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486 build ramblings

ST251

ST251

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 19, 2020
Messages
146
Location
Northeastern US
I'm starting this little thread to share the details of my next adventure, which is cramming Windows 95 onto a 40MB MFM hard drive in my 486 machine.
 
People didn't do this; a 386 in 1990 came with an 80MB IDE drive, for example. I'm not sure 40MB is even enough space for Windows 95, even with compression.
 
The absolute minimum amount of disk space is 50-55 MB if you don't install any optional software in setup. I doubt disk compression would help. If it did, you'd literally have no room to install anything else and it'd be dreadfully slow.
 
Yeah, I understand there's no practicality to it whatsoever. I'm just doing it "because". I know it isn't the setup of a typical machine but I did start this because I wanted to see if it was at the extreme edge of possible, and actually on that note I actually did it. I'm just trying to make it all into one neat post before I submit it here.


One word. Stacker :p
 
ST251 said:
Yeah, I understand there's no practicality to it whatsoever. I'm just doing it "because".
Click to expand...

You may find your target audience for such a setup is 1.

One word. Stacker :p
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Stacker can't work miracles. It's tuned for speed, not efficiency, so it will do 1.5x on executables at best and that's not going to be enough to fit everything on there. Also, you can't install with compression, you can only apply it afterwards. So this is extremely unlikely to work.

If you want a period-correct challenge, try the challenge I did in 1995: Install Windows 95 on a system that meets the bare requirements: A 386sx-16 with 4MB of RAM. Can you install it via floppies? Yes. In less than a day? And when finished, have it boot in less than 20 minutes? And launch programs in less than 5 minutes? Well, those are the real challenges.
 
Trixter said:
"Tolerable" being the operative word :)
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We all have different ideas of tolerable.

I was watching a video on the history of Cyrix on Youtube and there was a quote from a Cyrix spokesperson stating that 13 FPS was "smooth" for FPS gaming. People today bitch if the FPS of shooters is under 60.

My 286-12 Packard Bell that I purchased new came with IDE. Granted the 286 era was pretty long but few if any 386 class machines would have MFM.
 
If you do get it to work, please make a video of it! I'd love the hear the sounds the ST-251 makes while Windows 95 is detecting hardware. :D
 
Caluser2000 said:
Personnally I'd think it would be a waste of time and effort. But go ahead and do it you feel you really need to.
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It's just a project for fun that's designed to be a time waster :p

Since there's really nothing to do outside anymore, might as well kill time in a fun way

compaqportableplus said:
If you do get it to work, please make a video of it! I'd love the hear the sounds the ST-251 makes while Windows 95 is detecting hardware. :D
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I did get it to work..... somewhat. it locks up trying to detect hard disk controllers which I'm assuming means it doesn't like my MFM controller. I haven't posted anything yet because I'm trying to figure out a way to get it past that point.

Trixter said:
If you want a period-correct challenge, try the challenge I did in 1995: Install Windows 95 on a system that meets the bare requirements: A 386sx-16 with 4MB of RAM. Can you install it via floppies? Yes. In less than a day? And when finished, have it boot in less than 20 minutes? And launch programs in less than 5 minutes? Well, those are the real challenges.
Click to expand...

If I had that kind of hardware in my possession, I would.
 
I could be wrong but I recall getting Win95 down to <30MB at one time. I only have it installed on one system these days, and that install weighs in at 85MB. But it has DirectX 7, IE 5, and the MS OpenGL add-on installed. Leaving those out would save considerable space. Then there are some additional files that can be deleted from the default install like a 3MB sound font for a certain sound card driver, some .AVIs and help files, etc.
maxtherabbit said:
is your MFM controller 16 bit? I strongly doubt 95 will work with any XT class disk controller
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Unlike NT, Win95 can fall back to DOS-compatibility mode to access stuff like that. That's how it sees INTERLNK drives or a HardCard.
 
either way running 95 with 8-bit disk accesses (doubly so in compatibility mode) would be hell

a friend of mine has a WA6-V on ebay for a very reasonable price
 
Unknown_K said:
I was watching a video on the history of Cyrix on Youtube and there was a quote from a Cyrix spokesperson stating that 13 FPS was "smooth" for FPS gaming..
Click to expand...

I remember playing StarFox on the SNES and thinking it was hot stuff when it sometimes had frame rates in the single digits.

Quake quickly ruined the idea of sub 30 fps being anything good and it went up from there. I can still tolerate low frame games if they were designed with it in mind, but all of the kids these days grew up on crappy rail shooters and expect silky smooth framerates, they're spoiled lol.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
I remember playing StarFox on the SNES and thinking it was hot stuff when it sometimes had frame rates in the single digits.

Quake quickly ruined the idea of sub 30 fps being anything good and it went up from there. I can still tolerate low frame games if they were designed with it in mind, but all of the kids these days grew up on crappy rail shooters and expect silky smooth framerates, they're spoiled lol.
Click to expand...

I had an AMD 486/133 running at 160 when Quake came out and it played bad so I purchased a Cyrix P166 and M-tech HX motherboard and it played better but the CPU RAM too hot. So I ended up with a real Pentium 133 or 166 forget which and it ran much better. Of course I then purchased a Voodoo 3DFX 1 and that was real nice.

30FPS is kind of a bare minimum you deal with when scenes get real hectic but 60 FPS is very desirable.
 
I got it to install. The problem was that even though I had the on-board IDE controller disabled in the BIOS, for some reason Windows was still able to see it. To fix it, after it froze while detecting devices, I restarted it in safe mode and uninstalled the plug & play bios driver and a few other things I can't remember as of now, rebooted it and it actually entered Windows. Then I went to the Add New Hardware wizard and let it rescan, declining to install the PCI IDE Controller driver.

And yes, this was all made possible by Stacker :p

IMGb2.jpg
 
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