Yo, so here’s the thing. I stumbled onto this wild video from Jace over at MetraByte. Their mission? Get Windows 95, yes, the OG operating system, and Doom, running on a PlayStation 2. I mean, why not, right? The result was kinda like watching someone try to fit a square peg in a round hole—fascinating and kinda hopeless.
Windows 95, if you’re asking, finally decided to cooperate after what seemed like a zillion tries. But Doom? Nah, it just wasn’t happening. I guess that’s like trying to make coffee in a toaster. Technology from 1995 meeting 2000’s gaming console—sounds like a match made in chaos to me.
Picture Jace, probably pulling their hair out, slaving away for countless hours just to get the damn thing to work. A quick rundown: they used this modded PS2 with a bunch of geeky tools like a QWERTY controller, USB, HDD, and some crazy custom files. Why? Good question. Maybe they had a vendetta against easy tasks. Or maybe, like the rest of us tech nerds, they just love a good challenge.
DOSBox was their first move, but it flopped worse than a pancake. After, I dunno, 47 tries or so, Jace switched gears to Bochs—another emulator. The patience was unreal. If you ever watch their video, you can almost feel the agony through the screen. The slow grind of trying to force an operating system that’s ancient history onto a gaming console from a different universe? Pure madness.
Bochs was no cakewalk either. Jace had to wrestle with error messages, boot issues, and all sorts of tech goblins. But hey, they did see that Windows 95 install screen eventually. Talk about perseverance. I’m over here thinking I’d have thrown in the towel around the third error message.
In total, about 14 hours went down the rabbit hole, by Jace’s count. They did manage to get Paint up and alive on the desktop—without a mouse, though. Which is like, great, now what? Doom95? Yeah, forget it. Not happening. But the ride, it was worth the trip.
Anyway, if you want to join me following this beautiful disaster and more shenanigans like it, hit up Tom’s Hardware on Google News. That is, if you’re into the chaotic joy of wrestling with old tech. Fun times, man.
