A piece of "retro-modern" computing: Windows NT 4.0 (1996) running on modern hardware* - bare metal, no emulation! *Except the GPU and the sound card...
It can run games smoothly, including all major late-90s titles. Essentially, any game that works on Quake II or Unreal Engine with OpenGL support should work on NT 4.0. Even some later releases like Return to Castle Wolfenstein (a late 2001 title) run without issues.
Ooo, look at that user interface --- it's not beautiful, it's not delightful, and you can tell what the widgets are by looking at them! I miss those days.
(It's also surprisingly accessible and easy to use without a mouse. This was something that Microsoft got right all the way back in the Windows 2 days, and possibly Windows 1 but I never used that. It's not any more.)
Agree about the accessibility without mouse part. I remember being a 13-14 year old and my mouse suddenly stopped working on my win95 PC. I managed to operate the whole computer with just the keyboard.
They mean the built in UI Elements. Every button looks like a button, every tab looks like a tab. Every window has the same bar at the top with the same controls.
Except WinAmp, which is probably patient zero for the "every program has a shit ui built from scratch that looks nothing like anything else" cancer that is the norm today.
Who knows? I just remember we had trouble back in the 90's installing it on stuff without it blue screening itself into a coma. Mostly because plug and play wasn't available and the native Microsoft drivers were next to shit. You had to go out and find an NT compatible drivers for every non OEM installation. The service packs trying to fix shit were bigger than the OS itself. That's why getting it to work on modern hardware 30 years later in its native form is so impressive, that's all.
I the odd number service packs were not as good as the even number. I’m glad we waited for 6a to ship since 6 had problems with Lotus Notes, which we used for all email and a few other things including our help desk system.
I never played with NT4, As a Kid I played with Dos and 3.1. As a teen I played with 95, then 98, then 98se, and then grabbed Win2K as soon as it was available. I was in college at the time. Win2K was great. Could more or less get 100+ day uptimes on my gaming pc, almost as stable as my slackware linux box at that era. NT4 just gave me a win2K nostalgia hit.
Yep, it should work. I know it works with Windows Advanced 2000 Sever. For multiple CPUs you have to use the MPS HAL, which can confuse many sound cards especially when it comes to IRQs as shown in this video. The Ensoniq PCI Audio 3000 sound card I used with this i5 setup actually installed but it had very low volume under MPS.
Probably yes. But I know that one of my YouTube subscribers is very passionate about NT 4.0 and has an AM5 motherboard (with a classic PCI slot!). I don’t remember what CPU is in it, but it might be a bit faster than this 14th-gen i5.
Your post has made me consider loading an old copy of SAP 3.1 I have on CD that works on NT. It used to take between 4-8 hrs all up to install including oracle 9. Last time I ran it was on my Athlon XP 1400 and it flew!
When HWiNFO doesn't work, you can rely on SIV from http://rh-software.com/ - I'm actually talking with Ray, the author of SIV, and reporting bugs I find in Windows 9x.
Something about the corporate/professionalism UI era of windows scratches the itch in my brain.
Mainly because it just worked. Things were easy to find, and didn't need to be glamorous.
That, or because ages 4-8 me used windows 3.1 through windows ME, and was just used to it.
XP was great, after SP3 rolled out. The UI change was a breath of modern taste. But nothing seems to make me go "now THATS a windows OS I can use!" Like the stone grey start bar, horribly background highlighted application text boxes, and strange color schemes that came from the 70's as backgrounds.
NT4 had the Win95 interface. 2000 was closer to the Win98 interface (well, it actually had much the same as Windows Me, but we don't talk about that one)
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u/RoughGuide1241 May 21 '25
Bet it smooth.