Jace from self-confessed “silly tech” YouTube channel MetraByte has shared a video documenting their attempts to get Windows 95 and Doom up and running on the Sony PlayStation 2. In brief, Windows 95 eventually yielded to attempts to get it to boot, and it was possible to fiddle around in the standard apps, but there was no way Jace could get Doom to launch.
Both these platforms are very long in the tooth in 2025, of course. Windows 95 arrived in 1995, and the PS2 debuted in the year 2000. With its half-decade tech-age advantage, you might expect the PS2 to sail through the Windows 95 and Doom challenge. Indeed, it might have, but the hacky nature of getting x86 code to run on Sony's MIPS machine, plus the well-known foibles of Windows 95, built on DOS, meant there were lots of hurdles.
So, how did Jace do/not do it? It is quite a long story, but Jace condensed tens of hours of coaxing the PS2 to run Windows 95 into less than half an hour (video embedded above).
All Jace’s testing took place using a modded PlayStation 2, a game controller with a QWERTY keypad, plus a USB stick and a hard drive inserted into the fat PS2 for storage and data transfer. In parts of the video you can see Jace use a specially prepared USB stick or HDD which packed in the following contents:
- A PlayStation .ELF file. This is the homebrew code to run on the modded PS2. DOSBox and Bochs emulators for the PS2 were both tried.
- A virtual DOS boot disk or image file
- A Windows 95 install HDD or .ISO image file
- A free partition or image file for installing Windows 95 and Doom
Jace's initial time-consuming effort to use DOSBox to achieve their Windows 95 and Doom goals stalled, and after at least “47 attempts” to persuade the vintage OS to boot to desktop, our mad scientist decided to switch to another emulator called Bochs. The former is designed primarily for enjoying simple games, where the latter is billed as an accurate (and slower) general-purpose x86 emulator.
If you watch the full video, you will almost feel Jace’s pain. Such is the slow and frustrating process of getting an x86 OS onto this MIPS console. Nearly every process took an ungodly amount of time, hampered by limited and slow I/O on the PS2, the emulation layer, and these early editions of Windows sitting precariously upon DOS.
Using Bochs wasn’t plain sailing, either. Jace had to deal with a wide range of system hurdles, complaints about read errors, write errors, boot order, drive letter and mounting configurations, missing files, drivers, and more. However, they eventually saw the Windows 95 setup screen appear on their PS2 screen.
In total, it took about “14 hours” to complete the Windows 95 install by Jace's reckoning. Eventually, at the desktop, they managed to run Paint, but it wasn’t much fun without a mouse installed. Subsequent attempts to get Doom95 up and running were, not surprisingly, fruitless. Still, we enjoyed the journey.
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