Windows Update Restored: Fix Windows update on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP

by gslin • 3 years ago

306 175 3 years ago

cbmuser2• 3 years ago

What’s the advantage over Legacy Update which seems to work pretty well.

temp51723• 3 years ago

Legacy Update doesn't support Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 SP3+ Windows 98 First and Second Edition, Windows Millenium Edition.

Windows Update Restored (purportedly) does.

cbmuser2• 3 years ago

Thanks, this answers my question.

JohnTHaller• 3 years ago

Legacy Update is a better option for Windows 2000 and later as it uses a proxied Windows Update 6 implementation. Windows Update Restored uses Windows Update 3.1 and is better for Windows 95/98/Me and Windows NT4.

winterqt• 3 years ago

For context: https://legacyupdate.net

nashashmi• 3 years ago

Seems like a centralized repository for a collection of updates issued by MS to windows computers. Does this bring additional security updates not issued by MS?

jdwithit• 3 years ago

No, it's just old preexisting patches. In their FAQ and even on the front page they say continuing to run these operating systems is a terrible idea as they are highly vulnerable even after patching.

klaussilveira• 3 years ago

Is ReactOS stable enough to replace an old Windows 95 installation?

jaclaz2• 3 years ago

No matter if stable enough or not, ReactOS is aimed to replicate a NT based system, as such it can be very different from DOS/Win9x.

Quite a lot of (DOS based but not only) tools and programs (particularly any low-level one and - generally speaking - games) that run just fine in Windows 95 won't work on NT 4.00/2000 and later, and they as well won't in ReactOS.

sneed_chucker• 3 years ago

No.

m0002• 3 years ago

How about adding some instructions on how to use it? Just saying...

capableweb• 3 years ago

To find out more about the Windows Update Website and what it does, Click Here
http://windowsupdaterestored.com/en/aboutwindowsupdaterestor...

The submission is the literal website used for the updates. You use it by browsing the website like any other website.

You figured out how to use HN without much hand-holding, I'm sure you can figure out how to use this website as well :)

Edit: There is even a video explaining how to use the website, not sure what more you could ask for? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbWa_tlC-3I

m0002• 3 years ago

Awesome then! I don't know if I'm the exception, but my Win9x years were mostly offline or with a 56k modem, so online updates were off the map.

I was expecting one would need to tweak the registry or plug some custom DNS entries to get the updates running.

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

Huh, I never realized that 95/98/ME ever had online updates in the first place.

mattl• 3 years ago

Me neither.

Wikipedia:

Windows Update was introduced as a web app with the launch of Windows 98 and offered additional desktop themes, games, device driver updates, and optional components such as NetMeeting. Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 were retroactively given the ability to access the Windows Update website and download updates designed for those operating systems, starting with the release of Internet Explorer 4.

kotaKat2• 3 years ago

It all started in Windows 98 with the launch of Windows Update; they then released the Critical Update Notification Tool (later renamed to Utility, for obvious reasons) which would query the website and just tell you when a critical update was available to go check the site.

Otherwise, in the 95 era, I believe you'd likely be finding out through a software vendor or otherwise that a certain fixpack from Microsoft might fix an issue and you should go grab an update then.

coldpie2• 3 years ago

they then released the Critical Update Notification Tool (later renamed to Utility, for obvious reasons)

Oofda. That can't have been an accident.

xattt• 3 years ago

Um… what? You would trigger online updates in Windows 95 OSR 2 by using IE and navigating to the Windows Update website. This would then would trigger the updater.

n6h6• 3 years ago

I thought you were joking, but no, the CUNT is real

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Upda...

ogurechny4• 3 years ago

— Software could not expect internet connection (or any network at all) to be available, and would be considered really arrogant if it tried to dial or spend user's traffic by default.

— Those who knew how to enable those features probably checked update sites and news sites manually often enough.

— Almost all software had to bundle required components and updates anyway. Games came with DirectX version 5/6/7/8/9 installers, IE version 4/5/6 installers provided important system components, acting as semi-service-packs for 9x systems… and, of course, Visual Studio library dependencies.

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

What I'd love is a project for Windows 11 that gives me back full control of which updates I download and when I reboot. I've been living with vague registry hacks and the "pause for 5 weeks" button but they're getting less effective.

nikanj• 3 years ago

Just buy a pro/enterprise version, they support the GPOs to block updates

Joeri• 3 years ago

Windows pro managed through intune should give you that control, though it is a bit of an awkward path for a single user.

rwaksmunski• 3 years ago

Lookup Windows 10 LTSC

jonathantf2• 3 years ago

Not sure if this is because I run the Pro version but I've never ever ever once had Windows 10 or 11 reboot to install updates on it's own.

ailurooo2• 3 years ago

The genuine answer is that you won't get this functionality unless you use windows enterprise. Which of course you can't purchase.. This functionality is locked to just the enterprise and will likely never change..

londons_explore7• 3 years ago

can't purchase

There are certain high seas where such things are plentiful.

TheSkyHasEyes• 3 years ago

Tiny11 is a thing but I've no experience with it. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tiny11

nobody99992• 3 years ago

The genuine answer is that you won't get this functionality unless you use windows enterprise. Which of course you can't purchase.. This functionality is locked to just the enterprise and will likely never change..

Of course you can purchase "enterprise" versions of Windows 11[0].

What's more, anyone can purchase most of Microsoft's offerings for ~USD$1000[1].

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/windows-11-pro/dg7gmgf0d8h...

[1] https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing-details/

LoganDark• 3 years ago

unless you use windows enterprise. Which of course you can't purchase..

I recently purchased a Windows 10 Enterprise key from a website called "RoyalCDKeys" for under $4. It worked to upgrade my Windows 11 installation.

Basically any reseller will work but only if they use a payment processor other than PayPal. PayPal will only end in misery and your money being lost.

abwizz• 3 years ago

"service channels" are not a thing anymore?

stalfosknight4• 3 years ago

This should go without saying but this flagrant disregard for what users want is going to continue and get worse as long as people keep buying and using Windows. I wonder pretty often why people put themselves through this crap to use Windows.

pessimizer• 3 years ago

Because that's what comes on computers, and that's what the software they need runs on. The obvious reasons. If you want to fix that, work in antitrust, work on getting at least governments and public schools to choose FOSS solutions, work on improving FOSS solutions, work on Debian installers...

runesofdoom• 3 years ago

A possibly illustrative example:

A year or three ago, my uncle (mid-50s, telco IT manager, started on a Commodore in the 80s) decided he'd try Mint instead of upgrading from Windows 7. He got it installed and running, and decided he wanted to burn an audio CD.

His install of Mint didn't come with any application to accomplish this. He got something recommended installed easily enough, but it only supported FLAC, not his MP3s. So he removed that and got some different CD burning software that did support his MP3s, but was set to Finnish by default. He got enough Finnish translated to get it changed to English, and then ran into some sort of driver/support issue for his particular CD burner.

At that point, he did the free upgrade to Windows 10 and then burned his CD in less total time than he'd spent not burning a CD via Mint.

add-sub-mul-div2• 3 years ago

Because I'm an adult who knows how to weigh all the pros and cons of a situation and make decisions based on the sum of that reasoning rather than the emotion raised by one pain point. (My own or someone else's.)

Dwedit3• 3 years ago

Windows Update Blocker works as a nuclear option to disable all updates.

npteljes• 3 years ago

I'm solving this for myself with Windows 10 LTSC, which I keep activated with an activation emulator I host. For a professional, it was super easy to setup, virtually zero maintenance, and I get a pass on at least a good chunk of the bullshit that goes on in the MS-verse. Functionality doesn't seem to be lost, but I just use it to play my multiplayer games because of their Windows-only rootkit, I mean, anti-cheat.

dmitrygr• 3 years ago

Use registry editor to export And then delete wupdsvc and waasMedicSvc services. (HKLM/system/currentControlSet/Services) Reboot. Enjoy. Whenever you want updates, double click exported “reg” file and reboot. Allow updates to install. Delete services again.

p0w3n3d3• 3 years ago

You are the beta tester. While you're using "your" windows, you're performing a task as an unofficial employee. If something is free for you, you are the product that is sold.

doodlesdev• 3 years ago

Windows is not free.

Paianni• 3 years ago

PSA: Security updates for 2000 and XP are still available from Microsoft at https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/

ck2• 3 years ago

I saw an ATM reboot into XP kiosk mode the other week.

Struck me as a bit unsafe?

BTW this also exists or did exist for "Fix Windows Update on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008, 2003, and 2000"

https://github.com/kirb/LegacyUpdate

giobox• 3 years ago

It was pretty crazy how long IBM's OS/2 survived as an OS on tons of ATMs throughout the world, there will probably still be an ATM somewhere running XP in the 2050s.

mschuster91• 3 years ago

Struck me as a bit unsafe?

Usually ATMs run in their completely own network with heavy access controls limiting access even if the physical location is compromised.

fredoralive• 3 years ago

It’s not the greatest to be still using XP. Although hopefully an ATM would be on a real private network, or at least a VPN provided by some more up to date external box (though the latter could have its own bugs I guess). If you pair that with the fact you don’t have externally accessible general IO[1] there probably isn’t much opportunity to gain access.

[1] If you can get into the innards you can probably just, you know, grab the cash (beware of dye bombs though).

jaclaz2• 3 years ago

I saw an ATM reboot into XP kiosk mode the other week.

JFYI, there is a dedicated thread on MSFN.ORG for these sightings:

https://msfn.org/board/topic/176692-windows-xp-spotter-the-c...

Atm's and public signage (airports, metro and similar) are still common enough.

TheRealPomax• 3 years ago

Safer than card skimmers though.

incomplete• 3 years ago

why no https on this site?

wvenable• 3 years ago

Does modern HTTPS even work on Windows 95?

anthk5• 3 years ago

Under Retrozilla, TLS 1.3

samtheprogram• 3 years ago

Older web browsers like those on Windows XP don't support newer versions of SSL.

Dwedit3• 3 years ago

There are newer web browsers that will run on Windows XP, see New Moon http://matejhorvat.si/en/unfiled/pmxp/index.htm

Even the final official build of Firefox that supported Windows XP will break on websites like Github, where a Releases page will never finish loading, and never let you download any files. But the New Moon build on that website (28.10) will work.

(Don't forget to install uBlock Origin and a current fork of uMatrix)

Eric_WVGG• 3 years ago

This website requires a minimum of Internet Explorer 5.0 or above, but we recommend Internet Explorer 5.5.

that's the bit that left me gobsmacked

vbezhenar• 3 years ago

Last time I tried to tinker with Windows XP few years ago: you couldn't just update it after installation, but if you let it work for a few days, eventually it'd download and install updates automatically. And after those updates are installed, you can actually use Windows Update UI to install optional updates and other things.

It definitely was after 2011.

FredPret2• 3 years ago

Windows Update did a better job over the years selling me on the Mac platform than Apple ever could

metaltyphoon• 3 years ago

Funny enough, windows updates are infinitely better than macOS updates, which takes 30-60 mins each time.

hospitalJail7• 3 years ago

This was one of many gripes when I went from Android to iPhone. Holy crap, every day there was some necessary update and I had to sign into my apple ID + be plugged in at 2am or something.

Every time I unlocked that phone it would bother me.

That, a slower response time(might have been due to animations), not having widgets, and some buggy official apps like the podcast app, and I bailed from iPhone pretty quick.

I admittedly was so excited to unbox and give Apple all my personal information. Weird.

jshier• 3 years ago

They're getting faster in Ventura. Moving to the sealed system volume in macOS 11 made them huge and slow to apply, but they're getting better. On my M1 Ultra machine even large updates don't take more than 5 or 10 minutes in the restart stage, and that can include firmware updates for the Mac and monitor (Apple Studio Display). And now with the rapid security patches there are some updates you don't even have to restart to apply (mostly).

FredPret2• 3 years ago

But they don't pop up a million times and then restart your system for you while you have a long compute job running overnight...

laserdancepony3• 3 years ago

I still don't know why both are so slow. Upgrading my mostly vanilla Devuan boxes costs me a few seconds to minutes and restarts are only to switch kernels.

Sohcahtoa823• 3 years ago

The sad thing is that IMO, Windows users brought the shitty Windows Update implementation on themselves.

It was common in the Windows XP days for many users to never install updates and it really contributed to Windows's reputation for being incredibly insecure. Forcing updates became the only option to ensure Windows users remain secure.

neilv• 3 years ago

This seems like a nice altruistic useful thing, but (given some overly-trusting security practices we still often see) it'd still be good practice to keep some ideas in mind...

DECREASING LEVELS OF SECURITY:

1. Running Microsoft Windows.

2. Running out-of-support Microsoft Windows.

3. Running out-of-support Microsoft Windows and having it report itself to a server of unclear provenance and security (which could be efficiently indexing such insecure machines, and possibly even exploiting vulnerabilities during this simple interaction).

4. Running out-of-support Microsoft Windows and updating its system software from a server of unclear provenance and security (which could install malware, possibly even defeating any outdated vendor signing).

SUGGESTIONS:

* If your important science/medical/industrial/etc. equipment is stuck on ancient Microsoft Windows, probably you want to keep it airgapped and treat it gingerly, while planning to upgrade to more sustainable equipment (and hopefully it doesn't fail abruptly before convenient).

* If you're playing with Microsoft Windows for personal use, that's fine, but maybe consider whether you'd prefer to spend your time and energy instead learning and creating atop an open source software platform.

* For many business and personal purposes, Debian Stable is a good OS platform, and this is one installer for it: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/iso-dvd/

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

I'll never accuse old Windows of being bulletproof, but I've gotten some considerable reliability out of old appliances by adding SSDs, a passively cooled chassis, and a weekly reboot scheduled task. Basically, just get rid of the moving parts and plan for state drift.

Old OT is actually pretty easy to take care of aside from sourcing replacements for some secret sauce PCI card that is no longer made. New OT blurs the line with IT in a really difficult way however, you can no longer rely on a dead simple airgap to solve your security concerns because everything and its mother wants to be on the internet.

fires10• 3 years ago

You can not just rely on air gapped either. You have other avenues for attack as well. I actually virtualize most of my legacy OSes when possible. Just maintaining adequate serial connections when a USB to serial connector will not work with your legacy OS and a VM can't maintain a stable serial connection through the host OS. It's been a nightmare.

MuffinFlavored2• 3 years ago

Running Microsoft Windows.

Is Windows 11 with all of the default security settings really that insecure? Like Windows Defender, Windows Firewall, anything that needs admin needed you to click "yes, elevate to admin" through UAC

hospitalJail7• 3 years ago

I just posted this above, but according to Zerodinium, Microsoft Zero Clicks are the highest payout for a desktop OS. Either they are the most secure, or its a popularity thing.

hospitalJail7• 3 years ago

I hate windows, like I'm trying to get off it because of the ads/ragebait news. I hate edge. Microsoft is basically a never buy anymore, but according to this:

https://zerodium.com/program.html

Getting a Windows exploit is higher value than any linux exploit. Given how many servers use Linux, it makes me wonder if Linux 0 click are easier than windows.

There are a bunch of counters like 'there are too many distros', or 'a personal computer of a VIP is higher value than some corporations'. But I'm not sure its fair to include your point number 1.

I like to give people credit where its due, I imagine it took lots of work to make windows as secure as it is. (Giving Android OS the most credit for their 2.5M payout)

morpheuskafka• 3 years ago

It's strange to me that Thunderbird is even on their chart. Surely only a few free software enthusiasts use that anymore? Most of the population doesn't even use a desktop email client and if they do its work-provided Outlook to connect to Exchange/Office365.

mnahkies• 3 years ago

Linux servers generally aren't being used interactively though and expose a fairly limited attack surface to the internet, and so I feel like the value in Linux server exploits is more in the openssl/Apache/etc vulnerabilities

MuffinFlavored2• 3 years ago

I hate edge.

It's a thin wrapper around Blink just like Chrome/Chromium. What is there to "hate"?

weare1382• 3 years ago

Linux is the just kernel. Everything else in a distro is software running on top of it. Kernel bugs are generally hard to exploit remotely and typically have to be chained with other exploits. That's why there's so many specific payouts for common enterprise apps. Windows is a complete, highly integrated OS with a wide array of attack vectors baked right into it.

Plus sketchy companies like Zerodium major customers are nation-state actors who are primarily interested in data exfiltration and the application data stores themselves.

Jiocus• 3 years ago

Two reasons I think Windows exploits would pay higher than 'Linux':

1. The Windows (end-)user base is much larger than Linux (not counting Android), so a Windows exploit enables more potential victims.

2. Windows has been the de-facto corporate OS for a long time, so a Windows exploit offers more high-value targets.

ungruntled• 3 years ago

Compared to Windows, I find that most linux desktop distros have what I would call ‘stability vulnerabilities’ where the user has to tread carefully when doing something basic like updating graphics drivers or applying other updates, or changing resolution. Otherwise they end up with an OS that wont start or will just show a blank screen. I wouldn’t recommend linux for general business or personal use unless this kind of tinkering is enjoyable or you have sufficient IT staff.

emodendroket2• 3 years ago

True but the older your hardware is the less you encounter it… so I guess the best use for it is giving life to old hardware.

kdklol4• 3 years ago

There are the same exact problems on Windows though. Microsoft nowadays basically treats it's install base as beta testers and you regularly hear about breaking updates. There are devices out there with funky drivers, most notably Nvidia cards, but if you can avoid those (I know many people can't, me included) and choose a stable distro, I genuinely fail to observe these supposed instabilities on Linux. Personally, I think the real reason why companies are not switching is familiarity. Think of all that money spent on MS product training over X employees. Billions are spent yearly in this industry I'm sure.

Propelloni• 3 years ago

I respect your individual experience but this hasn't been the mainstream situation for many years now.

Back in 2012 I was the Head of IT for an A series start-up with about 80 people and we ran almost all machines on Linux (mostly Ubuntu) and it worked like a charm. We scaled to about 400 people before switching to Chromebooks in 2015 for the vast majority of users. Our IT operations team never had more than 4 FTE at any point in time, which compares very favorably with any other company. This was possible because Linux environments are extremely easy to maintain for a trained IT staff and, obviously, because we mostly avoided the MS Office crapware (which was less crappy back then than it is today). Google Suite served us fine and the rest was custom web-based software.

Today I'm at a different company, no longer in the trenches, and use MS Windows machines for my work and there is not a single week going by without need to call tech support. Adding the counter-productive helpfulness of MS Office applications I sometimes think MS is paid by our competitors to destroy our productivity. That's a "stability vulnerability".

yjftsjthsd-h3• 3 years ago

changing resolution.

Er, this decade? How would setting resolution go badly today? (The closest thing I can think of is that once upon a time you could mess up CRTs with bad settings.)

ryandrake2• 3 years ago

Coincidentally, I ran into one of these this week. I decided to upgrade my bog-standard Debian installation on a headless NAS from buster to bookworm. Should have been easy peasy: Update sources.list and then apt full-upgrade, right?

Wrong.

Half way through, Debian seems to have lost[1] libcrypt.so.1, which everything important in the system relies on. Could no longer sudo (needs libcrypt) from the session I was logged into. Couldn't re-log in at all either over the network (ssh needs libcrypt) or locally (local authentication needs it too). Could not even get to single-user mode because init=/bin/bash didn't even work. I ended up having to boot from a liveCD, re-assemble the raid partition containing my root filesystem, and manually copy libcrypt into /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/

All because I tried to upgrade Debian from 10 to 12, skipping a version, which, apparently you can't do anymore.

As much as I can't stand Windows and I grin-and-bear macOS, I've never had an experience even close to as bad as that on those systems.

1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993755

jaredhallen• 3 years ago

I hear this sentiment frequently, but it doesn't match my experience. I sure can relate to the idea, but that was a decade ago. I install a fair variety of Linux distros on a pretty wide variety of hardware between my work and personal efforts, and it pretty much just seems to work these days. The last grief I recall in this regard was trying to run Ubuntu 64 on a Pi4 with Vulkan, but that was a couple years ago when things were known to be unstable. That or maybe doing something obviously inadvisable like trying to change distro on a live system by changing the apt source files on a Debian install to Ubuntu repositories and running an apt upgrade. And honestly even things like that work a surprising amount of the time. I know it's good to be introspective and truthful about shortcomings, but I really have to hand it to all the open source contributors, package maintainers, and all the rest. The modern Gnu/Linux ecosystem is pretty remarkable, in my opinion.

RobotToaster• 3 years ago

People always say this but

1) doesn't even a domestic router block all inbound connections?

2) is there any evidence of unpatched remote vulnerabilities for windows 98?

userbinator2• 3 years ago

Yes, and probably not (and even if there were, I suspect no one has a huge incentive to go looking for them anyway.)

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

I'm glad somebody brought this up. I was waiting for the follow-up article to post on HN about the "Botnet of Windows 98 Machines"

adamdegas• 3 years ago

Yes, all 48 of them.

jodrellblank2• 3 years ago

"Be very careful connecting to some random server and running code from people you've never met, with whom you have no contract or legal comeback, just because other people are doing it. Also, download Debian!"

anthk5• 3 years ago

You can audit Debian, or rebuild it yourself. Try that with Windows.

userbinator2• 3 years ago

That's pure fearmongering FUD.

Recommending Debian to the retrocomputing community is possibly the most tone-deaf thing I've seen today.

ketralnis• 3 years ago

I'm with you that they could have stopped talking after the word "instead" but the rest is not fearmongering nor FUD: installing operating system patches from a random server on the internet just isn't a great idea

ckozlowski• 3 years ago

This. I suppose it can't be helped given the link was posted without context. But yours is the only post here that seems to get it.

For everyone else: This project exists for the joy of the retro-computing community. No one in their right mind - retro-computing enthusiasts included - would ever recommend using any of these versions of Windows for anything other than amusement.

No, DOSBox is not always an alternative.

Retro enthusiasts are quite excited by this project. And for anyone wanting to rebuild an old PC running Win95 for fun, this is going to be a very helpful tool.

Michael MJD (YouTube) covered this yesterday in fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbeqLmSVqvs

boomboomsubban2• 3 years ago

If you're playing with Microsoft Windows for personal use, that's fine,

Saying you're free to have your hobby isn't tone-deaf.

mike_hock• 3 years ago

That's pure fearmongering FUD.

It is. It's a community project that you can trust, or not. Debian also reports to servers of "unknown provenance" and updates itself from there.

Now, Debian has probably a lot more eyes on it than some Windows Update revival project, but some more niche distros have essentially the same problem.

Recommending Debian to the retrocomputing community is possibly the most tone-deaf thing I've seen today.

archive.debian.org might be right up their alley

p0w3n3d3• 3 years ago

What about retro gaming?

anthk5• 3 years ago

WINE will run tons of w9x games with assistants provided by Lutris just fine.

Dalewyn3• 3 years ago

* If you're playing with Microsoft Windows for personal use, that's fine, but maybe consider whether you'd prefer to spend your time and energy instead learning and creating atop an open source software platform.

Open source does not address my need or desire for Windows, regardless outdatedness.

Seriously, it's annoying that fReE and oPeN sOuRcE are thrown around like they will solve all the problems in the world. Spoiler alert, they don't. Especially if that problem involves a practical need that most libertarian neckbeards wouldn't care about.

Yes I run Windows, and yes I happily run EOL Windows because they are required to run something reliably. And yes, I happily run unpatched Windows because updates break shit and waste my time compared to the dangers posed by hypothetical threats outside my practical threat model.

Something being free or open source does not in any way fundamentally address my needs and desires. No, Wine is not a panacea (unless we're talking about the drink). No, I'm not going to waste even more time getting Linux to work just so I can get on with life.

kdklol4• 3 years ago

This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.

(Sent from a ThinkPad x41 running Windows XP)

londons_explore7• 3 years ago

DOS is easy to emulate - and dosbox does a great job of it, even in a web browser.

Windows 3.1, 95, 98, Me are less easy to emulate.

Note that that seems to have impacted the preservation of old games and programs. Plenty of dos games are all over the web and still quite popular, yet most stuff from the Win 9x era has almost entirely vanished due to the difficulty of running it on modern hardware.

Archivists take note - if you want something to live for a long time, it needs to be easy to emulate. And in turn, that means it needs to be both very common, and have simple API's so someone in the future can be bothered to make and maintain an emulator.

neckro23• 3 years ago

most stuff from the Win 9x era has almost entirely vanished due to the difficulty of running it on modern hardware.

The tricky part is that this applies even if you're using a VM. I learned the hard way that Windows 98 isn't compatible with Ryzen CPUs, even through VirtualBox. I had to try again on another PC with an older Intel CPU.

accrual• 3 years ago

A patch is available [0] to allow Windows 98 to be virtualized on more modern CPUs including Ryzen CPUs. It patches the "TLB Invalidation Bug". [1]

[0] https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x

[1] https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/win9x-tlb-invalidation-b...

gattilorenz• 3 years ago

For early-ish windows 98 era machines, 86Box is a very good option.

sedatk• 3 years ago

Archivists take note - if you want something to live for a long time, it needs to be easy to emulate

how do archivists have a say in this?

londons_explore7• 3 years ago

Some archivists make decisions about what to archive. Something that isn't going to be runnable in the future would be a poor choice if you only have limited resources.

Also, some archivists have the choice to convert media. For example, rather than storing a Wordperfect document, perhaps it is best to convert to PDF. Rather than storing the ROM of an 80's arcade machine, or the whole machine, perhaps it is best to store an MPEG video of a playthrough. Rather than storing the data on a floppy disk in a filing cabinet, perhaps it is best to store the data on a server which will be kept up to date? Well resourced archives might be able to implement emulators - but then the question remains how should that be done - Is it okay to have a PDP11 emulator that runs on dos, emulated by dosbox in windows XP, emulated again by virtualbox on Windows 11?

A big part of being an archivist is making decisions of what to keep, what not to keep, what form to keep it in, and when to convert it.

There is no consensus - some archives knowingly keep data and software that they have no way to open/run, in the hope someone might bother in the future. Others keep dependency tables to ensure that they always have some combination of hardware and software to run/open any stored material.

TillE• 3 years ago

I wanted to play certain games from that era (Spiderweb's Exile series), and the best solution I found was to just play the MacOS versions with SheepShaver.

You can technically get Windows 9x software running in a VM, but not without laggy video/audio in my experience.

mminer237• 3 years ago

I've had great success running Win 95 games on modern hardware. I just had to do it in Wine, amusingly enough.

londons_explore7• 3 years ago

Frustratingly, wine for windows isn't a thing...

ogurechny4• 3 years ago

DOS may be easy to emulate and re-implement because it's a single task operating system that does not do much. Most of hardware is accessed directly, and needs to be emulated instead. We enjoy great compatibility because of the enormous leap in performance since then (the slower the system the easier it is to simulate correctly on a modern one), and the combined knowledge of all the ins and outs collected during the PC boom by software authors and hardware makers implementing and re-implementing compatible devices.

WarOnPrivacy2• 3 years ago

My most recent use-case for XP (in VMs) is to deploy IE as a remote app, to access old DVRs that require ActiveX for web view.

majjam• 3 years ago

Does anyone have any experience with 0patch? I use it to keep a couple of old Win7 systems patched but it makes me nervous…

jxramos2• 3 years ago

I have to say this is awesome

This website requires a minimum of Internet Explorer 5.0 or above, but we recommend Internet Explorer 5.5. To download Internet Explorer 5.5, Click Here

jxramos2• 3 years ago

So I may have missed it, are they hosting old updates to make them available still or are they actually patching old SW with new builds. For example say the last update for XP was SP3.5, they got the tooling to build and release 3.6 which was never released by Microsoft but is from this organization? Is it one or both?

jeswin• 3 years ago

I looked up the last update for Windows XP - KB4500331[1] from May 2019. Eighteen years after the OS was released. Gotta give credit for that.

[1] https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=SP3+X...

hakfoo2• 3 years ago

What is the meaningful purpose of "Windows Update" for versions no longer recieving active patches. (I imagine there's some bigcorp or biggov that will pay whatever price is necessary to get a patch for XP, but anything earlier?)

Couldn't they collect and systematically 'slipstream' every patch and fix that would exist on Windows Update into a "Final Edition" ISO?

Or is the scope broader than a naive reading of the headline, and non-OS packages (drivers, third party software) were also relayed through WU?

Windows Update Restored: Fix Windows update on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP

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