Windows 95 Running on a PlayStation 2: A Partial Success with No Doom

Alright, let me take a crack at this. Here’s my take on the article:

So, here’s the wild adventure of Jace from MetraByte—a YouTuber who loves to mess around with tech in the quirkiest ways. This time, they tried to force Windows 95 and Doom onto a PlayStation 2. Yeah, you read that right. Windows 95 on a PS2. It’s as insane as it sounds. After a lot, and I mean a lot, of fiddling and head-scratching, they managed to get Windows 95 to sort of boot. But Doom? No dice.

You might be thinking, "Why even bother with such ancient tech?" I know, right? Windows 95 is almost like a relic from 1995, and the PS2? It made its grand entrance in 2000. In tech years, they’re practically ancient artifacts. So, you’d expect the PS2 could just handle a little 1995 software. Haha, nope! The main drama was getting x86 stuff to jive with Sony’s different setup. Imagine trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Seriously, it’s crazy town.

Anyway—or wait, was I talking about poking around the PS2? Yeah—Jace squished hours of tinkering into a video less than half an hour long. It was a modded PS2, some game controller thingy with a QWERTY keypad, and a heap of USB and hard drives. I think there was a special USB stick involved, packed with all kinds of goodies—like a dose of homebrew magic and DOS emulators. Fun times.

So, Jace starts with DOSBox, pounding away at getting old-school Windows to boot, but it was like watching paint dry. If paint actually refused to dry. After 47 times with nothing but goose eggs, they switched gears to try Bochs, which, honestly, sounds like some medieval torture device. But hey, it got the job done eventually. You could almost taste the frustration.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the whole process—driver issues, read errors, things blinking at them with error messages like they owned the place. But, finally, boom! Windows 95 setup screen. I imagine angels sang—but maybe that was just them.

So yeah, after 14 long hours, they got Windows 95 running. Jace even managed to play around in Paint. Without a mouse, though, it was probably like trying to paint with your elbows. As for Doom, the game never really got out of the starting gates. But hey, we still watched it all because, why not? It was one heck of a trip down nostalgia lane. Not sure what to take from all this, except that sometimes it’s about the journey, not the destination. Or something poetic like that.

Anyway, catch you on the flipside!