CrystalMark Retro benchmark extends support all the way back to Windows 95
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That Win95 window with "Threadripper" in the CPU description is choice. A serious Twilight Zone moment for those who clearly remember the era of the Oval Office Blowjob...
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Found out not too long ago that my dad still has our old IBM PS/1 in his attic. I have no idea if it still works since it's apparently been up there for at least 10 years. 25MHz 486 with Overdrive giving us 50MHz, 1GB HDD, 8MB RAM, 2x CD Rom, and a Sound Blaster. I remember the HDD, CD Rom, and Sound upgrade cost about $1000. We had a Epson ActionLaser 1500 too but I think it's gone. Now I want to go get it and set it up. I'm sure my wife will approve... :/
Pic from the internet. Looks exactly like what we owned.
Pic from the internet. Looks exactly like what we owned.
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I suppose I can see some nostalgia to feeling like I'm 15 again, waiting for a JPEG of Pamela Anderson's butt to download a few lines of pixels at a time on a 28.8 modem.
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First thing to check is to see if the CMOS battery has leaked all over the motherboard. If not, it might be relatively straightforward to resurrect! Or it might have one of those sealed RTC modules....Found out not too long ago that my dad still has our old IBM PS/1 in his attic. I have no idea if it still works since it's apparently been up there for at least 10 years. 25MHz 486 with Overdrive giving us 50MHz, 1GB HDD, 8MB RAM, 2x CD Rom, and a Sound Blaster. I remember the HDD, CD Rom, and Sound upgrade cost about $1000. We had a Epson ActionLaser 1500 too but I think it's gone. Now I want to go get it and set it up. I'm sure my wife will approve... :/
Pic from the internet. Looks exactly like what we owned.
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I highly recommend either setting it up and reliving some old memories, or checking how much they are worth on eBay. Last time I checked, 486's were going for way more than you would think.Found out not too long ago that my dad still has our old IBM PS/1 in his attic. I have no idea if it still works since it's apparently been up there for at least 10 years. 25MHz 486 with Overdrive giving us 50MHz, 1GB HDD, 8MB RAM, 2x CD Rom, and a Sound Blaster. I remember the HDD, CD Rom, and Sound upgrade cost about $1000. We had a Epson ActionLaser 1500 too but I think it's gone. Now I want to go get it and set it up. I'm sure my wife will approve... :/
Pic from the internet. Looks exactly like what we owned.
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The Clinton administration. Normal times, prosperity for all, no social media, great movies and music. Hail the mighty 90's.
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I want that KeyboardFound out not too long ago that my dad still has our old IBM PS/1 in his attic. I have no idea if it still works since it's apparently been up there for at least 10 years. 25MHz 486 with Overdrive giving us 50MHz, 1GB HDD, 8MB RAM, 2x CD Rom, and a Sound Blaster. I remember the HDD, CD Rom, and Sound upgrade cost about $1000. We had a Epson ActionLaser 1500 too but I think it's gone. Now I want to go get it and set it up. I'm sure my wife will approve... :/
Pic from the internet. Looks exactly like what we owned.
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Talk about walking back into history and why bring back the dinoretro.
Ancient times and my starter was an IBM PS/ValuePoint I think with a 486DX 25 or 33mhz CPU and a S3 + SoundBlaster with a 2x CD. Came with Indian Jones Atlantis Managed to beat it after 2 yrs of understanding it in my 7th-8th grade years lol. Sadly, it met the dump heap due to extreme rusting. Learned how to destroy the Win 3.11 Boot files by accident and restoring it through about 7-12 floppies worth. Also Dual Booting with Redhat 5 or 6?
Ancient times and my starter was an IBM PS/ValuePoint I think with a 486DX 25 or 33mhz CPU and a S3 + SoundBlaster with a 2x CD. Came with Indian Jones Atlantis
Managed to beat it after 2 yrs of understanding it in my 7th-8th grade years lol. Sadly, it met the dump heap due to extreme rusting. Learned how to destroy the Win 3.11 Boot files by accident and restoring it through about 7-12 floppies worth. Also Dual Booting with Redhat 5 or 6?
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We still use 7 MSDOS 6.22 and 4 Win 95 to run our production day and night, at £1.7 million to upgrade each of them to Windows 10 to do the exact same operation, easier to become an expert in changing motherboard capacitors then try and justify replacing them
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This is how I find out CrystalDiskMark/Crystal Dew World has a whole host of anime girl mascots.
Some of them even have Twitter accounts! https://x.com/suishoshizuku?lang=en
Then again, even Microsoft has anime girl mascots for Windows in Japan: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-getting-japanese-anime-mascot-it-still-needs-name
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Given the enshittification of technology in general and Windows 11 in particular, I think it might be time to make Windows 95 my daily driver.
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So, of course I had to give it a try.
Feel the burn of my late '90s powerhouse, a fully-loaded Pentium II with Voodoo3!
Benchmark results:
CPU: Single 400 / Multi 400
Disk Seq Read 282 / Rand Read 7 / Seq Write 200 200 / Rand Write 30
2D: Text 549 / Square 2655 / Circle 1010 / Image 992
3D: Title 100 / Break 100 / Wireframe 128493 / Polygon 131215
My "Project98" PC is not actually the fastest of its breed; it's just something I threw together out of spare parts a few years ago. It plays Win9x games fairly well, but it struggles with anything released 2000 or later. Still, it brought me pleasure both in the construction and use, so even if it doesn't benchmark very highly I still love the old beast. It has all the period-appropriate apps and games on it (PowerGoo! Quake II! MS Office 97! Many more!) and I fire it up every other month or so just to play around with it (and hear its fans roar).
One recommendation on the benchmark program: make the 3D/OpenGL display something on screen while it does its thing. The test can be somewhat lengthy (it took a four or five minutes on my PC) and all it did was pop up a black screen while it did its thing. I assumed it had crashed and killed the process twice before I decided to just be patient. That could have been avoided if there was something showing on the display.
Feel the burn of my late '90s powerhouse, a fully-loaded Pentium II with Voodoo3!
Benchmark results:
CPU: Single 400 / Multi 400
Disk Seq Read 282 / Rand Read 7 / Seq Write 200 200 / Rand Write 30
2D: Text 549 / Square 2655 / Circle 1010 / Image 992
3D: Title 100 / Break 100 / Wireframe 128493 / Polygon 131215
My "Project98" PC is not actually the fastest of its breed; it's just something I threw together out of spare parts a few years ago. It plays Win9x games fairly well, but it struggles with anything released 2000 or later. Still, it brought me pleasure both in the construction and use, so even if it doesn't benchmark very highly I still love the old beast. It has all the period-appropriate apps and games on it (PowerGoo! Quake II! MS Office 97! Many more!) and I fire it up every other month or so just to play around with it (and hear its fans roar).
One recommendation on the benchmark program: make the 3D/OpenGL display something on screen while it does its thing. The test can be somewhat lengthy (it took a four or five minutes on my PC) and all it did was pop up a black screen while it did its thing. I assumed it had crashed and killed the process twice before I decided to just be patient. That could have been avoided if there was something showing on the display.
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Sadly no, it doesn't.
That being said I ran it in dosbox-x running win 3.1. It may still work on something like pcem or real hardware. I also had to rename the file as the filename is longer then 8.3
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I'm unfamiliar with this tool so I really thought it was going to measure latency and perceived performance.
I was both excited and terrified to hear that my Win95 Pentium was more responsive than anything on the market today.
I was both excited and terrified to hear that my Win95 Pentium was more responsive than anything on the market today.
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This is cool... but... for those who are not kernel people I should mention that an emulated or hypervisor system is not going to give meaningful results vs real hardware. If I go into detail I'll get modded down so I'll throw some below my sig ;-)
E
Win95 and Win98 are practically the same. There was some multitasking but not preemptive. WinNT 3.1 started that and 3.5 did better. 4.0/Win2K and now we have Dave Cutler from DEC bringing VMS knowhow to make a true multiprocessing OS. Emulators treat all these the same, so SMP, Hyperthread, etc. all become homogeneous.
IRQs. Real hardware had limitations (ISA, EISA, PCI, PCI-E, etc.) in the 1980s and 1990s that emulation doesn't have. Those things made "simple" things like memory access, disk access, modem access, audio access, etc. all wait on each other.
VGA, CGA, EGA, video adapters started out on the main bus then eventually migrated to dedicated video buses, and today even dedicated PSUs and multiple power connectors. But back then none of that existed, and today's emulators make "quick" work of displays.
"Quick" work includes high bandwidth, low latency, no overheating, so none of the stuff that limited PCs in the 80's/90's. That means the emulator will outperform the original.
That's not really as important as when you COMPARE Win95, Win98, WinNT, Dosbox, WinXP, Win2K, etc in an emulator/hypervisor vs real hardware. The numbers won't match anything real. It's like comparing race cars at the Nurburgring vs Gran Turismo.
To truly compare these OSs, get the hardware set up (two people above already have the hardware although a PS-1 is not strictly a 100% IBM Personal Computer) and get the software setup... and run the benchmark.
There's more, but that's enough of the quick recap. The old hardware would bottleneck on displaying video, sprites, etc. Memory access on the 8086 differed from the 80286, 80386, etc. The emulator/hypervisor makes all that work seamlessly... The modem typically used the same DSP (eventually) as the audio, so if you were playing music or recording, good luck getting that "up to 56Kbps" or vice versa. We live in better times. Outside of politics.
E
Win95 and Win98 are practically the same. There was some multitasking but not preemptive. WinNT 3.1 started that and 3.5 did better. 4.0/Win2K and now we have Dave Cutler from DEC bringing VMS knowhow to make a true multiprocessing OS. Emulators treat all these the same, so SMP, Hyperthread, etc. all become homogeneous.
IRQs. Real hardware had limitations (ISA, EISA, PCI, PCI-E, etc.) in the 1980s and 1990s that emulation doesn't have. Those things made "simple" things like memory access, disk access, modem access, audio access, etc. all wait on each other.
VGA, CGA, EGA, video adapters started out on the main bus then eventually migrated to dedicated video buses, and today even dedicated PSUs and multiple power connectors. But back then none of that existed, and today's emulators make "quick" work of displays.
"Quick" work includes high bandwidth, low latency, no overheating, so none of the stuff that limited PCs in the 80's/90's. That means the emulator will outperform the original.
That's not really as important as when you COMPARE Win95, Win98, WinNT, Dosbox, WinXP, Win2K, etc in an emulator/hypervisor vs real hardware. The numbers won't match anything real. It's like comparing race cars at the Nurburgring vs Gran Turismo.
To truly compare these OSs, get the hardware set up (two people above already have the hardware although a PS-1 is not strictly a 100% IBM Personal Computer) and get the software setup... and run the benchmark.
There's more, but that's enough of the quick recap. The old hardware would bottleneck on displaying video, sprites, etc. Memory access on the 8086 differed from the 80286, 80386, etc. The emulator/hypervisor makes all that work seamlessly... The modem typically used the same DSP (eventually) as the audio, so if you were playing music or recording, good luck getting that "up to 56Kbps" or vice versa. We live in better times. Outside of politics.
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Ooh, an 'Umm, actually' moment!
Windows 3.1 was cooperatively multitasked. Windows 95 and above, however, offered preemptive multitasking when running only 32-bit protected mode applications. Any 16-bit applications shared a 'VM', with shared memory and were cooperatively multitasked within that memory space, but that itself could be pre-empted by the OS scheduler and other apps.
There were some compromises, especially if you used older 16-bit apps or drivers for some of your hardware. Backwards compatibility was high on Microsoft's list of priorities, and they bent over backwards to make sure Windows95 would run on almost any machine, and almost any older app would run on the OS. The worst of these compromises was the Win16Mutex, which --if a process crashed while 16-bit application was running-- could lock up the system. But this had more to do with the mutex preventing access to the kernel rather than a lock-up of the scheduler itself. Some more details are in an old MSKB article found here.
If you ran a clean 32-bit system (32-bit drivers, 32-bit apps) then Windows 9x was purely a preemptive multitasking OS. Win NT (and later 2K and XP) had fewer issues with their multitasking because they did away with much of the 16-bit baggage from the DOS and Win3 days. Admittedly, Windows NT did it before Windows 95, but that lineage was not the only Microsoft OS to offer that feature. Windows NT wasn't even the first Microsoft OS to do that.
That, in fact, was DOS 4.0, distinct from the better known MS-DOS 4.01. It only saw a very limited release but it offered pre-emptive multitasking... albeit with limitations. But it released in 1986, 7 whole years before Windows NT.
Yes, I'm picking nits. I've no argument with the gist of your post or your conclusion.
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Now I can find out how much faster my wife’s old win 95 machine is than the win 10 machine. The win 10 machine takes so long to boot it sometimes hibernates before finishing booting.
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ZOMG, that's the MDK benchmark! Those triangly bits rotated, and it supported MMXThis is all I need (points for recognition)
I absolutely loved the vibe of that game, there hasn't been anything quite like it since then. MDK2 was also fun, but much more conventional... although the toast-gun made me ROTFLMAOASTC.
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Across almost 2 decades, I've anecdotally used various versions of Windows and Ubuntu dual-booting on the same system, even as that system's components also changed over time.
My point is, there has almost always been a noticeable difference to me in boot time between Windows and Ubuntu across all of these versions and installations and systems. The time it takes an OS to boot isn't necessarily dependent on the hardware.
...although someone mentioned IRQ ports earlier and I had flashbacks to high school and my parents' living room and trying to use a midi cable to connect an electric keyboard to...I can't remember if it was the Windows95 or Windows98 machine. So yeah the hardware can absolutely mess with the boot time.
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Been searching high and liw. Does anyone have a leaking / exploding capacitor simulator to go with this?
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Oh, that's timely. I have running smaller old computers exhibition. Time to test P 120, 32MB, NV1*+VooDoo 2. (And P 188 MMX, 64MB, TNT or PIII, 128MB, GeForce 2Ti...)
*-Now, how many Arsian will recognize NV1 alias STG 2000..
*-Now, how many Arsian will recognize NV1 alias STG 2000..
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TheMolesRevenge
Ars Praetorian
I've still got a Win98 machine of similar age that I keep for older games. It doesn't get much use these days thanks to GoG, and half my reason for keeping it now is that it's built in a custom-painted AT mini tower, I'll have to download this and see how it compares. It's an AMD K6/3-400MHz with Voodoo3 and (I think) 256MB RAM.
Unfortunately I recycled my Pentium-233MMX with original PowerVR and 3dfx cards last year
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I lost most of my old hardware in a recent downsizing move. I did keep one system: a dual Pentium II system with every drive bay filled with Plextor 4X speed CD-R gear. Nothing since has ever matched the ability of those drives to read through scratches and rip anything. I have known torture test CDs that are barely Redbook legal, and usually when I put them in a modern DVD player I can’t play the start or end of them. Music before track 1 and after 74 minutes, you don’t know what you’ll get now. This era of Plextor drives handle it all without stuttering or skipping.
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