
Speedrunning Windows 95 - zdw
https://hackaday.com/2019/03/09/speedrunning-windows-95/
======
lqet
Anecdote: back in the early 2000s, I regularly installed Windows XP on the
machines of school friends and family members and got pretty fast at it. After
a few months, I realized that I had memorized the original Windows XP
"default" CD key (the one starting with FCKGW...) by accident. I haven't done
an installation of XP in 15 years, yet you could wake me up in the middle of
the night and I could tell you this damn key.

~~~
Magi604
This was me, but with the OG Starcraft: Brood War CD Key. I _think_ I still
remember the key, but I'm not sure and I don't have the CD to verify.

~~~
ygra
I still know my Starcraft CD key to this day as well.

Bonus: The same key also works for Half-Life. They used the same algorithm.

~~~
astronautjones
I loved quake iii and similar properties that only checked the last digit, 3
or c

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sp332
There's another speedrun category: time to bluescreen
[https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1103384684812255233](https://mobile.twitter.com/Foone/status/1103384684812255233)

~~~
ufo
This joke also reminds me of the "Banned%" Club Penguin speedrun. It was
short-lived but people came up with various tricks to speed up the email
verification subsequent banning process.

[https://www.speedrun.com/cp#Banned](https://www.speedrun.com/cp#Banned)

[https://www.pcgamer.com/getting-banned-from-club-penguin-
is-...](https://www.pcgamer.com/getting-banned-from-club-penguin-is-now-a-
speedrunning-competition/)

------
forgotmypw
I got pretty good at this type of thing at one of my earliest jobs was as a
network admin's assistant at a training place that was similar to today's
webdev bootcamps, but for stuff like Oracle, VB, and Java.

Before every class began, I would go through the entire classroom of 15-20
workstations and do a clean install of WinNT4 and whatever software packages
were necessary for the class.

Imaging was possible with software like Ghost, but it was still pretty clunky,
and NT4 required extra work after imaging, so we just did it manually.
Typically, by the time I was done a step with the last workstation, the first
one was ready for me to click the next Next button.

Thanks for the memories!

~~~
josteink
Windows NT and newer supported unattended installs of both the OS and other
software you wanted installed automatically. Not as fast as imaging, but
equivalent of a manual install, just without any manual work.

That’s how we handled 100s of machines with an IT dept of just 3-4 techies at
the uni I worked for.

And we _loathed_ people who came with non-standard HW our custom boot disks
didn’t handle (remember that even being a thing?).

Things have certainly changed and IMO mostly for the better.

------
rubenbe
I was recently amazed to find out that Windows 95 is still used in an
industrial automation setting. The company uses the NetBEUI[0] protocol and
Windows 95 is apparently the only version to support it.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS_Frames_protocol](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBIOS_Frames_protocol)

~~~
anon_cow1111
In the last job I had, Win 95/98 was on a computer used to send programs to a
20-ton piece of metal working equipment. Of course, you had to drop into DOS
to use the necessary software. Transfer rate was around 900 baud. The computer
that actually ran the machine consisted of a white monochrome monitor and a
desk-sized cabinet full of control boards. The cabinet had an air conditioner
attached to it and had trouble running on hot days.

Trivia about this machine: on the corner of one control board there was a
single, green indicator LED with a broken lead. It was bent over so the broken
part would still contact the solder joint and light up. If at any point it
stopped making contact with the circuit, the entire machine locked up or threw
random error codes until you wiggled it back into place.

 _" We'll fix it later"_

~~~
Sileni
The silver lining to jobs like that is after a year or two, you're the single,
solitary person in the world that can keep the machine running as expected.
Performance reviews become a breeze after that.

"We've been looking at your performance these last few months, and it seems
you've stopped taking on new responsibilities..."

"The machine is running."

"Yes but..."

"I have other offers."

"Never mind, carry on. Here's your raise."

~~~
anon_cow1111
Oh, it's great when it works out like that, but this place wasn't worth
staying with long term. I should clarify; I was a grease monkey/operator, not
tech support. You would never break 15usd/hr even as a foreman.

The slogan was literally "Run it till it dies". The machine next to me was
even older, and had a crash/down time of 1-2 hours every 9 hour day. Not
kidding. The floor offices still used terminal computers in 2014-ish. The one
in my depart finally crapped out (screen flicker due to the flyback cracking a
solder joint). Easy fix, I didn't say anything hoping they'd buy a damn
desktop like a normal company. Nope, they special ordered a new/refurb
terminal for god knows how much money (I think it was a televideo 9xx or
something).

I could go on, but you get the idea.

------
ComputerGuru
I had an assembly line for setting up Windows 95 with the 21 floppy disks (and
later Windows 98 with 38) at a school lab. Start one, when it asks for disk 2
move on to the next PC, and the next thing you know, you have a clean install
on every PC in the "lab."

~~~
zaroth
If you have 21 disks and 21 machines, how much slower is this install method
than if you had 21^2 disks for 21 machines?

Assuming all disks read in equal time and it takes no time to move the disks.

------
userbinator
For those wondering what the part at 00:48 is, it is this patch which allows
Win95 to run on fast CPUs:

[https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-
lim...](https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-95-21ghz-cpu-limit-
broken/)

There's various timing loops for calibrating delays, which were written at a
time when CPUs were much slower. Win98(SE?) didn't have this problem.

------
th0ma5
Someone had a thread on Twitter trying to crash it ASAP and the key was the
run dialogue box with "con\con" ... This even crashes the JavaScript Windows
95 emulators.

~~~
lqet
In case anyone was wondering (as I was):

> While any of these special filenames would have worked, the most common one
> used to crash old Windows machines was con, a special filename that
> represents the physical console: the keyboard (for input) and the screen
> (for output). Windows correctly handled simple attempts to access the con
> device, but a filename included two references to the special device—for
> example, c:\con\con—then Windows would crash. If that file was referenced
> from a webpage, for example, by trying to load an image from
> file:///c:/con/con then the machine would crash whenever the malicious page
> was accessed.

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/05/in-a-...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/05/in-a-throwback-to-the-90s-ntfs-bug-lets-anyone-hang-or-
crash-windows-7-8-1/)

------
ah-
Someone should enter this at one of the speedrunning conventions. I'd love to
watch a stream of someone installing Win95 in front of a huge audience,
complete with commentary.

~~~
ape4
"oh he forgot to uncheck <component>, that's going to cost him..."

~~~
tom_
"Over to IFuckedUrMom666, retired former Windows 95 installation champion, for
some extra commentary."

"Thanks Jeff. Yeah, we'll have to see how this plays out, but I'm tentatively
calling this one as maybe not a mistake. By leaving IPX support in, there's an
extra 198 sectors to copy - but you save 39ms later from reduced install
logging, as there's never any IPX check failures from the network
infrastructure. He's been playing such a straight-up game here so far, so this
is actually quite interesting - we might be seeing hints here of the bolder,
gutsier play that he's going to have to bring to the table far more often to
later stages. The Plus! installation round in particular is not for the faint-
hearted."

"IFuckedUrMom666 - thanks. We'll be back for more analysis later."

------
acoye
Can you speedrun something that is not locked to specific hardware like a
console game would be? Feels like hardware is most of the "speed"

~~~
daveFNbuck
You can speedrun PC games. For video games, better hardware can speed up
things like loading times (which also happens if you put an SSD in your PS4)
and increase the framerate but the actual gameplay won't become faster beyond
the threshold necessary to play the game smoothly.

This particular speedrun is much more tied to the hardware, but that's part of
the fun for these people. It might make more sense if you compare it to
something like car racing. Both the hardware and the person matter a lot to
the outcome.

~~~
zamalek
Speedrunners have built tools for some games (most Valve games if I'm
recalling correctly) that monitor times, while excluding loading screens.
Obviously this is a separate category, and both curiously exist for games with
a built-in timer (GDQ ignores in-game timers, for example).

~~~
floatboth
There's actually a whole scripting language for reading values from games'
memory and extract events for timing and progress:

[https://github.com/LiveSplit/LiveSplit/blob/master/Documenta...](https://github.com/LiveSplit/LiveSplit/blob/master/Documentation/Auto-
Splitters.md)

------
lanstin
Ok we need speedrun install Gentoo 2004. Speedrun install Slackware Linux 1.0
from floppies. Speedrun install perl 5 from Configure. Speedrun update all the
GNU autotools and gcc from a non-root user with a non standard prefix.

~~~
myrandomcomment
As someone using Gentoo in 2004 (what was I thinking?) I would love to see how
long this takes in a VM back by a CPU from 2019 and tons of RAM. I have some
memory in the back of my head of compiling Gentoo on a Sun Sparc 20 (4xCPU ...
I think) with max ram (32 or 128MB?!?) - because I owned one and could (it was
old HW in 2004). It took a few days from stage 1. Today if I need to compile
anything I ssh to a builder server with 48 cores and 256gb of RAM as the i7
laptop is to slow. Ah, memories.

------
hugh4life
I remember doing a similar competition back in high school between area
schools... except you had to put together a computer and then install windows.

~~~
TeamMCS
Funnily enough you've just surfaced an old memory of mine, we did the same
thing.

I vaguely recall having to build a 486 out of a bunch of parts, install
windows and get to the desktop.

Fun times

------
kakarot
Not quite the same but once I had to install Windows 7 and NVIDIA graphics
drivers without a functioning monitor.

If blind runs became more popular then maybe I could hone that skill.

------
justizin
this is a waste of time, i just burned a custom cd with an autorun.inf and
every morning before school, after installing linux the previous day, i would
pop it in so my mom could use AOL.

still, 24 years after windows 95, i gotta say this is .. hilarious. ;d

~~~
hackerbrother
you installed linux every night and installed windows every morning?

------
fetbaffe
Two important URL:s from the Windows 9x era

1) [http://www.annoyances.org/](http://www.annoyances.org/)

2) [https://www.litepc.com/](https://www.litepc.com/)

Good times.

------
mcnichol
Hah! I love that this is a thing.

In software development I think I could watch speedruns of folks building a
login service/page or any component really.

------
bubblethink
What are the rules ? Since this is a largely predictable instruction stream,
you know all the branch outcomes before hand. You even know the value
outcomes. You can create a close to perfect branch predictor, prefetcher,
scheduler etc.

------
danschumann
I remember that it used to take an hour or 2.. including walking away and
coming back

------
pavel_lishin
Meanwhile, I can't manage to install 95 in a VirtualBox install :/

~~~
pavel_lishin
Ah, found the solution:
[https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=82787](https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=82787)

------
narag
It seems it was made emulating an ancient processor using current processors
and in fact creating a massively overclocked virtual processor + virtual
disks. Very nice.

------
oscareczek
Oh, hello there.

------
781
OT: can someone explain this anime/waifu thing to me, in particular why does
someone record a video like this one with careful window placement so that we
can see the anime? I feel like I'm missing something.

~~~
mrweasel
I just want to know what window manager that it.

~~~
redspl
XFCE4 w/ Mofit (misspelled in the package) theme. I'll move back to a tiling
WM one day..

------
Serpenservm
Instructions unclear. I accidentally installed Arch instead.

~~~
oscareczek
I use Arch BTW

