In 1995 I was working in a shop that was beta testing Windows 95. And I found the newshell demo and installed it on a NT 3.51 machine. It was fun to try out, but wasn't complete enough to do any real software testing on. That's what my department did--we evaluated, tested and sometimes wrote software for the entire organization, from the desktop OS all the way to the mainframe. The feature set wasn't as complete as the Chicago beta, and because NT 4.0 moved the graphics subsystem into kernel space, it wasn't a real NT 4.0 system either. I just went back to using WfWG on my work desktop, as an exemplar of how every desktop in the organization was set up, and NT 3.51 at home, as it had a better dial-up setup. In October, I bought a copy of Windows 95 to use at home. 95 was my go-to until NT 4.0 came out. After that, it was NT 4 at home and work, until I reluctantly adopted 2000, because a number of our Citrix machines were running it. But by then I was doing most of my work with Linux and KDE.
I wish I had similar physical experiences at the time. But then again everyone's own experiences is what makes all of this fun! I remember reading computer magazines and seeing this "Windows NT 4" stuff and was just...basically confused and excited for what was to come. Eventually got a hold of NT 4 and came to the realization that most 3rd parties were focusing exclusively on 95/98. Still dual-booted. Eventually moved onto Windows 2000 and ME. To this day I still think 2000 is better than XP. ME got a bad rap, though somewhat deservedly. MS should have released an "NT experience" pack for Win9x to give you an idea of what's to come. Or not...
@@koztech I guess it all depends on what you were using it for. For me it was a job, and at the time the job was to give others the best tools to do their jobs. I never came across a business use case that needed DOS games, or DOS _anything,_ and the fact of the matter was that everything written for Windows 95 installed and ran on Windows NT 4.0, because Microsoft had designed it that way from the start. The only reasons to have Windows 95 and not go straight to NT was because market research showed that a lot of home users didn't have enough RAM to let NT run well. Back then, DOS & WfWG ran okay on 4 MiB of RAM, and NT needed at least 8. I don't know of any home user who switched to Win95 with only 4M and was happy with that! Most everyone upgraded to 8 or more, or bought a new machine. So it really was a moot point. NT was just better at all the things that mattered. And game playing didn't matter.
@@Lofote to me, the simplicity of the Chicago desktop was what made it powerful, especially on the limited resolutions that we were using back then. To me, pixels devoted to decorations were taking away from seeing the things I wanted to see. The taskbar slider was annoying, and couldn't be disabled. Active desktop was a stone cold performance killer. We called it "Captive Desktop" because it felt like being held captive by a CPU cycle-eating monster. While those decorations may have been acceptable for home computers that were really just toys, my job at the time was to deploy computers to do serious work. It was a hospital, so it's not hyperbole to say that it was a life and death matter sometimes. On the server side, Active Directory was just another example of wretched excess. We were also a Novell shop, and I had seen NDS trees done well. But I had aslo seen NDS done poorly, with multiple trees. When AD came to the shop, I joked that we were growing a forest. The joke was on me, because we did. Now "forest" is an actual AD term! 🤦♂Obviously MS was trying to boost NT to the "enterprise" level, but the reality was that even at enterprise level, that much complexity was rarely a benefit. Back then, I was more interested in LDAP, an open standard that could be made as simple or complex as the user needed. It was around that time that I switched to using Linux primarily, both at home and at work. The KDE desktop offered some of the Windows 98 style geegaws, but they could be turned off. The best of both worlds. Samba on Linux was a better (and free) file server for Windows clients. There was LDAP, and SNMP and more. That's where all the exciting new stuff was.
@erNews1Ok interesting. Active Desktop I think wasn't enabled by default, but that was definitely somethign I would turn immediatly off, if it was. I think if you installed IE4 under NT4 it was actually enabled by default, if I remember correctly, and I always turned it off immediatly. But what made Win2000 waaaaaaay better than NT4 was the management: I mean installing hardware drivers under NT4, like for example sound drivers was a nightmare. And USB support was not even there. This was such a huge step in Win2000. And all the other management utilities of NT4 which were not updated since NT3.x like user manager, printer manager, services applet, disk management, etc. This was a huuuuge thing for me in Win2000 and I loved it back then and never wanted to go back :)... Active Directory was a big chance, correct, but it was absolutely necessary. The domain concept was far too limiting for even medium companies, the original NT domains were just too simple, especially when you are multi-sited or wanted multiple domains (subdomains were not possible in NT, just domain trusts, which can be very complex if you need many of them). And the fact that it used DNS, Kerberos and LDAP and so were now usable for 3rd party was also a big thing. So I saw the new complexity as a huuuuge step forward and a necessary step forward, but yes, domain admins needed to learn a lot back then to understand it, but it wasn't rocket science either and ... well it has proven to be future-proof, as Windows Server 2022 and also the next version (2025) still is based on the same concept, so at least it was worth it ;)... I never liked Linux, always found it strange, but of course people are different and thats fully ok :)... And I love the features of current Windows Server versions like data deduplication, distributed file system with synchronisation/redundancy, security management, NTFS feature like sparse files etc. so I wouldn't trade that in for Linux, even though I know some of these features are also somewhat available if you know how ;)... Thanks for your time, it is really interesting to see how other admins felt and thought :)...
Likely they had to bump the version to 4.0 because the 4.0 shell has compatibility shims for programs compiled for 3.x and below. For instance the colors ButtonHighlight and ButtonLight are swapped so the button is better defined on white backgrounds, which are also defined for Widnows 3.x and below apps.
@koztech You might also notice in Windows 10 and 11 some non-resizable windows have a thicket titlebar than others; this is another version locked tweak, this time being at version 6.0 and above having the thicker titlebars.
Kinda related; Windows XP 32-bit versions up to SP2 still contained Program Manager, you could even change settings to boot into it. In SP3, it is replaced by a dummy program. If I remember rightly it was needed to install Windows 3.1 programs due to them making directories and shortcuts in Program Manager, and they would be uninstallable without it being there, even if in SP3 they just made a dummy program that'd pretend it was allowing it. It isn't fully Windows 3.x-like, as it just takes whatever theme you're using and give you the PM screen etc. without the start menu. Even if you turn the themes off, it'll use Windows 9x for the "classic" theme.
4:20 It was by design, that it reported 4.0 to the user and programs, because some programs checked the version number to decide whether it is running on the Win9x-ish user interface or not.
What's interesting is when I had Windows 3.1 as a kid we had a shell called sidebar or something. It made it a lot more useable. It must have not sold well, because I can't find it anywhere. Not even pictures, but I can remember what it looked like.
@@koztech No it was something my dad bought in a store I think. It came on a single 3 1/2 floppy disk. I don't remember who made it or anything, just the name of it. Sidebar.
Photoshop 5.0 installer couldn't run perfectly without this,most software installer needs it to function properly. RealPlayer 8 can run under NT3.51，it's interesting to see realplayer 8 renders a modern window in NT3.51,but the video stop rendering, didn't test this with shell update yet.
I ran Nt4 with the direct x ripped out of windows 2000 beta for quite a while (windows 2000 beta didnt work on my machine). Much more stable than windows 95 and 98.
Dude, Unreal and Unreal Tutnament actually runs on Windows NT 3.51 without new shell! Check there are a videos on RUclips. BTW how did you fix the thick borders?
Oh? Didn't know that, my research showed 9x or NT4 or higher. As for the borders, I eventually found the right control panel (Desktop, as Kawa-oneechan mentioned).
@@koztech I did, not see what you clicked in the desktop properties to fix the bars. About Unreal, just search Unreal Tutnament on windows NT 3.51 here on YT
Nice... but NT 3.51 has no DirectX support, only OpenGL 1. GLQuake might work if you have proper OpenlGL drivers. Anyways the main reason Windows NT 3.5x is cool many years later..., is because it looks like Windows 3.11 while it's a 32bit system... :)
I knew about DirectX not being supported but was curious to see what would happen with NT Newshell reporting as Windows NT 4. But it supporting OpenGL is definitely a good thing for us retro enthusiasts!
Even to this date Windows still comes only with OpenGL 1.1. The ICD system is how newer versions of OpenGL are accessed. Also for 3.1 and above you have to create two contexts, first a compatibility context to probe for the modern version functions, then a second context to create the forward context, and possibly a second window if you need to use the extension functions to set the pixel format.
Direct3D can't work on NT 3.51, because the graphics driver is in user mode and went to kernel mode for NT 4.0 for performance and DirectX reasons. So NEWSHELL won't fix this.
Newshell was released before Windows 95, and it was created so developers could test their Windows 95 applications, it was not intended to be used as a consumer desktop environment, even in the NT world.
really good video overall! something you might want to improve is the audio; the mic quality isn't the issue, but adding silence between every pause makes things sound more awkward, especially as many times a word is cut off. kinda gives everything an unnatural vibe and counterintuitively reduces the listening experience. i would prefer to keep those sections untouched, but i get why you're doing that.
I appreciate the constructive criticism! The "cut offs" are a result of me cutting out lip smacks, knocking the microphone, etc. Try as I might, I can't stop them. That's on top of the "umms" and "buttts"... They really bother me, so I assume those bother others too. But I'll try to keep this in mind for future videos. Maybe not the next few as they are already recorded and/or edited.
I used to do that for a lot of my videos but stopped (except for long periods of no audio like a montage) because I was told it was too distracting. Also read some articles and saw some videos saying similar things. But it's definitely worth revisiting. Especially for videos I record in my basement workshop.
Around April 1997 I had a multiboot system with NT 3.51, OS Warp 4.0 and Slackware 3.0. It wasn't messy, although Windows loved to break my MBR and screw up with LiLo (Linux Loader). I tried this "NT 4 preview" in a spare hard drive, just to find out that it wasn't stable enough, even for a home desktop. I had NT because it could use NTFS instead of FAT32. I needed to have Windows for help desk purposes. For everything else it was either OS2 Warp or Linux + Xserver + WindowMaker. Nowadays I still have Windows 10 for gaming and Ubuntu Linux for everything else. I also tinkered with BeOS, QNX and older stuff, since 1985 (Sinclair TK-85 was my first experience).
In the day had Win N T 4 and ran Sim Tower very stable, do that in Win 3.11 Win NT system setup little more tiresome to do, dos screen instalation. Still miss good old Windos 3.x !
I remember working at an ISP in the late 90's and we were running NT 4.0 and it was so hard to service pack it and it not totally bomb out. That OS and Steel Belted Radius for auth ran that shitty dial-up ISP until it closed down. Place was a joke, but it was my first real IT job.
16:40 -- The install error you are getting with UT isn't really a "compatibility" issue per-se. The file it's complaining about that it can't find, OpenGLDrv.dll, has 9 characters in the filename (not counting the .dll extension). So it's considered a "long" file name, relative to classic MS-DOS 8.3 file name length limit. When you are scrolling through the System directory, there is no file in there called "OpenGLDrv.dll". All of the files beginning with "opengl" all have that followed by "~#" (tilde-numeral), exactly like how Windows 95 and later will "truncate" long file names when you are looking at them from an old DOS or Win16 app that doesn't know about long file names. I'm willing to bet this is a CD mastering issue. I'd guess the ISO image had Joliet filesystem extensions included. Joliet extensions to the ISO9660 format were not supported until Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Thus, Windows NT 3.51 only sees the shortened versions of the file names on CDs like this one which use Joliet extensions to store the long file name information. If you were to re-master the CD as a pure ISO9660 format image, you *might* be able to make it work under 3.51. ISO9660 has some provisions in it for names longer than 8.3 (but not as long as what Joliet allows for). So assuming no file names on the UT disc are longer than 30 characters (IIRC), that might work. Alternatively, you could try ZIPping up the contents of the CD on a Win95 system, taking that ZIP file over to your NT 3.51 machine, unpacking the ZIP archive into a directory on your hard drive, and trying to launch the installer from there. Assuming you have your NT volume formatted as NTFS, that should preserve any long file names that Unreal Tournament has...
@@koztech Irritatingly, I responded to my own comment shortly after posting it, where I included information about an old Microsoft Knowledgebase article on this subject. ...but RUclips filtered it out because I included a URL to the KB article; ugh. Google for MS KB 142372 if you want to read it...BetaArchive has a copy of it archived on their site.
"Detected" Assuming it actually is detecting anything it's probably checking the date, and if it's X days after launch they either planed to do an update, or something like that. Or, as you seemed to imply, they're just lying.
USB was still pretty foreign - should I say - totally foreign to NT 4.0. Drivers had to install an entire infrastructure to even handle these ports. And for what I can remember being told to me, they weren't plug and play at all, you had to have any USB device plugged in on startup.
NT 4 and Win95 had such basic support for USB that it wasn't even worth it. 95 only got support because 98 was delayed and PC manufacturers had PC's with USB ready to go. Thus Windows 95 C, or OSR 2/2.1/2.5 came to be. (Not the best explanation but it works).
NT 4 have very nice unofficial USB support and it is plug and play, and works fantastically with all kind of USB storage devices. Even Win 98 can not handle USB stage devices with the universal drivers that well. Windows 95 have also universal driver for USB storage devices, but that is all it can do with USB ports, nothing else, no HID devices, only storage (flash drives, cards traders e.c)
@@koztech Even then, Windows 98--even second edition--didn't natively support flash drives. I remember hunting so long for drivers back when I was using my Windows 98 machine as a media center and needed to copy files over from my Windows XP machine.
Oh man I forgot about that! Very few flash storage devices worked without drivers, and even those that were supposed to work with the "generic" driver barely did.
@@koztech What I remember is that my drive didn't have a driver for Windows 98, so I had to try multiple different "generic" drivers until I found one that worked. And, even then, I remember some futzing about to get it to be detected. I seem to remember I had to restart the computer after disconnecting the drive in order to connect it back again.
As for the thick borders, it's highly unlikely that it was meant to differentiate it. It may just be an artifact of porting over the style from the 3.x UI, but also the Explorer shell and new UI controls were developed on NT 3.51 in the first place, before being ported over to the Windows 95 team. You're really just looking at a pre-release of Explorer, one that predates Windows 95 itself. Things that look normal to you are normal because Windows 95 ended up that way.
In 1995 I was working in a shop that was beta testing Windows 95. And I found the newshell demo and installed it on a NT 3.51 machine. It was fun to try out, but wasn't complete enough to do any real software testing on. That's what my department did--we evaluated, tested and sometimes wrote software for the entire organization, from the desktop OS all the way to the mainframe. The feature set wasn't as complete as the Chicago beta, and because NT 4.0 moved the graphics subsystem into kernel space, it wasn't a real NT 4.0 system either.
I just went back to using WfWG on my work desktop, as an exemplar of how every desktop in the organization was set up, and NT 3.51 at home, as it had a better dial-up setup. In October, I bought a copy of Windows 95 to use at home. 95 was my go-to until NT 4.0 came out. After that, it was NT 4 at home and work, until I reluctantly adopted 2000, because a number of our Citrix machines were running it. But by then I was doing most of my work with Linux and KDE.
I wish I had similar physical experiences at the time. But then again everyone's own experiences is what makes all of this fun!
I remember reading computer magazines and seeing this "Windows NT 4" stuff and was just...basically confused and excited for what was to come. Eventually got a hold of NT 4 and came to the realization that most 3rd parties were focusing exclusively on 95/98. Still dual-booted. Eventually moved onto Windows 2000 and ME. To this day I still think 2000 is better than XP. ME got a bad rap, though somewhat deservedly. MS should have released an "NT experience" pack for Win9x to give you an idea of what's to come. Or not...
@@koztech I guess it all depends on what you were using it for. For me it was a job, and at the time the job was to give others the best tools to do their jobs. I never came across a business use case that needed DOS games, or DOS _anything,_ and the fact of the matter was that everything written for Windows 95 installed and ran on Windows NT 4.0, because Microsoft had designed it that way from the start.
The only reasons to have Windows 95 and not go straight to NT was because market research showed that a lot of home users didn't have enough RAM to let NT run well. Back then, DOS & WfWG ran okay on 4 MiB of RAM, and NT needed at least 8. I don't know of any home user who switched to Win95 with only 4M and was happy with that! Most everyone upgraded to 8 or more, or bought a new machine. So it really was a moot point. NT was just better at all the things that mattered. And game playing didn't matter.
Interesting history. What made you not like 2000 vs NT4?
@@Lofote to me, the simplicity of the Chicago desktop was what made it powerful, especially on the limited resolutions that we were using back then. To me, pixels devoted to decorations were taking away from seeing the things I wanted to see. The taskbar slider was annoying, and couldn't be disabled. Active desktop was a stone cold performance killer. We called it "Captive Desktop" because it felt like being held captive by a CPU cycle-eating monster. While those decorations may have been acceptable for home computers that were really just toys, my job at the time was to deploy computers to do serious work. It was a hospital, so it's not hyperbole to say that it was a life and death matter sometimes.
On the server side, Active Directory was just another example of wretched excess. We were also a Novell shop, and I had seen NDS trees done well. But I had aslo seen NDS done poorly, with multiple trees. When AD came to the shop, I joked that we were growing a forest. The joke was on me, because we did. Now "forest" is an actual AD term! 🤦♂Obviously MS was trying to boost NT to the "enterprise" level, but the reality was that even at enterprise level, that much complexity was rarely a benefit. Back then, I was more interested in LDAP, an open standard that could be made as simple or complex as the user needed.
It was around that time that I switched to using Linux primarily, both at home and at work. The KDE desktop offered some of the Windows 98 style geegaws, but they could be turned off. The best of both worlds. Samba on Linux was a better (and free) file server for Windows clients. There was LDAP, and SNMP and more. That's where all the exciting new stuff was.
@erNews1Ok interesting. Active Desktop I think wasn't enabled by default, but that was definitely somethign I would turn immediatly off, if it was. I think if you installed IE4 under NT4 it was actually enabled by default, if I remember correctly, and I always turned it off immediatly.
But what made Win2000 waaaaaaay better than NT4 was the management: I mean installing hardware drivers under NT4, like for example sound drivers was a nightmare. And USB support was not even there. This was such a huge step in Win2000. And all the other management utilities of NT4 which were not updated since NT3.x like user manager, printer manager, services applet, disk management, etc. This was a huuuuge thing for me in Win2000 and I loved it back then and never wanted to go back :)...
Active Directory was a big chance, correct, but it was absolutely necessary. The domain concept was far too limiting for even medium companies, the original NT domains were just too simple, especially when you are multi-sited or wanted multiple domains (subdomains were not possible in NT, just domain trusts, which can be very complex if you need many of them). And the fact that it used DNS, Kerberos and LDAP and so were now usable for 3rd party was also a big thing. So I saw the new complexity as a huuuuge step forward and a necessary step forward, but yes, domain admins needed to learn a lot back then to understand it, but it wasn't rocket science either and ... well it has proven to be future-proof, as Windows Server 2022 and also the next version (2025) still is based on the same concept, so at least it was worth it ;)...
I never liked Linux, always found it strange, but of course people are different and thats fully ok :)... And I love the features of current Windows Server versions like data deduplication, distributed file system with synchronisation/redundancy, security management, NTFS feature like sparse files etc. so I wouldn't trade that in for Linux, even though I know some of these features are also somewhat available if you know how ;)...
Thanks for your time, it is really interesting to see how other admins felt and thought :)...
Border thickness is in the Desktop control panel, as it was in the 3.x shell.
Likely they had to bump the version to 4.0 because the 4.0 shell has compatibility shims for programs compiled for 3.x and below. For instance the colors ButtonHighlight and ButtonLight are swapped so the button is better defined on white backgrounds, which are also defined for Widnows 3.x and below apps.
Didn't know that, but makes sense to me, thanks!
@koztech You might also notice in Windows 10 and 11 some non-resizable windows have a thicket titlebar than others; this is another version locked tweak, this time being at version 6.0 and above having the thicker titlebars.
Kinda related; Windows XP 32-bit versions up to SP2 still contained Program Manager, you could even change settings to boot into it. In SP3, it is replaced by a dummy program. If I remember rightly it was needed to install Windows 3.1 programs due to them making directories and shortcuts in Program Manager, and they would be uninstallable without it being there, even if in SP3 they just made a dummy program that'd pretend it was allowing it.
It isn't fully Windows 3.x-like, as it just takes whatever theme you're using and give you the PM screen etc. without the start menu. Even if you turn the themes off, it'll use Windows 9x for the "classic" theme.
4:20 It was by design, that it reported 4.0 to the user and programs, because some programs checked the version number to decide whether it is running on the Win9x-ish user interface or not.
What's interesting is when I had Windows 3.1 as a kid we had a shell called sidebar or something. It made it a lot more useable. It must have not sold well, because I can't find it anywhere. Not even pictures, but I can remember what it looked like.
Was it an OEM thing (like HP, Packard Bell, etc.?)
@@koztech No it was something my dad bought in a store I think. It came on a single 3 1/2 floppy disk. I don't remember who made it or anything, just the name of it. Sidebar.
But I think the logo was three triangles pointing down right corner. If that helps.
Quarterdeck Sidebar?
@@koztech That sounds right
Photoshop 5.0 installer couldn't run perfectly without this,most software installer needs it to function properly.
RealPlayer 8 can run under NT3.51，it's interesting to see realplayer 8 renders a modern window in NT3.51,but the video stop rendering, didn't test this with shell update yet.
Office 97 runs on NT 3.51, it looks really odd with the 3.x style interface.
I ran Nt4 with the direct x ripped out of windows 2000 beta for quite a while (windows 2000 beta didnt work on my machine). Much more stable than windows 95 and 98.
This Direct X from beta 2000 is version 5.0 😊
Dude, Unreal and Unreal Tutnament actually runs on Windows NT 3.51 without new shell! Check there are a videos on RUclips.
BTW how did you fix the thick borders?
Oh? Didn't know that, my research showed 9x or NT4 or higher. As for the borders, I eventually found the right control panel (Desktop, as Kawa-oneechan mentioned).
@@koztech I did, not see what you clicked in the desktop properties to fix the bars. About Unreal, just search Unreal Tutnament on windows NT 3.51 here on YT
@@koztech ruclips.net/video/kPy1XKq0Dog/видео.htmlsi=eMlzBaInJUJpedlO
Nice... but NT 3.51 has no DirectX support, only OpenGL 1. GLQuake might work if you have proper OpenlGL drivers. Anyways the main reason Windows NT 3.5x is cool many years later..., is because it looks like Windows 3.11 while it's a 32bit system... :)
I knew about DirectX not being supported but was curious to see what would happen with NT Newshell reporting as Windows NT 4. But it supporting OpenGL is definitely a good thing for us retro enthusiasts!
Even to this date Windows still comes only with OpenGL 1.1. The ICD system is how newer versions of OpenGL are accessed. Also for 3.1 and above you have to create two contexts, first a compatibility context to probe for the modern version functions, then a second context to create the forward context, and possibly a second window if you need to use the extension functions to set the pixel format.
Indeed :)
Actually Calmira do not work on NT 3.x at all 😅
@@koztechtry Direct X 5 from Win 2000 it works on NT 4.
Direct3D can't work on NT 3.51, because the graphics driver is in user mode and went to kernel mode for NT 4.0 for performance and DirectX reasons. So NEWSHELL won't fix this.
Newshell was released before Windows 95, and it was created so developers could test their Windows 95 applications, it was not intended to be used as a consumer desktop environment, even in the NT world.
really good video overall! something you might want to improve is the audio; the mic quality isn't the issue, but adding silence between every pause makes things sound more awkward, especially as many times a word is cut off. kinda gives everything an unnatural vibe and counterintuitively reduces the listening experience. i would prefer to keep those sections untouched, but i get why you're doing that.
I appreciate the constructive criticism! The "cut offs" are a result of me cutting out lip smacks, knocking the microphone, etc. Try as I might, I can't stop them. That's on top of the "umms" and "buttts"... They really bother me, so I assume those bother others too. But I'll try to keep this in mind for future videos. Maybe not the next few as they are already recorded and/or edited.
@@koztech Add some background music, it should mask these cutoffs
I used to do that for a lot of my videos but stopped (except for long periods of no audio like a montage) because I was told it was too distracting. Also read some articles and saw some videos saying similar things. But it's definitely worth revisiting. Especially for videos I record in my basement workshop.
Around April 1997 I had a multiboot system with NT 3.51, OS Warp 4.0 and Slackware 3.0. It wasn't messy, although Windows loved to break my MBR and screw up with LiLo (Linux Loader). I tried this "NT 4 preview" in a spare hard drive, just to find out that it wasn't stable enough, even for a home desktop. I had NT because it could use NTFS instead of FAT32.
I needed to have Windows for help desk purposes. For everything else it was either OS2 Warp or Linux + Xserver + WindowMaker. Nowadays I still have Windows 10 for gaming and Ubuntu Linux for everything else. I also tinkered with BeOS, QNX and older stuff, since 1985 (Sinclair TK-85 was my first experience).
Windows did like to mess with non-Microsoft bootloaders.
In the day had Win N T 4 and ran Sim Tower very stable, do that in Win 3.11 Win NT system setup little more tiresome to do, dos screen instalation. Still miss good old Windos 3.x !
Yep, that was when there was professionality in the software industry.
I remember working at an ISP in the late 90's and we were running NT 4.0 and it was so hard to service pack it and it not totally bomb out. That OS and Steel Belted Radius for auth ran that shitty dial-up ISP until it closed down. Place was a joke, but it was my first real IT job.
i grew up with W95 and i have to admit, i had never heard of this
16:40 -- The install error you are getting with UT isn't really a "compatibility" issue per-se. The file it's complaining about that it can't find, OpenGLDrv.dll, has 9 characters in the filename (not counting the .dll extension). So it's considered a "long" file name, relative to classic MS-DOS 8.3 file name length limit. When you are scrolling through the System directory, there is no file in there called "OpenGLDrv.dll". All of the files beginning with "opengl" all have that followed by "~#" (tilde-numeral), exactly like how Windows 95 and later will "truncate" long file names when you are looking at them from an old DOS or Win16 app that doesn't know about long file names.
I'm willing to bet this is a CD mastering issue. I'd guess the ISO image had Joliet filesystem extensions included. Joliet extensions to the ISO9660 format were not supported until Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Thus, Windows NT 3.51 only sees the shortened versions of the file names on CDs like this one which use Joliet extensions to store the long file name information.
If you were to re-master the CD as a pure ISO9660 format image, you *might* be able to make it work under 3.51. ISO9660 has some provisions in it for names longer than 8.3 (but not as long as what Joliet allows for). So assuming no file names on the UT disc are longer than 30 characters (IIRC), that might work. Alternatively, you could try ZIPping up the contents of the CD on a Win95 system, taking that ZIP file over to your NT 3.51 machine, unpacking the ZIP archive into a directory on your hard drive, and trying to launch the installer from there. Assuming you have your NT volume formatted as NTFS, that should preserve any long file names that Unreal Tournament has...
Hmmm...might need to give that a shot...(Sigh, writes down yet one more video idea...lol!)
@@koztech Irritatingly, I responded to my own comment shortly after posting it, where I included information about an old Microsoft Knowledgebase article on this subject. ...but RUclips filtered it out because I included a URL to the KB article; ugh. Google for MS KB 142372 if you want to read it...BetaArchive has a copy of it archived on their site.
"Detected" Assuming it actually is detecting anything it's probably checking the date, and if it's X days after launch they either planed to do an update, or something like that. Or, as you seemed to imply, they're just lying.
USB was still pretty foreign - should I say - totally foreign to NT 4.0. Drivers had to install an entire infrastructure to even handle these ports. And for what I can remember being told to me, they weren't plug and play at all, you had to have any USB device plugged in on startup.
NT 4 and Win95 had such basic support for USB that it wasn't even worth it. 95 only got support because 98 was delayed and PC manufacturers had PC's with USB ready to go. Thus Windows 95 C, or OSR 2/2.1/2.5 came to be. (Not the best explanation but it works).
NT 4 have very nice unofficial USB support and it is plug and play, and works fantastically with all kind of USB storage devices. Even Win 98 can not handle USB stage devices with the universal drivers that well. Windows 95 have also universal driver for USB storage devices, but that is all it can do with USB ports, nothing else, no HID devices, only storage (flash drives, cards traders e.c)
@@koztech Even then, Windows 98--even second edition--didn't natively support flash drives. I remember hunting so long for drivers back when I was using my Windows 98 machine as a media center and needed to copy files over from my Windows XP machine.
Oh man I forgot about that! Very few flash storage devices worked without drivers, and even those that were supposed to work with the "generic" driver barely did.
@@koztech What I remember is that my drive didn't have a driver for Windows 98, so I had to try multiple different "generic" drivers until I found one that worked.
And, even then, I remember some futzing about to get it to be detected. I seem to remember I had to restart the computer after disconnecting the drive in order to connect it back again.
I wonder if this would work on WinFrame?
🤔 (adds to video ideas list)...
can it run on win11 ?
Unfortunately no as it was specifically written for NT 3.51. You can run a VM with 3.51 running on it and then install this within.
Windowsn't
Ha ha ha ha! Love it!
nice to see
Thank you!
As for the thick borders, it's highly unlikely that it was meant to differentiate it. It may just be an artifact of porting over the style from the 3.x UI, but also the Explorer shell and new UI controls were developed on NT 3.51 in the first place, before being ported over to the Windows 95 team. You're really just looking at a pre-release of Explorer, one that predates Windows 95 itself. Things that look normal to you are normal because Windows 95 ended up that way.