Sharp NetWalker caught running Windows 95
While the rest of us are content with using Ubuntu on our Sharp NetWalker PC-Z1 MIDs, Pocketables reader Gary wanted to see how well Windows 95 could run on the ARM Cortex A8-powered device.
His interests in such shenanigans started way back when he got DOS running on an iPAQ Pocket PC and have recently been fueled by waiting for the arrival of his Pandora handheld, which some would like to see running QEMU or Wine to emulate Windows on its ARM architecture. Rather than sit around and wait for the Pandora to start shipping, Gary fired up bochs (an x86 PC emulator) on his NetWalker and got Windows 95 up and running in no time.
The process isn't exactly for the uninitiated (i.e., me), so I'll let Gary explain what's involved and how everything is done:
All you have to do is open a terminal window and type: sudo apt-get install bochs ("sudo" means super user and will require your password). You then need to type: sudo apt-get install bochs-x to install the graphical user interface for bochs in Windows. It's all in the ubuntu repositories.
Then it gets a bit trickier. Bochs has no friendly front end. Instead, you have to configure it manually in file called bochsrc. You also have to create a disk image using bximage (which comes with bochs), fdisk the image to partition it, format it, and then copy all of the windows install files onto it by mounting it to the file system (which is quite easy in linux). You then have to boot into bochs from a bootable cd image and then run the setup file that you have previously copied onto the hard disk image. Finally, you can run it.
The main apps I launched in the video [see below] were Notepad, Paint, and Calculator. Anything should work provided it is compatible with the Windows 95 version I have. Some things may be very slow though, and I doubt anything requiring graphics acceleration would work because bochs does not emulate a 3D graphics card. I can run Internet Explorer but I'd need to configure networking to surf to the net and I haven't tried that yet. Bochs is not like parallels or vmware – it doesn't come with drivers to detect the host network device – not in so far as I am aware. Everything pretty much has to be done manually.
Gary hasn't tried anything other than Windows 95 but says that Win98, various x86 Linux distros, and DOS should all work fine. Windows XP, he says, will likely be much too slow to be of any use since it would require 128-256MB of memory (Win95, in comparison, only needed 32MB), but getting it to run could probably be done.
Pretty cool, huh?
Thanks, Gary!
