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In a comment to another question about Windows, somebody brought up a good point, Raspberry Pis have the horsepower to run older games. It just so happens that I have a favorite older game from the win95 era that I'd like to give a go but the typical desktop hardware these days is just too advanced.

This might be a bit ingenuous, but we can emulate ARM systems on x86 so is it possible to emulate x86 on ARM processors? If the Raspberry Pi can emulate an x86 machine would there be any other complications to installing Windows 95?

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    A Raspberry Pi is said to be roughly equivalent to a 300 MHz Pentium II, and then it needs to emulate an x86. To me that sounds like it will be too slow to be fun/interesting.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Jul 28, 2012 at 15:29
  • @ThorbjørnRavnAndersen is there any chance you have a link to support the 300MHz Pentium II performance?
    – Dan B
    Commented Jul 30, 2012 at 16:07
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    The wording comes from the FAQ. You might also find raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=5678 interesting.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Jul 30, 2012 at 22:19
  • 1
    ALso note that you can emulate an x86. Question is whether you REALLY want to know if it will be fast enough to be fun.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Commented Jul 30, 2012 at 22:25
  • Consider ReactOS, see this answer
    – Tobias Kienzler
    Commented Jan 9, 2013 at 7:49

2 Answers 2

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Bochs can emulate x86. "thekeywordgeek" already beat me to it and has no trouble running any applications compared to DOSBox.

DOSBox has a limit of 64 MB. It can run Windows 95 but it's unusable. After booting ,I can't even open start menu or explorer.

My dosbox.conf

memsize=64

..

[autoexec]
mount c ~
c:
imgmount a w95.img
boot w95.img

Qemu might be a better choice.

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I tried various tutorials, but the results were always too slow to be useful. (took 20 mins to boot, took 1 min to register a mouse click, 10 minutes to open Windows Explorer, etc)

Then I discovered PINN has a pre-built image that emulates Windows 98 at a usable speed. (boots in less than 3 min, mouse click register in 5 seconds, 2 min to open Windows Explorer) On a Pi 3!

(Yes, I know you asked for 95, but I hope this works for you)

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  • Hey Botspot, can you please tell me the pinn image name?
    – fizz
    Commented Mar 19, 2020 at 13:55
  • @SuperSoda It's been a long time. I remember the name of the image included "Win 98". You won't find it in the normal OS page. I think you have to switch tabs to other OS types to find it. Sorry I can't be of more help than that.
    – Botspot
    Commented Mar 19, 2020 at 17:19
  • I found the image, it's called win98-pi and you can find it in the testing category.
    – fizz
    Commented Mar 29, 2020 at 10:15

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