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."

Comments

Additionally...

[TitaniumFox]

... the folks at litepc.com offer small Win98 installations for flash cards, too.

Cheers

Summary

[cookd]

Skimming through the website, they appear to have a process to create an instant-on OS image that is custom-fitted to your application. As far as I can tell, it does something like this:

1. Analyze your application to determine which system components it needs to run properly (which DLLs, device drivers, COM components, etc.).
   
2. Create a Win98 install set up to only load the minimum necessary components.
   
3. Snap a memory image of the Win98 machine with your program loaded.
   
4. Compress this memory image onto a flash card.
   
5. At runtime, expand the memory image back into RAM and pass control back to Win98 as if nothing had happened.
   

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.

Re:On the mac side

[longbottle]

You can install OS 9/X directly onto an iPod and boot up any mac that has FireWire with it. Very handy for full system backups and disk fixing.

You don't install onto the iPod's buffer RAM, you install onto it's hard disk (5GB-30GB, depending on model).
The filesystem of the hard disk inside is actually HFS+ (the extended mac filesystem) so this really isn't that difficult. The cool part though, is the firmware. Open Firmware (it's in all the "new world" macs) makes it possible to boot from any device that can hold system software, not just iPods.