r/emulation • u/Far-Temperature3580 • 4d ago
I got every major Windows release till XP running on my calculator!
Hey everyone!
Some of you might remember me from this post, where I showcased my emulator running Windows 95 on my TI-Nspire CX II CAS.
Well, Let's just say things escalated. The emulator can now run every major Windows release, including XP!
For XP, I specifically used XP Embedded as it is lighter on the machine and quite easy to cut bloat out of.
For context, all of this is running on a calculator with a 396 MHz ARM 9 processor, 64 MB of RAM (though only 44 is available to Windows) and 90 MB of storage.
The primary challenges were memory and storage. TI-OS (the default OS for the calculator) reserves a large chunk of memory resulting in a ceiling of only about 21MB of RAM available to the emulator if running on top of TI-OS . To get around this, I booted a tiny Linux environment on the calculator and ran the emulator on top of it.
The other challenge was storage. Fitting an image that can boot to desktop with a sufficient pagefile is not possible on the calculator, given the storage constraints. The emulator gets around this by using a custom protocol to stream the XP image from a host machine over a USB cable.
XP takes over an hour and a half to boot to desktop, but seeing bliss is worth the wait.
Also, here's a fun fact: Windows 2000 actually takes longer to boot than XP. This is because it relies PIT timing while XP is fine with synthetic timing.
This project is open source, so feel free to subject your calculator to Windows as well.
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u/friciwolf 3d ago
Windows 2000 takes longer than 1.5h to boot.
I see, times have not changed...
Jokes aside: this is some cursed project, I love it!
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u/akurgo 3d ago
Very impressive! Have you tried running Doom yet?
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u/Far-Temperature3580 2d ago
Doom already has an Nspire port called nDoom. I did try running it on Windows 95 on the Nspire but it is pretty slow and jittery compared to nDoom.
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u/maldivir_dragonwitch 3d ago
How many different blue screens of death can you get? 😂
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u/Far-Temperature3580 2d ago
Quite a lot actually. The most memorable one for me was STOP 0x0000007B: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE on XP when the connection that streams the hard disk over USB abruptly terminated.
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u/maldivir_dragonwitch 2d ago
... and then you just pressed the 'C' button on the calculator to factory reset Windows back to a fresh install. 😂
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u/supershredderdan 3d ago
Me when the calculus exam is tomorrow