Windows [Retro-PC series]

Microsoft via Wikipedia

Of course, my Retro-PC was going to have Windows, but what version(s)?

I planned to install Windows 3.1 on my existing MS-DOS, and Windows XP was required by some of the games I have in my collection. I also wanted to have one “in-between” version of Windows – 95, 98 or ME – in the box. I remember ME being ugly and unstable as hell, so I did not even consider it. Windows 95 was one of the “good” operating systems Microsoft has produced over the years, but the lack of FAT32 and limited hardware support (at least to run on my ThinkCentre) drove towards choosing Windows 98, and more precisely the SE (Second Edition) edition of it.

I also wanted to run various emulators (NES, Commodore 64, MAME etc.), and while there are a variety of emulators running on top of many different platforms (MS-DOS, Linux, OSX), the most popular emulator platform is Windows. Usually (and luckily) these emulators still include Windows XP as a minimum requirement. (UPDATE: I now prefer Raspberry Pi for emulation, but might occasionally use Windows or OSX emulators on some tasks.)

So my final selection of operating systems is:

• MS-DOS 7.1 and Windows 3.1
  • MS-DOS games
  • Windows 3 games like Myst
• Windows 98SE
  • Most Windows games in my collection requiring DirectDraw, Direct3D or DirectX 7 or less
• Windows XP
  • Windows games requiring DirectX 8/9 and possibly taking advantage of the 2 CPU cores of Pentium 4 HT.
  • Also used for emulators and other retro-related utilities
• Ubuntu
  • For dual boot and other utilities

Note that Windows XP, or even something like Windows 8.1, is very capable of running older Windows titles as well – mostly because DirectX was backwards compatible until the version 9.0. For me, there was a bit of “authenticity” reasons and fun factors involved trying to get Windows 98 into the box as well. Windows XP is also no longer (= since 2014) officially supported (= it must be “retro” by now), and being one of the best operating systems Microsoft has ever released, having it on board is well justified.

But how to get all these legacy systems installed on a single PC? I will suggest one strategy in my next post.