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Vista on 250 MHz Cyrix MII (vid)

dpatten said:
I seem to recall a couple of German kids a few years ago radically underclocking a socket 3 Pentium overdrive chip and a first gen socket 4 Pentium chip and getting XP to boot at something like 16 MHz.

*update* Google reveals the winner of the contest booted XP at 8 MHz

http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_eng.htm
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yep, i've seen that before actually... pretty interesting lol, but not surprised. as long as your chip supports the 5x86 instruction set you should even be able to load it at 1 MHz (if you have lots of time to spare) :p

i underclocked this cyrix this morning to see how low i could go with vista, and as expected it worked on as slow a clock settings as i could get it... which on this motherboard is 100 MHz. i'd make a video, but i don't think all of youtube's servers combined would have enough space to store it.
 
barythrin said:
lol. So now you need to have it do the rate your windows experience, and then load a dos game (Ultima! heh) and see how that goes. Actually that makes me think I may need to check compatibility on a few games that were remade for Windows on my newer OSes too.
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hmmm that'd be interesting... i see no reason ultima wouldn't work though actually! i have been playing winquake on it though. :)
 
Cool. Yeah perhaps older version would still work but I haven't seen Vista's dos compatibility yet. I guess I've run into snags with software rewritten for Windows 95 or something with dependencies on older directx or 3dfx drivers, etc. I guess Ultima 7 would be an interesting choice to try :)

How does Quake run on it? Maybe a short video demo of that would be worth while. Your comment in the vid on removing a minute of black for their 10Min limit cracked me up.
 
The problem with Vista is that they completely removed the 16bit subsystem. So if you have any 16 bit apps you are out of luck.

I doubt it will be any better in Windows 7.

The other issue with Vista and old software or games is that it won't do the lower resolutions (320x200 etc) so some of the games that want to go full screen at lower than 640x480 res won't run at all.

I have to use DosBox or ScummVM to run any of the older games I want to play. I will admit, however, that I have not spent much time on getting really old apps to run on vista as the emulation works just fine, or alternatively I have a Dos machine I can use.
 
Well the thing with that is that people complained that the OS was getting too large and all the backwards compatibility was beginning to cause problems such as people grossly not understanding what the WinSxS folder is for and why it was so big. As tech marches on you're going to have to let older stuff go in order to support the newer stuff. Vista not supporting 16-bit makes sense since 32-bit is beginning to fade away at this stage. Anything 16-bit thats mission critical wouldn't be running on a modern system with Vista, it would be on the machine it was originally intended for but then we go down the road of the $200+ 386 motherboard. I'm not singling you out or anything but I've seen a lot of people complain that programs that ran on 9x don't in Vista/7. Its hard to make an OS support a program across its entire time line and this is kind of the thing that prompted Virtualization, for businesses anyway. Personally I've had better luck with DOS Box than actual DOS machines :rolleyes:
 
Mike, I salute you.

That is by far one of the best demonstrations of what a bored nerd can accomplish when he puts his mind to something!

Keep up the good work!

Cheers
 
lutiana said:
The problem with Vista is that they completely removed the 16bit subsystem. So if you have any 16 bit apps you are out of luck.

I doubt it will be any better in Windows 7.
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Not strictly true. the 64 bit versions of Windows Vista no longer have the wow16 subsytem to run 16 bit Windows programs. The 32 bit versions of Vista do. Another problem is programs that are themselves 32 bit, but that have a 16 bit installer.

If you want/need to run antique windows software in Microsoft's slick new GUI then get the 32bit versions. The tradeoff of course is if you want/need more than ~3GB of RAM. Methinks that if you are running 16 bit Windows programs, written before the first Clinton administration, having more than a 4 gigs of RAM isn't going to make much of a difference...

I specifically installed the 32 bit beta version of Windows 7 on my wife's machine so that she could play Microsoft's Tetris from the Windows Entertainment pack that I bought wayyyyyy back in Windows 3.0 days. It won't play on her XP Pro 64 bit installation.

You are however, S.O.L. after Windows 7 as Microsoft has indicated that they are no longer producing 32 bit versions of Windows after that.

I personally think that computer manufacturers should never have gotten away from punch cards, and that all new PCs should have a punch card reader in the first 5.25" slot. ;)
 
dpatten said:
If you want/need to run antique windows software in Microsoft's slick new GUI then get the 32bit versions. The tradeoff of course is if you want/need more than ~3GB of RAM. Methinks that if you are running 16 bit Windows programs, written before the first Clinton administration, having more than a 4 gigs of RAM isn't going to make much of a difference...
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I was not aware that the 32bit version of Vista could do this. I have only ever run the 64bit version (I have 8Gb or RAM). Good to know.

dpatten said:
You are however, S.O.L. after Windows 7 as Microsoft has indicated that they are no longer producing 32 bit versions of Windows after that.
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Yes, but I distinctly remember them saying the same thing about Vista, in fact they seemed quite adamant that Vista would only be 64bit capable and that there would not be 32bit version, they changed their minds sometime around the RC release of it. So who knows if they mean it this time or not.
 
lutiana said:
Yes, but I distinctly remember them saying the same thing about Vista, in fact they seemed quite adamant that Vista would only be 64bit capable and that there would not be 32bit version, they changed their minds sometime around the RC release of it. So who knows if they mean it this time or not.
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I would think that it is very likely that Windows 7 is really the last Microsoft 32 bit OS. The last generation of mainstream 32 bit processors will be approaching 5-7 years old when Windows 7 ships. That compares favorably with the 16-32 bit break between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

You could run Windows 3.1 (in standard mode) on a 286. By the time Windows 95 came out you needed a real 32 bit processor.


Time marches on and leaves us with obsolete hardware.
 
dpatten said:
Time marches on and leaves us with obsolete hardware.
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What I used to tell customers when I worked in computer repair was that a computer was only obsolete when it stopped doing what you needed or wanted it to do.

Good point about the 64bit support, it is time I think, for MS to drop 32 bit support.
 
lutiana said:
Good point about the 64bit support, it is time I think, for MS to drop 32 bit support.
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Sigh. I suspect people will still be reading email and browsing the Web and playing Solitaire when the minimum ante is a 256-bit CPU with a minimum of 64 cores.

A lot of progress isn't. I want my HAL 2000. :)
 
lutiana said:
Good point about the 64bit support, it is time I think, for MS to drop 32 bit support.
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I'm gonna have to majorly disagree there. From the day to day use I've seen I still see bugs in the 64-bit world and some applications we use error out on that platform as well. Honestly I love the backwards compatibility factor of MS. I mean, I can pretty much run cp/m binaries which means if the hardware standards aren't too mucked up I don't have to re-purchase software. If I had to repurchase each application everytime a new OS was out I guarantee I wouldn't be sitting here in an MS world.

I understand eventually letting it go or giving in to an integrated emulator but I don't think 64-bit is quite ready for the general population yet and certainly not enough to blow away 32-bit yet.
 
barythrin said:
Honestly I love the backwards compatibility factor of MS.

...I don't think 64-bit is quite ready for the general population yet and certainly not enough to blow away 32-bit yet.
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I guess I need to phrase that better. By phase out 32bit I meant as a running platform, they would still need to maintain 32bit app compatibility. Exactly the same way Windows XP can run 16bit apps, but won't run on 16bit hardware.

We're also talking about the OS that would replace Windows 7, which is at least 4 - 5 years away (assuming they keep to their 3 year life cycle, and that they actually release 7 in January of '10). By which time I'd bet the 32bit platform will be significantly less prevalent.

But ultimatly I agree, we are not quite ready for general adoption of 64bit, even if for no other reason than it is unnecessary for day to day use.
 
barythrin said:
I'm gonna have to majorly disagree there. From the day to day use I've seen I still see bugs in the 64-bit world and some applications we use error out on that platform as well. Honestly I love the backwards compatibility factor of MS. I mean, I can pretty much run cp/m binaries which means if the hardware standards aren't too mucked up I don't have to re-purchase software. If I had to repurchase each application everytime a new OS was out I guarantee I wouldn't be sitting here in an MS world.

I understand eventually letting it go or giving in to an integrated emulator but I don't think 64-bit is quite ready for the general population yet and certainly not enough to blow away 32-bit yet.
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I think that we will have the ability to run 32 bit programs for quite a while yet.

Take 16 bit Windows apps for example. The last 16 bit version of Windows, Windows 3.11, came out in 1993 or so. Windows XP will be actively supported by Microsoft until 2014.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?LN=en-gb&C2=1173

So, we can assume that 32 bit Windows 7 will probably be on extended support by Microsoft until somewhere between 2017 and 2020.

In other words Microsoft will be still actively supporting software written ~25 years before when they completely cut the plug on support for 16 bit Windows applications.

If you extrapolate that, assuming Windows 7 is the last 32 bit available version of Windows and it comes out in 2010, we might be able to run 32 bit applications until the 2030's.

I might be dead by then. Or Microsoft might be.

I would also be very surprised if there isn't some paradigm shift between now and then that renders the whole thing moot.
 
dpatten said:
I might be dead by then. Or Microsoft might be.

I would also be very surprised if there isn't some paradigm shift between now and then that renders the whole thing moot.
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PLEASE GOD!!!

I agree with you, I can even run MS-DOS apps on my Windows XP Home Edition, but not on Windows 98 (what...). Vista cut the cord on the ability to run MS-DOS executables, but I have been able to run *some* 16-bit apps on it, just as long as they aren't full screen :sneaky:
 
in the past i've thought about maybe somehow stealing XP's ntvdm module, since that's the 16-bit subsystem layer. there has to be some way of integrating it into vista or win7.
 
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