I installed Win95 OSR 2.5 on my Pentium III Pacman PC tonight! The goal was to test out my new ATI Rage XL video card for my eventual ITX Llama PC. And... I gotta tell you, I don't think I made the best choice in hardware here, but I think it SHOULD work. Time for a 🧵.

So, before I got to installing drivers, the Win95 install was pretty straight forward. I always enjoy seeing this screen!

After install completed, I took a look and needed some drivers, including for the 3Com network card. So I booted into Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and used the networking capability to copy drivers over to the Win95 partition. Seemed like the easiest thing to do!

Just look at that lovely 640x480 desktop! Hah! Anyway, next up, I decided to install and configure the network card. It went off without a hitch, and I mapped a network drive to my Raspberry Pi.

Next, I decided to install audio drivers for my Aureal Vortex 1 card. What's nice about this card is that it is a PCI card that works well under Windows 3.11 too!

Of interesting note, DirectX 6 is needed to complete the driver install for the Aureal Vortex 1. On reboot, I got prompted to install it! So we got that installed, rebooted, and finished setting up the card!

Next, I fired up Unknown Devices to see what was left to install. I knew that chipset drivers would get messy in Windows 95, so I made a backup copy of the install and went to work on it!

Installing the Via Service Pack 4.43v got us some additional chipset support, which was nice!

However, there was one thing that I was not able to get installed under Windows 95, and that is Via USB drivers. I tried every way to Sunday to get this to work. I do have drivers that will work under Windows 98 though. That'll be a project for another day!

Now for the ATI Rage XL video card. I couldn't find Windows 95 drivers, which was kind of the POINT of getting this card. However, I did find Windows ME drivers. They require DirectX 8.1 for the utils to work. But if you disable the utils on startup, things seem to be ok.

So, sidenote: I had a false sense of security w/ this card. I had installed the PCI variant in my dual Pentium Pro and had gotten several OSes working with it. But in hindsight, most of them were NT OSes and not 9X ones. I guess I didn't do my homework!

So, yea, this is where we land! Just USB drivers not installed, and of course, the "wrong" video drivers, but they work.

And that's going to do it for this experiment. I might try Win98 next, but I will be curious to see if the Aureal Vortex 1 card will work. I've created a pretty big mismatch with this system's HW, but it's all just for fun anyway. Thx for following along! @threadreaderapp unroll

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