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Run Win98 From 16MB Flash Disk
ksheff writes "Embedded Ware Technologies has come up with a product to run Win98 applications from a 16M Flash disk. This could be useful for companies that would like to use an existing Win9x application in an embedded system."
... the folks at litepc.com offer small Win98 installations for flash cards, too.
Cheers
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
M-Systems makes a device called the Disk-on-Chip that I believe can do this. Although it doesn't interface through IDE, it can be made to emulate a hard drive at the BIOS level, using M-Sys's TrueFFS BIOS. Therefore, operating systems (like Windows 98, I believe) that use BIOS calls to access the hard drive can use the Disk-on-Chip as if it were a hard drive. Other operating systems like Windows NT and Linux need the proper drivers / kernel modules to access the disk. The upshot of all of this is that I was able to get my own hacked-up minidistribution of GNU/Linux (which I naturally called Asshat Linux), to boot and run off of the 16-Megabyte Disk-on-Chip in a Visara 1783 thin client machine (formerly running QNX). I believe that the same could be done for Windows 98. If anyone wants info on how I did this, email me or post a reply.
If I remember correctly, some enterprising folks managed to do this a couple of years ago when hacking Virgin's Webplayer. I can't find any archives, but Google's cache (http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:nFk2b5yLOY8J :snoopy.net/pipermail/iopener/2000-May/thread.html +16mb+flash+webplayer&hl=en&ie=UTF-8) shows that someone managed to get WinMe to fit under 16MB back in May of 2000.
There would probably have to be a few device drivers involved, but it sounds like a pretty cool idea to me. This way, you don't have to rewrite existing apps or retrain the dev team to make them work in an "embedded" environment.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I guess it means more photos like this and this.
Seriously, why would someone use something so complicated as the basis for a limited-function embedded system? Can't anyone program in assembler anymore?
OK, this is all very interesting. But what sane person uses Win98 for embedded applications? I seem to recall a slashback (some time in mid 2000, I think) that linked to a photo of one of those roadside displays that was displaying nothing but part of a "please insert driver disk" dialog!
Windows 98 in an embedded system?
I always thought that embedded systems were about rock solid reliability - and I don't think that anyone (even Microsoft) would admit that Win98 qualifies.
What's the smallest you can get wine down to?
It would be interesting to see if you can do this with embedded linux + wine.
Advantages:
* You can disable all the gui stuff (if it's embedded, then you might not need any gui)
* You can hack it to make it smaller
* You don't need a windows license
Does anyone know how big wine is normally when compilied? libs and all.. I have no idea if it is a few MB, or 10's of MB's.
Microsoft can't make Windows CE stable (or PocketPC for that matter), so I don't believe that a 3rd party will be able to do the same with a custom product - particularly with an OS that has such a legendary stability record as Windows 98.
The reliability of the Windows CE powered ticket machines at my local cinema is awful. At any one time, at least one or two machines have either locked up; are in the middle of rebooting (but stuck because they can't find the network - that's how I know it runs Windows CE); or worst of all.. about to crash.
You know a crash is about to happen because the UI starts flaking out (text vanishes, on-screen buttons loose captions) while in middle of trying to buy tickets. This happened to me once - I was able to finish by guessing which button to "print tickets", but it locked up when the people next in line tried to use it.
The only reason the machines are actually useful is because the short lines mean you can get your tickets fast - as opposed to the horrendously long queue to buy from the human ticket drones.
The only reason the machines manage to sell any tickets at all is because there are 6 of them - "reliability" through numbers I suppose.
Yet, you can boot an entire Mac from an iPod.
Windows 98 has the advantage of allowing an application to directly access I/O ports and memory mapped registers on I/O cards. This means that you are not forced to write a device driver to do I/O. The system can be setup to run a single application, with Windows providing the GUI and network stack. The end-user only sees the provided application, and is never given the chance to run any other programs or to modify the system.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If I could boot a PC from a flash card (whatever size necessary) with Windows 98, yet have the swap file and any writable files be on the HDD, it would ease my tech support issues at home. My wife is a writer, and currently on a combination of Win98 and wordprocessing tools that she's comfortable with. You don't mess with her environment, because that means time re-learning stuff which means loss of income. The primary reason for booting from flash would be startup speed, for her. So - that said, I will be looking for whatever information is necessary to accomplish that.
I wonder how big it will be for a bootable SoftMac on Win 98 with this TinyWin solution? It would be cool to boot emulated Mac off a 32MB USB flash disk from my notebook...
RISC OS has always sat in rom, ever since it was first released back in the late 1980s. A full gui desktop operating system in ~4mb of rom. And it is a heck of a lot more stable than Windows98.
I put a full install of Win98 on a 256mb Lexar Jumpdrive Pro. Works pretty good, although you need to install it on a hard drive first (so the USB driver can be installed), and ghost the image over.
In the case of buying an adapter separate from the card itself, perhaps taking to this plan and buying in bulk may be more expensive. However, for do-it-yourself hobbyist projects, any CompactFlash card, combined with one of these from PC Engines, makes an ideal, tiny hard drive suitable for your embedded application.
Whoah, I sound like one of those people who sells stuff.
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And the Angel said unto me, "These are the cries of the carrots! The cries of the carrots!"
I have done this before as well but my compact flash dies after some months. I heard it is due to frequent write to boot sectors and other system areas by Windows 98. Can anyone confirm this?
I have also done this with a floppy disk version of 7.5 (+/-), on a 4 meg card, and that boot is almost instantaneous. Not a ton of functionality, but it is very cool to see your old hardware spring to life that fast... :)
...i got a win98 to boot from a cdrom (but less than 15meg occupied) without using floppy or hard disk. with 64meg of ram. i still have the cd somewhere... obviously it was crap... but a nice memory of when i was a windows user... fortunately time have passed, and and i finnally saw the light.
Your saying you can't even update your wife's comp to WinXP Home without her getting all disorientated?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
had a M$ enabled backdoor and was limited to 640kb of ram IIRC. Windos 5 never got such a backdoor, though NT5's upgrade policy is similar.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
I've been running W95 for years on a 220Mib PCMCIA ATA card, SanDisk brand - top-shelf. No problems.
Are you using an off-brand CF card bychance?
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
It is a SanDisk 256MB I was using. When you say you are running from PCMCIA ATA card, does that mean you boot from something else? Normally PC does not boot off PCMCIA, isn't it?
I group everything as NT or DOS. Win2k identifies itself as NT5, so I call it that. XP identifies itself as NT5.1, so I call it that.
"Windos" means a version of windows such as 3.1 or ME that is a direct descendant of MS-DOS rather than a VMS hybrid. When I want to insult Windows(NT or DOS) without a specific reason, I call it "Micros~1 Winshit".
As I recall, it was some sort of remote-access dealy they sold the US government for DOS 3.3. If I remembered where I read it, I'd quote the specifics.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It's a ThinkPad 730TE, which does normally boot off of the PCMCIA, as it has no internal drives at all, just 3 PCMCIA slots
Even the floppy drive is external and hangs off of a cable from the port "replicator".
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"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
I'm not saying she'll get disoriented, I'm saying the down time and the time spent learning the new little quirks could be a problem. I don't know if you've ever been tech support for a significant other, but it can be thorny. And the last thing I want to hear when I come in the door after being tech support at work all day is "the damn computer's broken, fix it right away, I have a project due to the printer in the morning".