Yes, Samsung's Gear Live Smartwatch Will Run Windows 95 (And No, It Won't Run Crysis)

Let's be honest here -- it's a relatively safe bet that Windows 95 was never on your radar when you thought about purchasing a smartwatch, which assumes you're even interested in the emerging wearable category to begin with. Android Wear, iOS, and Tizen? All viable candidates (if not now, then soon), and you might have even looked into webOS (remember webOS?). But while Windows 95 was never a consideration for the vast majority, at least one novel individual came up with the idea, and then made it happen onSamsung's Gear Live.

His name is Corbin Davenport and before you ask yourself, 'Self, why would someone go through the trouble of porting Windows 95 over to a tiny, underpowered smartwatch display?,' perhaps the better question to ask is, 'Why not!?' Granted, the usefulness of such a hack is certainly something to question, but it's all in good fun. It also underscores how far technology has advanced since Windows 95 was in the driver's seat many moons ago.

In his YouTube video, Davenport notes that he got Windows 95 to run on Android Wear using aDosBox, a free app that's available to download on Google Play. It's not ideal, but when it comes to porting Windows 95 onto Android Wear, there aren't exactly a bunch of options.

"Faster emulators like DOSBox Turbo don't seem to work properly on Android Wear," Davenport notes. "That's why it's slow."

Be that as it may, Davenport does indeed get Windows 95 successfully up and running on his Gear Live, though not without some wonky behavior. It's easy to navigate the menus and desktop in Windows 95 using touch input on the Gear Live, but if you try to run an application, it will crash due to lack of RAM. Samsung's Gear Live actually boasts 512MB of RAM, but aDosBox wasn't written for this sort of thing - bummer!

Still, it's a pretty nifty hack, and if you enjoy stuff like this, check out Davenport's other YouTube videos. He has a couple of similar videos, one of which shows Doom running on Android Wear and another with Minecraft PE running on it.