Steam Deck + Windows 95
Today’s entry in the endless “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old or Obsolete Device” series is extra silly: this is the Zscaler logo being displayed on my Steam Deck… running Windows 95! 🤣
As I shared in a previous entry to this series, the Steam Deck is an ultra-powerful, cutting edge device capable of playing even the most demanding modern games. Naturally, my first impulse was to somehow shoehorn a 27-year-old, wildly-impractical, long-dead operating system onto it.
Windows 95 was a PC operating system released by Microsoft in (spoiler alert) 1995. It introduced a ton of technologies and concepts that became commonplace for the following decades, including the Start menu, “plug and play” hardware support, advanced multitasking, and most importantly, the Blue Screen of Death (which I experienced firsthand about a dozen times while creating this stupid gag).
Actually making this work was surprisingly fun and a little tricky. While the Steam Deck is capable of running an installation of (modern) Windows, its default operating system is Linux. When you first boot a Steam Deck, it drops you into a simple interface for browsing and launching games. However, you also have the option of rebooting the device into a full-bore Linux desktop mode.
Once there, you can install and run most standard Linux apps, including “DOSbox-X,” which is a user-friendly fork of the awesome DOSbox. DOSbox is a cross-platform app which emulates a typical 1990’s-era desktop PC, typically used for playing classic PC games that struggle to run properly on modern computers.
Once I had DOSbox-X running on the Steam Deck, it was pretty easy to set it to boot from a disk image containing a full Windows 95 installation which I found on archive.org. Additionally, DOSbox-X makes it possible to take a folder on the “host machine” (in this case, the Steam Deck running Linux) and mount it into the virtualized OS as if it were a floppy disk. So, I grabbed a nice low-res copy of our logo, dropped it into a folder, mounted that folder inside DOSbox-X as a floppy drive, and loaded the image right up. Easy!
I hope you all have a great weekend - make sure you make some time to do something silly and fun and wildly impractical, it’s good for the spirit!
