Kata 📎

As is tradition (well, I’ve decided that it’s my tradition), I’m doing #AdventOfCode on older hardware. I’m also a bit of a Windows 2000 fan, because … I don’t know why, weird irrational nostalgia, I guess. Either way, I’d like to do some Win2k thingie for AoC this year.

The minimum system requirements are a Pentium 133 and 32-64 MB of RAM. That’s pretty much exactly what I have. So, let’s try to install it.

The installation took well over an hour, but once it’s done, it’s actually quite usable. Here’s a video of the boot process (just takes about a minute) and a bit of web browsing:

https://movq.de/v/5dbc55dbaa/MVI_9356.MOV.mp4

It’s also the first time that I saw this screen (see below). Windows can’t power off the PC by itself, I have to push the button. I only knew similar screens from Win9x.

I don’t know yet which programming language I’ll use. Maybe Visual Basic? 🤪

#retrocomputing

Mar 27 at 6:43pmWeb
Show threadKata 📎1d ago
Taking photos of these holographic CDs is ridiculously hard.
Show threadDesertFOX1d ago
@movq This is defnitely one of the most difficult motives to scan! 😠
Show threadKata 📎1d ago

@dfx I can imagine. 🤣

I never noticed before that there’s a jumping … person … woman … at the top? It’s hard to make out what’s going on here.

Show threadKlaus Frank1d ago

@movq Put them into a flat bed scanner and make multiple scans while rotating them.

At least with the scanner I used last time that kinda worked. Didn't look exceptionally pretty but ok-ish in the end.

Show threadKata 📎1d ago

@agowa338 Yeah, kind of, I can see where this is going. 🤔 If you’re really patient, I guess you could do this in small rotational increments. Could be cool.

How are you doing this, @dfx?

Show threadDesertFOX1d ago
@movq @agowa338 I don't really deal with too many holographic discs. If I really need to, I try to take a static image in a flatbed scanner to get a good representation of it for my retro collection, but that's about it. Some discs are almost i possible to scan, though...
Show threadKata 📎3h ago
Installing SP4 takes another ~40 minutes. Disk I/O is really slow on this box.
Show threadMaZderMind33m ago
@movq I vividly remember waiting for the installer, hoping the system would be bootable afterwards. I think I uses Win 2000 for a looooong time, avoiding WinXP.
Show threadilpalazzo1d ago
@movq Soft Power-Off requires ACPI compatibility. Windows could power itself off since 98 AFAIR, not sure about later versions of 95. 2K definitely can on compatible hardware.