Comment by keepamovin
8 hours ago
If you're dealing with weird legacy 9x systems in 2026, another headache you've probably run into is getting them to talk to the modern web (since modern TLS and JS completely break old browsers).
I actually built a win9x compatibility mode into BrowserBox specifically for this kind of weirdness. You run the server on a modern system and launch it with bbx win9x-run, and it proxies the modern web to legacy clients. It works surprisingly well with IE5, IE6, and old Netscape on Windows 95/98/NT. Might be a fun addition to your retro utility belt!
Kernel-Ex and Basilisk and friends (Serpent browser or whatever it's called) plus some TLS stuff can browse the modern web just fine. JS, OTOH... get NoScript ASAP and block selectively.
Or better, ditch the web completely and head to Gopher/Gemini.
Ah! I solved that easily enough. Internet Explorer 8 works okay for the webby front ends to operate the transmitter equipment. How do you run that, in this day and age, safely?
Run it in Windows XP, in a VM.
Now here's the clever bit - qemu will allow you to expose the keyboard, mouse, and framebuffer as a VNC server. So you set up Apache Guacamole to point a VNC client at the VM, and then "normal people" can log in, operate the transmitter, and log out again.
You can do a lot of sneaky things with that, including setting up headless X, running VNC on it pointed at your qemu VM, and then streaming the headless X servers's framebuffer out with ffmpeg.
Yes sometimes work can be a bit boring with not much to do, why do you ask?