phaq

Well, well, I just feel like 10 years ago, playing around with my rather aged SGI O2, which I didnt touch for years, doing a fresh reinstall of IRIX and some apps.

While flipping through my CDs I stumbled accross SoftWindows95 for IRIX. I just couldn’t resist and put the flipper in, having the software installed just minutes later, only to see that I didn’t have the license any more 🙁

But there’s hope …

After some searching I found a Usenet article with a valid license of SoftWindows95. Well, I think it’s fair enough to republish this, as for one, Insignia has sold-off SoftWindows about 10 years ago, and the successor company FWB Software stopped development in 2001, furthermore that company doesn’t exist anymore as it has been sold-off, too. Well, not even SGI is able to provide a license key for a software, which is 14 years old … hm…. Well, I _think_ it’s ok, otherwise let me know …

To activate SoftWindows95 (both v4.0 and v5.0), just place this text into /usr/lib/SoftWindows/FLEXlm/license.dat:

FEATURE Insignia_SoftWindows95 insignia 4.000 01-jan-0 0 \
        ECE41259D5BE4700DC27 VENDOR_STRING="5100 0100 0000 0001" \
        HOSTID=ANY vendor_info=SOFTWINDOWS95 ISSUER="Silicon Graphics, \
        Inc."

The license won’t show up from the GUI _but_ SoftWindows95 will work.

Oh, and by the way, on archive.org you’ll find SoftWindows 2.0 for UNIX which should work on IRIX 5.3.
It comes with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, and is propably better suited to run on elder machines such as the SGI Indy.

According to IRIX.net forums this would go into usr/lib/SoftWindows2/FLEXlm/license.dat:

FEATURE Insignia_SoftWindows insignia 2.000 01-jan-0 0 \
        FC5452A92A01D8F98BF2 VENDOR_STRING="5100 0100 0000 0001" \
        HOSTID=ANY vendor_info=SOFTWINDOWS95 ISSUER="Silicon Graphics, \
        Inc."

I tried this one myself an can confirm it working as well.

Considering the age of the O2 and it’s dated 200 MHz MIPS CPU, the emulation speed isnt’t too bad.
I remembered it being worse than that, but maybe that’s just the “geekness” of having gotten something very old to work again 😉

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