Testing Windows 95 July 20th, 1992 (WINBALL) with 86Box Socket 3 (1994)

You’ve been waiting for the most epic moment when we test the very first versions of Windows 95, and this moment has come now! We have actually tested Windows 95 July 20th, 1992 build (or build 07200022), which was said to be the earliest confirmed Windows 95 build that predates the Chicago Feature Specification by more than two months.

The WINBALL ARJ archives came from a leak that happened on September 18th, 1992, almost two months after the compile date. Then, they became “lost media” for more than two decades before eventually being found again on June 23rd, 2024. Additionally, this Windows 95 build doesn’t include any Win32 support, which confirms the fact that it predates the Chicago feature document.

We are very excited to repackage those ARJ archives as usable floppy disk images that we’ve created for you, along with the MS-DOS 5.00a floppy disks that you can download from the Internet Archive:

After you’ve downloaded the two required files, you can start the preparation for Windows WINBALL.

Stage 1: Preparation

We’ve prepared a virtual machine using the 86Box manager. This virtual machine used the following specifications:

First of all, we’ve used an MSI MS-4145 motherboard with an Intel i486DX clocked at 50 MHz and 64 MB of RAM. Then, we’ve inserted a hard drive that has a size of 174 MB and a 3.5″ 1.44 MB floppy disk. Finally, we’ve used Sound Blaster 1.0 as a sound card, IBM VGA as a GPU, and a Logitech Serial Mouse as a mouse.

We went to the BIOS setup for initial preparations of the system. All we had to do was to let the BIOS automatically detect the IDE parameters for the hard drive, like shown below.

The hard disk parameters appeared to be correct, except that the size had an extra 1 MB at the end of the disk.

Stage 2: MS-DOS 5.00a

The next stage that we had to consider working on was installing MS-DOS 5.00a, because this version of Windows 95 required MS-DOS to be installed due to lack of Win32 support. We have inserted the DISK1.img floppy image to the virtual machine after all configurations have settled.

After that, we’re greeted with the MS-DOS setup screen:

We’ve adjusted necessary options, only one of which was changed from the default. We didn’t want MS-DOS to launch the shell on every startup, because we needed to focus on installing Windows WINBALL.

We let MS-DOS use the entire disk, and the formatting process succeeded. Then, the installation went on successfully, except that we were prompted to insert the second disk to continue the installation.

As soon as the installation was complete, we’ve removed the MS-DOS setup floppy disk and restarted the virtual computer. We found ourselves in the C:\ prompt:

Stage 3: Installing ARJ

The next stage was to install the ARJ tool that we found from this page, version 2.75a. As we’ve already prepared the unarj.img file for you, there’s no need for you to do anything except inserting said image to the floppy disk drive.

We’ve verified that the needed setup file indeed exists as you can see:

We’re presented with the installation steps. Fortunately, we only had to answer Yes to the two questions that were shown to us:

As ARJ was being installed, we were asked if we wanted to create the ARJ directory. Of course, we’ve responded with Yes, since we needed the tool.

As you can see, the installation went successful. Now, it’s time to copy the ARJ files from the WINBALL floppy disks to a directory that we’re going to create at the root drive, called C:\WINBALLS.

After that, we’ve inserted the first WINBALL floppy disk, winball1.img, and copied the WINBALL archive file to the WINBALLS directory, called WINBALL.ARJ, using the copy command.

Then, we had to repeat the same steps for the rest of the WINBALL image files as follows:

• winballs2.img: WINBALL.A01
• winballs3.img: WINBALL.A02
• winballs4.img: WINBALL.A03
• winballs5.img: WINBALL.A04
• winballs6.img: WINBALL.A05
• winballs7.img: WINBALL.A06
• winballs8.img: WINBALL.A07

After the copy process finishes for all above files, you should see:

We’ve verified that the archive files exist:

Here, we no longer need the floppy disk, so we’ve ejected it from the system. Afterwards, we’ve run the arj -v -y x WINBALL.ARJ command.

As soon as the extraction process finished, we’ve reached the final and the most exciting stage!

Stage 4: Windows WINBALL

In this stage, we’re now demonstrating how we got Windows WINBALL to install and with sound support! We ran SETUP in the WINBALLS directory, and got this screen:

We pressed ENTER, and we got an option to choose between express or custom install. Of course, we’ve selected express install.

Immediately after our selection, the necessary files for Windows installation got extracted to the C:\WINDOWS directory.

We got a graphical setup UI that looked similar to the Windows 3.1 setup UI, but with some subtle differences, including the title bar being Fixedsys.

After that, the installation program installed the remaining files needed to start Windows and its programs.

Then, we started asked for a printer. We’ve decided not to install any printer, so we’ve decided to just press Install on No Printer Attached.

After that, we got asked for the network card installation. Since the network part of this Windows build was considered to be unstable, we’ve decided to cancel the network card installation.

Then, we got asked for the MS-DOS editor name.

Finally, it asked us to reboot the system and to start Windows using the WIN command.

When we rebooted the system, we fell back to the C:\ prompt.

We ran WIN as instructed, and we saw a very interesting boot splash for Windows 3.1:

Then, we got a BSOD that looked like this:

We answered with Y, meaning that Windows needed to continue. Then, Windows started up with this error message “An error occurred loading the VSERVER device: not serving on any nets.”:

As soon as we closed all error dialog boxes, the Program Manager appeared as usual.

Bonus: Sound Blaster 1.0

To make the experience even more interesting, we’ve decided to install the sound card drivers for the Sound Blaster sound card. We opened Control Panel > Devices > Add, and added the Creative Labs Sound Blaster 1.0 driver.

We got asked for the driver disk. We’ve used C:\WINBALLS as the disk, since that directory contained every driver.

Then, we got asked for the sound card configuration. We made sure to match the port and the interrupt number what we’ve set on 86Box as follows:

Then, we got asked to reboot Windows:

As soon as we restarted Windows, the familiar tada sound finally blasted from our speakers! You can confirm this via Control Panel > Sound!

Enjoy!

#news #Tech #Technology #update #WINBALL #Windows #WindowsChicago #WindowsWINBALL

Get ready for the Windows WINBALL showcase in 86Box!

#Windows #WindowsChicago #WINBALL #TechNews #TechUpdates #retrocomputing #Computers