Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and i've mentioned in the past that the smartphones that we're seeing now are really maybe even sometimes more powerful than the desktop computers that I had when I was a kid so that got me thinking couldn't we run a desktop operating system on one of our handheld computers or our smartphones turns out you can let's start out with Windows 95 I'll show you how to do it okay so what we have here is a nexus one that running Froyo and this nexus of course can install non-market apps I've already configured it so that I can install apps that come from other sources other than the market some Android phones on some carriers that have the initials AT&T might not let you do this so if you've got one of those phones that won't let you install a non-market app you're out of luck for this but for everybody else let me show what you need to do first and foremost you're going to need two different packages if you will the first one is the apk the SDL app then I've got links to that over in the article on pocketnow.com I've already installed this to do it let me show you how to do it here you just not that one you tap on the app okay tell it to install and it goes ahead and installs the app for you okay normally we'd open it but I want to show you the other part so I'm going to say done the second package that you're going to need is the SDL folder now inside the SDL folder are a series of images binary images in this case which include your BIOS your VGA and whatnot so you're literally setting up a VGA video adapter computer BIOS and then loading in a operating system image on top of it so it's really kind of cool you're loading up Windows in a virtual machine in this case so let me show you how that's done let's come back out here and run the app now the name of the app is Lib SDL and it's right over there so we're going to tap that and that's going to read all of the information from those image files and what you can see here is it's loaded up the the BIOS and the VGA BIOS as well and it's starting up Windows 95 now there are several different windows 95 images that you can get this is the second one that I tried the first one was in Russian and I don't speak Russian so that didn't help much this one is in English so it helps me quite a bit but there's no splash screen the Russian version had the windows 95 splash screen with the animation going across the bottom so it was kind of cool okay now I wanted to be quiet there for just a few minutes while it played the windows startup sound it's been a long time since I've heard that what you can see here is you've got the background which is kind of bleeding through the boot process and that's what's blinking in the background the reason for that is Windows 95 doesn't like non-standard display resolutions so here we're running at 640 by 480 and that's pretty much what we're stuck with we can't expand it to fill everything out without getting into some some low-level hacks and tweaks in the Windows 95 image itself but that having been said here you go it's windows now a couple things to note is windows was not touch friendly Windows 95 so instead you've got your mouse pointer right there to move it you've got to touch your finger on it and drag it and it's not all that accurate you can see now I've positioned it down by the Start menu it's kind of difficult to click on something because when you touch your finger down again it tries to reposition the cursor but there usually have finally after three or four taps have been able to select the Start menu I'm going to use the scroll ball which is analogous to the up and down and left and right arrow keys we're going to go to programs and then we are going to go down to Internet Explorer which is right there and we're going to load out up now unfortunately it doesn't tap in to your network so we're not going to be able to see anything but we're going to fire up Internet Explorer and look at what this was and I don't remember if this is ie one or two maybe we'll go in and take a look at that it is taking a little bit of time but there you can see we've got Internet Explorer loaded up and we'll go over here to help see if we can get to it help and it's not letting to do it but in any event is Windows 95 it's on your Nexus 1 if you want to go in and use your keyboard here's a another Android tip for you we'll go down here to the address bar and tap in it and then we'll press and hold the menu button and that brings up your on-screen keyboard and we can go to and you can see it's not in there but if I could position the mouse there we go go to Pocket now.com and doing this on camera is a lot slower than doing it in real life I'll hit the back button to get rid of that keyboard and there you go it's redirecting me to home that Microsoft comm but it's not going to get there again because I don't have any networking I don't have an awful lot of stuff I can't install any programs I can't do a lot of things with it but I can show all my buddies look hey I've got Windows 95 on my phone why because I can one thing to remember if you remember from Windows days you can't just exit the app you have to go down to the Start menu I can get it and tell it to shut down otherwise the next time you boot up you're going to see the scan disk and it is going to go through and run scan disk for you and I don't know any way out of that so you're pretty much out of luck if you don't shut down properly each time but that said why run Windows 95 on a nexus one the answer because you can now go and impress your friends enjoy if you like this tip give it a thumbs up subscribe to our YouTube channel and please come by and visit us at pocketnow.com for pocketnow.com I'm Joe