Unfortunately, a short-lived illness immediately followed by a few days of aggressively unpleasant weather have made researching a new post this week very difficult. Luckily, I was recently made aware of another fake operating system for an old console! Interestingly, this wasn't made as a pack in for a bootleg console packaged with a keyboard (as I suspect was the case with Famicom Windows 98), but as a kind of digital album/art project by the eponymous Mikey.
Despite what expectations that might foster for you, it's actually both packed with features, and pretty authentic-feeling (at least, it looks and feels authentic to me, speaking as a poor kid who only got to use Windows computers at school in the nineties). There's a few minigames, you can change the desktop wallpaper and theme, there's a bunch of fake "websites", some of which even scroll and have animation and music, and there's various other little things to discover in here, too.
The games aren't particularly exciting. There's a maze game obviously inspired by the famous maze screensaver, and a bunch of very very simple things, like a traffic-avoiding game with text graphics, a Flappy Bird clone, a Simon Says-type game, and so on. They're not really the draw here though, and it is nice that they exist, at least. The "The Internet" option lets you choose one of a bunch of websites, all shown in super low-resolution 1995-vision. There's 1995 versions of sites like Twitter and Reddit, the game's own Itch.io and Bandcamp pages, and a few classic memes, like the Space Jam homepage, Hampster Dance, and so on. There's also a "I'm Feeling Lucky" button, which picks a website at random, including a few secret ones that don't have their own buttons.
Your inbox just contains a single mail from the creator, thanking you for looking at their work, and Music lets you select a bunch of his tracks to listen to from a menu. Visualisers lets you pick from a bunch of different small animations, each with their own music. There's lots more references in here, too, to things like the Windows Media Player Headspace skin, the After Dark screensaver, Solitaire, and so on.
This isn't really a game I can recommend or steer you away from, but if it sounds interesting, you can find the rom by searching for its title and going to its Itch.io page. It's pay what you want too, including nothing, if you like. There's apparently already been two sell-out print runs for actual physical cartridges, too. I think this is an interesting enough curiosity that I might try and get one if there's ever a third run.
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