You know, there’s this YouTube channel MetraByte where Jace, who calls themselves an aficionado of “silly tech” (whatever that really means), embarked on this wild venture. Imagine this, they tried to get Windows 95 and Doom to work on a PlayStation 2. It’s like trying to put a square peg in a round hole, right? Windows 95 finally decided to cooperate, after being poked a lot, but Doom was a no-show. Ha!
Anyway, here we are in 2025, and both these tech pieces feel ancient. I mean, Windows 95 showed up in ’95 and PS2 in 2000—makes PS2 seem like the big sibling. So naturally, you’d think PS2 could handle ’95 and Doom without breaking a sweat. But, not really. Because getting an old x86 program to dance on Sony’s MIPS-based console is like asking your cat to do backflips—kind of tricky.
Maybe you’re wondering if Jace pulled it off? Well, they boiled down what felt like days of tech wrangling into a quick half-hour show-and-tell. And honestly, watching it was like watching someone make a complex recipe, only to realize halfway through they’re missing half the ingredients.
So Jace, with this gem of a hacked PS2, used some sort of QWERTY-controller combo, a USB stick, and a hard drive. Why a hard drive? Guess it helped cram more data in there. And that USB stick? It had this odd collection: a .ELF file (fancy homebrew thing), DOSBox, and Bochs emulators. They also did this virtual DOS dance to try and shoehorn Windows 95 and Doom in there.
The whole thing was painstaking. Jace gave DOSBox “47 attempts” to get the OS up (no joke), and then pivoted to Bochs, which was slower but they say more accurate. Whatever that means in this tech landscape. Getting x86 to work on MIPS was like trying to fit your foot into a shoe that’s two sizes too small.
If you’ve got the patience to sit through the full video, you’ll actually feel a bit of Jace’s frustration. It was slow. Like, watching paint dry slow. Every little thing on the PS2, from the I/O issues to the emulation woes, was a test of endurance. But, one step forward—they finally saw the Windows 95 setup screen. Yay?
Bochs did its own tug-of-war with Jace: errors left and right. When Windows 95 ultimately flaunted its desktop on the PS2, Jace tried Paint (sans mouse, which, you can imagine, is like trying to eat soup with a fork). Doom95 was the dream that stayed just that—a dream. But hey, what a quest.
In total, Jace clocked about “14 hours” to wrap up the whole Windows install. Channel your inner movie buff; even without a climactic ending, the journey itself was a blend of tech hurdles and old-school magic.
Oh, and if you’re into keeping tabs on all things like this, follow Tom’s Hardware on Google News. The world of tech never stops spinning, kinda like a PS2 DVD.
