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Windows 3.1 Emulator Windows 103/25/2021
If I remember correctly it didnt even ship with a network driver for example.
![]() Windows 3.1 Emulator Free Space RemainingA hacker by the name of redsPL thought that Microsofts latest and greatest circa 1992 might do well crammed into the free space remaining on a ThinkPad X200s firmware EEPROM.
It would take a little fiddling, plus the small matter of convincing the BIOS to see the EEPROM as a virtual floppy drive, but clearly those are all minor inconveniences for anyone mad enough to boot their hardware into a nearly 30 year old copy of Visual Basic for a laugh. Once the somewhat finicky software and hardware environment was up and running, it seemed a waste not to utilize it further. Especially given the fact most firmware replacements only fill a fraction of the X200s 8 MB chip. Windows 3.1 Emulator Drivers With OnesJust getting the display resolution up to 1024768 (and still with only 256 colors) required patching the original video drivers with ones designed for VMWare. Windows 3.1 Emulator Zip And XzThe last piece of the puzzle was messing around the zip and xz commands until the disk image was small enough to sneak onto the chip. ![]() I was a Radio Shack employee during that time period, and I bought the last 100HX off the sales floor for a lot less than they normally sold for (or I wouldnt have bought it). I was never able to do much with it, so it got junked about a year later (I had a 386 by then). Sorry to all of the retro-computing folks, but sometimes the good old days werent really that good. They did for the CD32 consoles which were banned in the USA due to a copyright of a blinking cursor. It sat right next to an Apple IIGS everyone used to play Oregon Trail and Ultima IV. There were also custom BIOSes based on Windows 3.x on some Compaq Deskpros from 95-2000. I remember the computer would not access the BIOS setup unless you have an HDD with its hidden setup partition or you boot the setup utility on a bunch of floppy disks. ![]() Ah, those were the days In all seriousness, its a shame that this is a running gag that even newer writers are shoehorning. Maybe stop putting up garbage articles You cant blame your readers. Come on guys. This nowthis is a great article, we need more like it. The compromise a previous employer had was to have an internal USB port and SD card slots in the system. From a BIOS point of view, it was trivial to be instructed to boot from these devices because they were always at a fixed location. Then you know you can always go back and the risk is quite minimal. Almost all of the UI was there and all of the disk routines, for example.
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