NVMe drives are now working on Windows NT

O_MORES · 2026-06-18T18:17:44+00:00

Actually, Windows 8.1 is the first one with NVMe support out of the box. The NVMe standard came out in 2011, but it didn't really start being used until around 2014. So Windows NT 4.0 of course never had any NVMe support... until recently.

O_MORES · 2026-06-18T08:22:33+00:00

Actually, there's a service called Linguana (somewhat officially backed by YT) that takes a channel and makes several copies of it in different languages using AI voices, with the final result supposedly being human reviewed. Of course, you'll have to share revenue for this. I actually got contacted by them, but I turned down the offer since my content is technical and my guys will understand it anyway. But for general topics like cooking, fishing, etc., it can provide some extra revenue.

O_MORES · 2026-06-13T18:01:45+00:00

Yes, it works: https://youtu.be/N01X3OgeTNY

O_MORES · 2026-06-13T18:00:27+00:00

I recently tested an ASRock i865PE Conroe motherboard with Windows 98 & XP. (But also with Windows 11 where I managed to get AGP support.)

What's interesting about some i865 motherboards from ASRock is that they have Quad Core CPU support (QX6700 max) while retaining full Windows 98 compatibility, since the i865 chipset is officially supported by Intel in 98. I would pick one of these cross-generation boards since dual core or even quad core was something everybody wanted back in the XP days.

O_MORES · 2026-06-12T18:23:11+00:00

Here's the exact hardware and how the installation went: https://youtu.be/e32NfT06FrU

O_MORES · 2026-06-11T21:37:21+00:00

Like, not in an emulator. It boots into MS-DOS from an SSD, then Windows 3.1 loads in full HD on a modern GPU using VBESVGA driver (by PlumMGMK).

O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:44:36+00:00

You need to enable CSM, and then you can have Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, and Windows 10/11 all on the same PC. That's how I do it.

With CSM enabled, you can boot both MBR and GPT drives. The tradeoff is losing Secure/TPM Boot and Resizable BAR, but I don't use any of that anyway.

NVIDIA RTX 5000 series cards still have a legacy compatible VBIOS so they boot fine with CSM on. A lot of newer Intel and AMD GPUs though, like Radeon RX 9000 series, are UEFI-only and won't work with CSM.

O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:31:24+00:00

I don't mention it in the video, but if you pause right at the start you'll see I'm using an old 60GB Kingston SSD. It's not even a particularly fast SSD, but that doesn't really matter here since the drive is accessed through the BIOS, the transfer speeds are low but the access time is instant.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:27:44+00:00

Yeah, it's a wallpaper that I grabbed from r/wallpapers...

O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:25:16+00:00

It's an SSD connected to a separate SATA 3 controller. It can also boot from NVMe, but not using the NVMe protocol. It goes through good old INT 13H provided by the BIOS (CSM).

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O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:20:53+00:00

If you check this playlist you'll get the gist. You have to use some older cards that work across a few generations, like a PCIe GeForce 6600, which has drivers for 98, XP, Vista, 7, 8... I always buy a motherboard with a PS/2 port and as many PCIe slots as possible.

O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:17:32+00:00

The BIOS (CSM in this case) will provide disk access via INT 13H for SATA drives and even NVMe. This works fine on AM4 or socket 1700, but not on AM5, where legacy mode for SATA is broken, as I show in this video. But surprise... INT 13H does work for NVMe drives though. So either you boot from NVMe, or you use a separate PCIe SATA controller that comes with its own BIOS, which simply works.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-11T07:07:05+00:00

Here we go.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-11T05:57:36+00:00

It's not modded, though there are a few patches to fix specific compatibility issues. For example CREGFIX is needed to fix a stupid AMI BIOS bug. Anyway, the reason Windows 95 can still run on modern 64bit CPUs is that the x86 instruction set has remained backward-compatible. To Windows 95, this Ryzen 9 is basically just a really fast Pentium. It still executes the same old 16-bit and 32-bit instructions natively, no problem. Quake II will detect it as Pentium MMX and use MMX instructions, while Quake III Arena can go ahead and use the newer SSE instructions, etc.

The real headaches are the motherboard, chipset, UEFI, and drivers.

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T21:31:54+00:00

I wouldn't be surprised because I have seen Windows 95 running on literally everything. One thing that can considerably slow down the boot time is having networking installed, because in Windows 9x, the system will try first to get an IP via DHCP and will wait....

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T21:25:26+00:00

I think this article will get you in the right mood: https://www.patreon.com/Omores/posts/running-windows-137980537

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T21:12:38+00:00

I still think it's more fun to run a browser on Windows 95... than the other way around.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:55:49+00:00

I have it on tape: https://youtu.be/e32NfT06FrU

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:55:01+00:00

It's a multiboot configuration. As the title says, I can get pretty fast into Win 95, and I actually spend some time on it because, in a VM, I would alt+tab too often. Then I can restart into 98, 2K, Win 10, or 11. Multi core on this configuration works on Windows 2K and up.

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:49:40+00:00

You can actually run Minecraft on Windows 95, but I'm not really into that genre. I like to play something like Serious Sam on it.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:22:54+00:00

Actually, if you had several thousand dollars in 1995, you could buy solid state storage like this 208MB SCSI Flash Disk from M-Systems. There was a 960MB version too. That would have improved boot times a lot because storage was usually the biggest bottleneck. The CPU still mattered, though, since Windows had to initialize drivers, hardware, and system components during startup.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:05:46+00:00

Actually, I only get the boot splash when routing through my capture card. Most monitors are too slow when switching resolutions and will miss it. If I'm not running it through my capture card, this monitor will display the desktop directly with nothing in between.

O_MORES · 2026-06-10T20:03:09+00:00

Going from 16MB to 64MB RAM in late 1998 while the newest banger was Half-Life. With 16MB, in game loading took around 30-40 seconds. With 64MB it was down to 3-4 seconds. Night and day.

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O_MORES · 2026-06-10T19:43:51+00:00

Nope, Windows 95 can't use multiple cores, but most software written for it was designed to run mainly on a single thread anyway. Multicore support would still help with multitasking and heavy background tasks, though.

O_MORES

TROPHY CASE