Curiosities #21 - Windows 98 (NES)

 One category of pirate original that always draws attention when screenshots emerge is the "fake operating system" genre. Presumably made for Famiclones that are sold with keyboards as "educational computers" (though I have to emphasise this is just a theory on my part. I have no evidence, but those machines do exist, so it'd make sense). Unfortunately, these things are also pretty elusive. None of the ROMs are in any of the big ROM collections, they're not sold on cartridge on AliExpress or any other easily-usable-in-the-west sites as far as I'm aware.

 

But I managed to track down a copy of this one, and satisfy my curiosiity. There's not really much to do in it, unfortunately. It loads up in a pretty authentic PC-like way, with a fake bios screen and a Windows 98 loading screen, then you're on your desktop. There's a few icons to click and you can also open the start menu. You can open a few folders, which might have files in, you can get a fake command line prompt, and you can open a fake web browser.

 

The only files in the folders that actually do anything are image files, that show you a nice little picture. The web browser can show you a mock up of what was probably the default page on Internet Explorer at the time, a Microsoft page, or a page that is presumably relatd to this ROM's developers. Some of the things you can click open what look like Windows dialogue boxes in Chinese, though none of the buttons in them actually do anything. I was surprised that there doesn't seem to be any actual game in here, like a super-simple Minesweeper-type thing or something. As it is, there's maybe five minutes worth of stuff to look at in the ROM, and no reason to ever go back to it after that.

 

An interesting technical note is that I think every window is a full screen back ground. You can't scroll or move anything in them, and when you open or close a window, it involves the entire screen going black for a split-second. Even just opening the start menu on the desktop does this (and you can't open it when a window is already open, lending a little more credence to my theory).

 

So that's it. my curiosity is satisfied. If I manage to get ahold of any similar ROMs (I know there's a Windows XP one out there somewhere), I might post about those too. But like I said, there's only a few minutes of stuff to do in here at most, and it's not like anything really interesting or cool is being lost by this thing being so rare and elusive.