Windows 95 Runs on PlayStation 2 — But This Modded PS2 Can’t Play Doom

Man, where do I even start with this rabbit hole that Jace from MetraByte dove into? If you’ve ever thought about running Windows 95 and Doom on a PlayStation 2, you’re probably one of the few. But Jace—this brave wizard flinging spells at ancient tech—decided to give it a whirl. Spoiler alert: Doom never made it to the party. But let’s rewind a bit.

Picture this: Windows 95—that crusty old gem from 1995—and the PlayStation 2, which strutted onto the scene in 2000. You’d think with a tech head start, the PS2 would just, like, snap its fingers and run Windows 95, right? Yeah, not quite. Trying to cram x86 code into a MIPS console felt like trying to stuff a square peg into a round hole. Windows 95 is famously finicky, and getting it to behave on a PS2 required some real wizardry.

Jace’s video boils down what felt like an epic saga into a snappy 30-minute clip. Imagine hours upon hours of wrangling the PS2 into compliance, armed with a modded console, a game controller with a QWERTY keypad (yep, that’s a thing), a trusty USB stick, and a hard drive. Each tool a tiny charm on this quest.

Inside Jace’s bag of tricks? A .ELF file for the PS2, DOSBox and Bochs emulators, and a digital hodgepodge of boot disks and image files. But trying to boot Doom was like asking a cat to walk a tightrope. Kinda iffy from the start. DOSBox was initially supposed to help crack this puzzle, but after Jace’s “47 attempts” (and that’s a lowball estimate, I’m sure), the OS still wouldn’t shake hands. Enter Bochs, an emulator that takes the patience of a saint to use.

Watching the video, you could almost taste Jace’s frustration—the slowness, the system quirks, the error messages popping up like unwanted guests. The quest wasn’t smooth. Far from it. Boot errors, drive mischief, missing files were the norm. It was a circus.

Still, against all odds, that glorious Windows 95 setup screen finally flickered to life on the PS2. It was like spotting an endangered unicorn nibbling in your garden. Yet, even when Jace eventually got to the desktop, managing to open Paint was just scratch-and-sniff fun, considering the lack of a mouse. And Doom95? Yeah, never got its act together. Imagine a rollercoaster—you get all the thrills of the ride, just minus the grand finale.

In the end, this tale wasn’t about victory. It was the journey—every stumble and curse word muttered. Jace took us along for one wild, geeky, delightfully messy ride.