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Developer Installs Windows 95 On An Apple Watch (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Developer Nick Lee has successfully installed Windows 95 on his Apple Watch. It works, but it runs very slow. For example, it takes about an hour for the OS to boot up. In a blog post, Lee points out the Apple Watch features specs capable of running the old OS. To get Windows 95 running on the Apple Watch, Lee had to modify Apple's development software in "rather unorthodox ways" that allowed him to turn the OS into a Watch app, which also emulates an environment for the OS to run on, he tells The Verge. To deal with the fact that Apple Watch's screen is always turning itself off when not in use, he set up a motorized tube that constantly turns the Watch's crown, preventing it from falling asleep. In addition, Lee altered the Watch's software to let Windows 95 track a single fingertip, hence the constant swiping in his video.
Despite hating both windows 95 and the apple watch. This is some awesome hackery.
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I have no idea what emulator he's using, but it gets the prize for slowest x86 emulator of the year. Windows 95 is *lightweight* compared to anything modern, even under an emulator.
Let's see, quick test here. Samsung Chromebook, which is a dual-core Cortex-A15 (ARMv7) at 1.7GHz. Let's set cpufreq cap to 500MHz (Apple Watch is 520MHz). Install Win95 on a PC under QEMU, copy it over to the Chromebook, compile QEMU (for some reason it's not in the Arch Linux ARM repo...), and boot it up.
Boot time, from qemu launch to desktop and no "hourglass" cursor? 90 seconds. Emulating a PC on a 500MHz ARMv7.
Okay, so the Apple watch probably uses a lighter weight core than the Cortex-A15 on the Chromebook, but still, that doesn't anywhere near account for this kind of discrepancy. Oh, and QEMU is actually emulating a full 64-bit CPU (which of course Win95 doesn't need).