In a fascinating exploration of nostalgia and technical prowess, YouTuber Omores has successfully managed to run Windows 95 natively on the Ryzen 9 9900X CPU. This endeavor follows a previous experiment where Windows 98 was also executed on the same modern hardware, hinting at the potential for legacy operating systems to thrive in contemporary environments.
Retro OS experiment shows Windows from the 90s running directly on an AM5 system
While the installation of Windows 95 on an AM5 system presented its own set of challenges, Omores approached these hurdles with creativity and determination. One significant obstacle was the compatibility of storage, as Windows 95 cannot boot from the SATA or NVMe controllers commonly found in modern motherboards. To navigate this issue, Omores employed a PCI-to-SATA card equipped with an onboard BIOS, allowing the vintage operating system to find its footing.
Further testing revealed that booting from an NVMe SSD was feasible, provided the partition size remained under 8.4GB. RAM limitations posed another challenge, as Windows 95 could only recognize up to 62 MB of memory. However, through an update to HIMEM, the memory manager, Omores successfully expanded this limit to 1.7 GB. Additionally, the installation of PATCHMEM, an unofficial patch developed by Rudolph Loew, further facilitated this workaround.
In terms of graphics, Omores experimented with the Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS and Quadro FX 4500 GPUs, both of which performed reasonably well under Windows 95. Notably, the YouTuber managed to install an unofficial Nvidia 82.69 driver, enabling the operating system to run in full HD resolution. Despite these advancements, some issues persisted, such as the Nvidia Control Panel’s failure to launch, attributed to its dependency on Internet Explorer 6, which is not officially supported on Windows 95.
Graphical glitches also emerged when opening DOS windows, leaving this aspect unresolved. Nevertheless, the core functionalities of Windows 95—sound, networking, storage, and display output—operated effectively on the AM5 system, showcasing the remarkable adaptability of a software that was never designed for today’s hardware landscape.