Freewin95

[Linuxgamer94]

Hello forum,

I know that before React OS the devlopers worked on an project called FreeWin95. I was woundering if there were any ISO's[/i ] available. I tried using Mr. Google to find any ISO's, but I could not find any. Do any of them even exist or was it just code that never got released. I know the project was never finished, but I want to see what the OS was like as there is realy not much information about it other then the bare featurs on Wikipida.

[Z98]

The project never actually produced anything either so there's nothing to see.

[Linuxgamer94]

so there are no ISO's are source code?

[Z98]

There is not.

[Linuxgamer94]

oh darn.

[mrugiero]

That's actually why it's called ReactOS, in response to the lack of reaction they had previously when trying to make Freewin95.

[hbelusca]

Afaik they were almost lost inside discussions about how implementing this and that... so nothing came out.

[EmuandCo]

That's actually why it's called ReactOS, in response to the lack of reaction they had previously when trying to make Freewin95.

Plain wrong. The name was chosen because of the license restrictons and monopolistic behavior of MS at that time...

[mrugiero]

Plain wrong. The name was chosen because of the license restrictons and monopolistic behavior of MS at that time...

I'm sure I read what I said somewhere.

[Linuxgamer94]

so there was nothing made at all? Hm wow that is shocking.

[tomleem]

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/FreeWin95

http://pc.wikia.com/wiki/FreeWin95
'FreeWin95 eventually led to ReactOS'

I found the above when doing a Bing search.

[Linuxgamer94]

http://www.reactos.org/wiki/FreeWin95

http://pc.wikia.com/wiki/FreeWin95
'FreeWin95 eventually led to ReactOS'

I found the above when doing a Bing search.

So would it still be possible by useing FreeDOS 1.1 as the base and use some code from DOSBox to make it? Would that work? I know you can get Windows 3.1 to run in DOSBox. I know it uses emmulation, but would it still be possible to do the job and I know you can run Windows ME in DOSBox.

[EmuandCo]

ME runs really bad, except you use DOSBox as real PC emulator and not the emulated DOS. Same goes for 95, 98 and 98SE. And who needs a 9x clone?? [[TheFlash]] does such a great job to make a really good DOS Subsystem for ROS.

[PurpleGurl]

EmuandCo is right. Windows 95 was fairly stable, but it had memory leaks and the 64K resource heap limit wasn't a good thing. Windows 98 added some improvements, mostly fixes from the service packs and improved appearance. SE was supposed to be Windows 98 with fixes, but one of the later shell32.dll patches made it quite unstable. Then ME was supposed to be an improved Windows 98, and it was supposed to hide the fact it ran on top of DOS. It did have some improved system files, but overall, it seemed to be more unstable.

I tried Windows 2000, and after using Windows 98SE, I liked it a lot. It seemed to have better performance, and it locked up less often. When applications did hang, I could get control of the system back much faster. One thing I did was to export the colors, textures, and schemes from Windows 98 and used regedit to import them into 2000. Then I disabled all the logs and stuff, turn off the hard drive acoustic management, turned on DMA for the hard drive, disable asynchronous commits, and done various other tweaks. It ran very well. I even manually patched Explorer.exe to allow more colors in the system tray.

I have a rough idea about a few of the under the hood differences. 2000 was a true 32-bit OS. Win 9x/ME were 16-bit/32-bit hybrids. I imagine that was why there was a 64k resource heap limit in 9x and not in NT/2000. My guess is that the thunker code in 9x may have slowed things down in places. Then there was the addition of HAL in 2K and a change in how the GUI code was attached to the OS. Those changes made it more stable if I am not mistaken and allowed the system to be more responsive in cases of software problems. I am only guessing, but if you have a problem in user mode and the GUI is in user mode, then it would be harder to get the software unhung.

[DOSGuy]

So would it still be possible by useing FreeDOS 1.1 as the base and use some code from DOSBox to make it? Would that work? I know you can get Windows 3.1 to run in DOSBox. I know it uses emmulation, but would it still be possible to do the job and I know you can run Windows ME in DOSBox.

DOSBox is an emulator. It does have a DOS command interpreter, but FreeDOS has a much more complete one. There's nothing in DOSBox that you could take to create a FreeWin95 OS. It's possible that you could use FreeDOS code to be the DOS mode, and maybe even use DOSBox code to handle running DOS software within FreeWin95, but you would still have to create all of the code for running for Win9x software. It would probably be much easier to start with ReactOS code and push the target OS back to Windows 95 by changing the behavior of the DLLs to match the behavior of the Windows 95 versions of those DLLs. Aside from being leaner (you could drop any DLLs and portions of the API that weren't present in Windows 95), would it be worth the effort? Windows has a "Compatibility" tab that you can use to make Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 behave like Windows 95, which Wine can do as well, so that would be the ideal option for compatibility with software designed for older versions of Windows. Also, now that ROS has theme support, it should be possible to make ROS look and feel like Windows 95 as well. An OS with the features of Windows 2003 that can look/feel and run software from Windows 95 seems to be more useful than an OS that can only run software compatible with Windows 95.

By the way, I use Windows 95 in DOSBox all the time, and it works great! It took me years to get Windows 98 running in DOSBox, and it doesn't work nearly as well. I've never tried to run Windows ME, but I can only imagine that it would even more difficult and the experience would be even worse. DOSBox isn't meant to run those operating systems.