and work backwards.

[0]https://reactos.org/

Perhaps they won't even need to work backwards: their implementation claims to support NT syscalls for 95! Just deploy ReactOS then.

I would have thought they could use KernelEx for that.

I would consider this project to be a joke. The code is nasty and you can barely consider this minimal graphical window, an operating system. There is basically nothing built there to contribute or at least that's my thought after reviewing their project on github.

There is a pull request from someone suggesting they are removing malware from this... https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/pull/3

although it looks like the "malware" may have been a joke from the diff

https://github.com/Versoft-Software/Free95/pull/3/commits/3f...

With ReactOS being around and given such a small target audience I don't expect this will go far.

To be honest I wonder if this ends up being part of some CTF challenge

I used something like this back in the day to run Winamp when CarPCs were a thing (to play MP3s before MP3 player stereos came out).

If I knew what I knew now, I'd have done it so much differently, but it was the late 90s/early 2k and we use what we know.

Hmmm, why didn't i see this post before? i'm actually the lead developer of this. Don't believe? then don't. >:)

Can I run Crysis with this?

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