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Hey, so get this: Jace from this wild YouTube channel MetraByte tries to pull off this crazy stunt—getting Windows 95 and Doom to actually run on a PlayStation 2. Yeah, for real. I stumbled across the video and couldn’t help but watch Jace wrangle with this whole setup like some mad scientist on a tech adventure. Spoiler alert: Windows 95 sort of worked, but Doom just wasn’t having it.
Now, Windows 95 and the PS2? Talk about ancient history in 2025. Windows 95 dropped back in ’95—no duh—and PS2 hit the scene in 2000. You’d think with PS2 being newer, it’d breeze through this challenge, right? But nope. It turns out, wrangling x86 code to play nice with Sony’s MIPS machine is like herding cats. And Windows 95… it’s a moody diva built on DOS. So yeah, Jace hit wall after wall.
Alright, so here’s where it gets geeky. Jace is armed with a modded PS2, a game controller that’s got a QWERTY keypad (because why not?), and a USB stick plus a hard drive plugged into that chunky PS2 model for storage. Oh, and some magic files like a PlayStation .ELF file for homebrew code, DOSBox and Bochs emulators, and a whole stack of other tech voodoo. Jace’s first valiant attempt? Using DOSBox. But after 47—yes, 47—tries, nada. So, enter Bochs, the slower but “accurate” emulator.
Watching the vid, you can almost feel Jace’s pain. Seriously, every process felt like watching paint dry. The PS2’s I/O wasn’t exactly built for speed, plus the emulation thing just made everything crawl. Bochs wasn’t some magic bullet either. Jace wrangled with error messages, missing files, and all those fun boot order frustrations, but lo and behold, Windows 95 finally blinked to life on the screen.
After a marathon “14-hour” install (can you even?), Jace finally got the Windows 95 desktop up and running. Paint launched! Horray! But uh, totally not fun without a mouse. And Doom95? A total no-show. But hey, watching Jace’s epic tech wrestling match was… oddly satisfying. Maybe it’s just my tech nerd side showing. Who knows.
Anyway, if you’re as nerdy about this stuff as I am, look up Tom’s Hardware on Google News and stay in the loop with all the tech shenanigans.
