Turn your PC into a 1980s computer
Hankering for days gone by? Nik Rawlinson revisits one of the earliest editions of Windows, and finds out how to play retro games on your Raspberry Pi or PC
Pining for the simpler, more colourful days of Windows 2.0 and the games that consumed your teenage years? Nik Rawlinson explains how you can still load Windows 2.o (with a bit of fiddling), and finds out how to play nostalgic games on either your Raspberry Pi or PC via an easy-toinstall emulator.
I
f the world today seems depressing, why not revisit the fun and excitement of computing in the 1980s?
The operating system you’re probably using now has its roots all the way back in 1981, when MS-DOS first hit the scene ( see more on this story in Retro, p123).
Their established competitor, CP/M, had been shipping since the middle of the previous decade, but it never caught on in the same way – although it would later make its way into many British homes as the OS that underpinned the Amstrad PCW range of word-processing computers.
Running any of these text-based OSes today feels like a dry and limited experience, but you don’t have to skip ahead very far to get to the birth of Windows. Version 1.0 shipped in 1985, followed up later the same year with 1.01 – and then in 1987 by Windows 2.0, which introduced the radical new feature of overlapping application windows. Radical for PCs, at least.
After that, of course, came Windows 3.0, which was the first edition to really gain mainstream appeal – a success that Microsoft built on with the significantly updated Windows 3.1. Those editions weren’t released until 1990 and 1992 respectively, however, so don’t qualify if you truly want to relive the glory days of the 1980s.
GETTING WINDOWS 2.0
As such, to experience the wonder of 1980s desktop computing, you can’t do much better than Windows 2.0. Be aware that the code is proprietary to Microsoft and hasn’t been made freely available – but if you want to experiment at your own risk then it’s easy to get hold of an installer. The WinWorld website ( winworldpc.com) hosts an extensive library of old OSes, including versions of Windows going all the way back to version 1.0.
Installing ancient versions of Windows can be tricky. The files you can download from WinWorld are floppy disk images: to use them, you’ll first need to get a compatible version of MS-DOS running (presumably in a virtual machine), before mounting the disk images one by one to simulate inserting and swapping multiple 5.25in floppies.
If that sounds too troublesome, you can also download a preconfigured disk image that contains a working, bootable installation of MS-DOS and Windows 2.03. You can download it from the Mega file repository at pcpro.link/315mega – although this package comes with no guarantees. When you click the download button, Mega will prompt you to create an account, but you don’t need to as the download will start automatically. Wait for it to complete.
Once the archive has downloaded, you’ll note that it’s compressed using the RAR file format. Windows can’t open this natively, but if you have a tool such as the open-source 7-Zip file manager installed, you can use it to unpack the contents (if not, download it from 7-zip.org).
The RAR archive contains only one file: a virtual disk image called
WINDOWS 2.0. VDI, which
you should save to a convenient location on your Windows PC.
SETTING UP VIRTUALBOX
The best way to try out an OS is in a virtual machine, and that applies especially to old software that was designed to run on hardware from a different era. There are numerous virtualisation hosts, but we’re going with VirtualBox because it’s free and works directly with the VDI file we’ve just downloaded. Visit virtualbox.org to download and install the latest version. Once that’s done, launch it and click New on the toolbar.
Now we need to define the virtual machine on which we’re going to run Windows 2.0. In the “Name and operating system” dialog box, type “Windows 2” for the name; in the Version menu you’ll see that Windows 2.0 is too old to make the cut, but you can select “Windows 3.1” and it will work. Now click Next.
On the next screen, you can leave the memory allocation set at 32MB, although real Windows 2.0 hardware was more likely to have shipped with 640KB of RAM. You now just need to attach the virtual hard drive that we downloaded in the previous step to your new virtual computer. Click the radio button beside “Use an existing virtual hard disk file”, followed by the folder icon on the row below. Click the “Add” button on the dialog that appears, then navigate to your Downloads folder, select the VDI file and click Open, followed by Choose and Create.
You’ll be returned to the VirtualBox homescreen, with a new entry for Windows 2.0 in the sidebar. Select this and click Start on the toolbar to perform your first boot.
RUNNING WINDOWS 2.0
Prior to Windows 95, Windows was a program that ran on top of MS-DOS, rather than being a complete operating environment into which you’d boot directly. So, when you start your new virtual machine, you’ll be presented not with a login screen, but a DOS prompt.
From here, however, running Windows is easy. Just switch to the Windows folder on your virtual hard disk by entering cd windows, then launch Windows itself by entering
win. On the original hardware it may have taken a minute or more for Windows to start up, but modern PCs are so much more powerful that it
should only take a second or two for Windows 2.0 to launch.
You’ll find that you’re immediately presented with the File Manager, without being asked to log in. Local security was all but nonexistent – it was assumed that each user would have their own PC or simply share a communal one – and networking was very much an optional extra.
For this reason, after a bit of fascinating exploration, you might quickly start to run out of things to do with Windows 2.0: there’s no practical way of getting online or installing programs outside of those bundled into the OS. If you want to broaden your experience, your best bet is to look into emulation.
EMULATING THE 80s
Believe it or not, tech has come so far since the 1980s that it’s now possible to run former flagship applications in your web browser. The PCjs website ( pcjs.org) recreates a wide range of historic programs using JavaScript, meaning you can try them out with zero installation or configuration required. The range includes MS-DOS versions of IBM Multiplan (1982), Lotus 1-2-3 (1983) and Microsoft Word (1984), as well as OSes including CP/M-86 (1983), Windows 1.0 (1985) and the original IBM OS/2 (1987).
Without a doubt, however, the main appeal of emulation lies in the ability to play old games. There are hundreds of programs out there that can emulate specific computers and gaming consoles from different periods, allowing your desktop computer to run classic games that were originally designed for radically different hardware.
Perhaps the most elegant way to get into emulation uses the humble Raspberry Pi rather than a desktop PC. If you don’t have one of these, we’d recommend the latest Raspberry Pi 4 for emulation: the board with
2GB of RAM can be picked up for £34 ( pcpro.link/315pi4b). You might also need a micro-HDMI adapter, as this model lacks the full-sized HDMI connectors of previous versions – but we think the more powerful hardware is well worth it.
Once you have your Pi, the secret ingredient is the RetroPie software package, which provides one-stop emulation for an enormous range of old systems, including the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Nintendo
Game Boy. (It can also emulate numerous platforms from before and after the 1980s, from the Atari 2600 to the Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo GameCube.)
You can get started by downloading the RetroPie image from retropie.org.uk. There are versions for the original Raspberry Pi, as well as the Pi 2, 3 and 4. As the Raspberry Pi 4 is a powerful computer (by Pi standards), you might not want to give yours over entirely to retro gaming – and you don’t have to. One option is to set up a dedicated microSD card for RetroPie, and keep another for everyday use. Or you can add the RetroPie components to an existing setup, so that one environment can handle both games and whatever else you might want to do. This takes a little effort, but we believe it’s the neatest solution.
INSTALLING RETROPIE
RetroPie must be installed from the command line, so start by opening a terminal window (either by clicking the icon on the taskbar or from the Accessories menu). You’ll find the full RetroPie installation instructions at pcpro.link/315retropie, but you can get up and running by just typing a few commands.
First, you need to install the necessary dependencies by entering the following (you might find that they’re already installed):
sudo apt install git lsb-release
Now, clone the RetroPie system from Github by returning to your home directory with cd ~, followed by:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/ RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git
Once it’s finished downloading, open the RetroPie folder ( cd RetroPie-Setup)
and change the permissions on the installer so you can run it ( sudo chmod
+x retropie_setup.sh). Finally, launch the installer by entering:
The simplest option at this point is to do a basic install and to take both the main and core software bundles, which installs not only RetroPie but also the full range of emulators. You can also select “Manage packages” to install just the core files, and then pick and choose which emulators you want to install on top – although this is something we’d only recommend for experienced users.
Once RetroPie has finished installing, quit the installer. You now have a whole library of emulators at your fingertips – but you don’t have anything for them to run yet. There are several online ROM repositories from which you can download old games, including Retrostic ( retrostic. com), MAMEdev ( mamedev.org/ roms), Zophar’s Domain ( zophar.net/ pdroms.html) and CoolROM ( coolrom. com.au/roms). It’s important to remember, however, that many games remain the copyrighted properties of third parties – just because a ROM is available, it doesn’t mean you have the right to download and play it.
Once you’ve found a ROM you want to download, you’ll need to check that it’s in a suitable format for running on RetroPie. You can find a full list of compatible ROM extensions at pcpro.link/315rom. If it’s a match, download it, then open a File Manager window and navigate to /home/pi/ RetroPie/roms. Here, you’ll find a subfolder for each of the emulated machines installed on your system. Drop it into the relevant one. Once you’ve dropped ROMs into multiple folders, RetroPie will give you a control console for each emulation platform that’s available.
For now, though, return to the terminal window and enter emulationstation to launch the RetroPie front-end. Once it appears, the first thing you’ll want to do is set up your preferred keystrokes for use in games. There’s quite a lot to configure, as RetroPie supports many different controller layouts to work with the various machines it can emulate. RetroPie maintains an illustrated list of the various controllers’ buttons at
pcpro.link/315buttons, so you can work out which controls are applicable to your preferred console. If you want to go one step further, you can buy an actual gamepad – a good place to start is with the selection at The Pi Hut ( pcpro.link/315gamepad), many of which work with RetroPie.
Once your keystrokes have been established, RetroPie will present you with a list of all the emulators for which ROMs are available. Scroll through the selection and find one to start playing.
RUNNING RETROPIE ON A PC
Despite its name, you don’t need a Raspberry Pi to run RetroPie: you can run it on any PC running a Debianbased Linux (such as Ubuntu), and you’ll find instructions for installing the software on Ubuntu at pcpro.link/315ubuntu.
You can also run it on a Windows PC through the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). To do so, you’ll first need to enable the subsystem by right-clicking the Start menu and opening “Windows PowerShell (Admin)”. In the PowerShell prompt that appears, enter: dism.exe /online /enable-feature / featurename:Microsoft-WindowsSubsystem-Linux /all /norestart
Now you need to install the core Ubuntu files into the Linux subsystem. You can find and install Ubuntu from the Microsoft Store
( pcpro.link/315store), and when it’s finished installing you can launch it directly from the Start menu. The first time it runs, it will take a little while to start as it needs to initialise. You’ll also need to set a Unix username and password, neither of which needs to be the same as your Windows login.
If all that sounds a bit complicated, you can install the EmulationStation software itself on Windows: visit
pcpro.link/315station to download the installer and get instructions for setting up and configuring it.