The app is available for jailbroken iPhones only obviously, and it’s available through Cydia. It’s called “Windoze” so search for that… It’s in the xSellize repository, or you can install the .deb package manually through the terminal if you so choose. The package (which includes both OS images) is about 35MB.

I have to give the author(s) of the original program called “Bochs” some credit though. It’s an open source IA-32 emulator that works on most operating systems… read more about it on their site. Definitely a pretty cool project, but the port to the iPhone lacks value. I can definitely see value in the app if it had proper input interfaces, but it doesn’t so all you can do currently is point and click and even that doesn’t work too well.

I thought I’d share some screenshots I took, we’ll start with Windows 3.1 then do Windows 95:

Here's the Bochs icon, right next to FB which I use rarely.

After adding the xSellize repo in Cydia and installing windoze, this is the icon you’ll see on your iPhone.

Initial Bochs/iPhone Screen

Choose your image…

Info Screen

Thanks, xSellize for giving the original author credit. There are a lot of stolen applications floating around out there, but this isn’t one of them. I have yet to try the original emu out, but I’m a fan of DOSBox for my old games like Doom2.

WINDOWS 3.1 (Even though it says 3.11, I was hoping for networking)

Bochs loading up on the iPhone

Now you tilt your screen and let Bochs load. Windows 3.1 loads pretty fast, probably even on a 3G or first gen.

Bochs continues to load the disk image...

Hey I remember SMARTDrive! No need for that anymore.

The Windows 3.1 Startup Screen

Ahhh, I remember you. The nostalgia starts kicking in right about now.

At one time, people would type “win” after DOS loaded fully (windows was installed on top of dos… a program essentially) then people just said %&*# DOS and added that win command to their autoexec.bat files.  Good thing whoever made this image did the same because you can’t type in windoze for the iPhone.

Loading... kind of like an 80386

All loaded up.

Here’s the long lost program manager shell. People used this for a long time, well into the 90’s. Ask me sometime about the FOB Chinese guy I worked with at Motorola who was given a very thick Toshiba Satellite complete with a 3.5″ FDD and windows 3.1 to do his job a couple years ago in… 2006. Yeah it was 2006, wow. I’ll never forget that.

MS-DOS Prompt

Whoops! I clicked the MS-DOS icon, now I have to exit the app and restart it because I can’t type “exit.”

File Manager

Windows 3.1 Games

Minesweeper was my favorite.

It was hard to click the square, so I gave up :'(

WINDOWS 95

It loads just like Windows 95... because it is.

Not too large of an install huh – 99MB. Gone are those days. I think my first Windows 95 machine had a 6GB drive in it and 16 or maybe 32MB RAM. It was a Pentium 133 (HP Pavilion) which ended up breaking several times before they gave us our money back. I kind of miss those days, I was in sixth grade well actually I got it during the summer after fifth grade. I was to go to a new school, which was when things took a turn for the worse for me. If only I could go back, I would change so many things. But I have no regrets – yeah right.

Windows 95 Startup Screen

Yeah, the bottom bar does it’s little animation. Very cool to see on the iPhone.

The Windows 95 Desktop, on the iPhone

The first time I started it up it started in safe mode, but after I restarted it it resumed in it’s normal mode.

Standard Start Menu stuff

Dammit, can't they make the network connection work?

It’s not so different from IE6 which way too many people still use. I wished the internet connection would’ve worked, not that the IE5 or whatever it was experience would be better than the Safari Mobile experience. The iPhone should’ve included a stripped down version of flash though and an embedded JVM – at least on the 3GS which can handle it.

Control Panel, Kind of

The Control Panel icons take about a second each to load once they get going on the 3GS. I wanted to try to increase the mouse speed, but none of the control panel applications would load! I think I would have just had to wait a long time, but I had things to do.

Windows 95 on iPhone Shutdown Screen

Always shut down your computer the way Windows tells you do or you could damage your computer.

Please wait while your computer shuts down.

THE END.

The most used router in the consumer market is by far the Linksys WRT54G(x), and that’s what I use – I actually have several versions of these, some doing hard work and others just laying around. Most of these routers I didn’t have any issues with, but I can remember a time several years back when I bought a new one and it would freeze up without failure pretty much every day. Restarting (unplugging) the router didn’t do anything to fix the issue, I actually had to push that little reset button down on the back of it for thirty seconds and reset everything. That meant I had to reconfigure all my settings every day! This was more than a little pain in the butt, and seeing that a firmware upgrade did not fix the issue I almost thought it could be the hardware – perhaps bad memory in the router. I was wrong

I Googled for awhile and stumbled upon a few different third party firmwares that could be used on the WRT54GL. It amazed me that there was such a thing, I never new that third party router firmware existed. I found several: Tomato, OpenWRT, and DD-WRT. The first one, Tomato, seemed cool and everything but not very visually appealing and the features list wasn’t too long. OpenWRT is a great firmware and it’s very extensible, but not quite as robust or as popular as DD-WRT. I’m not sure about Tomato, but OpenWRT and DD-WRT are both based on Linux. DD-WRT is based on OpenWRT. Keep in mind that this isn’t an exhaustive list of router firmwares – there are a lot of them out there. There’s even some small distributions of *nix floating around for weird router architectures that aren’t generally supported.

So at this point you might be wondering why you would want to have a third party router firmware. Here’s a bullet point list of some reasons why you should use the DD-WRT firmware, if your router supports it (we’ll get to that):

• It’s easy enough for an average user to use. Just follow the install directions for your router provided on their site.
• It’s the most popular and therefore has the most support in the form of threads on their forums and elsewhere.
• DD-WRT has been through 24 major releases, plus all of the other intermediate releases. This means that it’s generally very stable and probably a lot better than whatever firmware you’re using on your router right now.
• DD-WRT provides MANY more features than what comes with your OEM firmware. We’ll get into the features real soon in the next post, but I’d describe them as being just as robust as a router that would cost hundreds of dollars.
• DD-WRT is based on Linux which means you can install new packages and log into the shell to use all your favorite command line utilities like SSH, SCP, RM, LS, PING, TRACEROUTE, etc.
• The source code is available, so if you’re a developer and you’d like to contribute or tweak something, it’s all there.
• There are seven different versions in each release ranging from micro to mega. Depending on the hardware specs of your router you may be limited to micro, or you may be able to use mega.
• I could go on and on, but once you look at the screenshots and features, you’ll be planning your first DD-WRT install in no time!

A note to the beginner, or intermediate computer user

Flashing your router with a third-party firmware requires some knowledge of networking, and the ability to pay attention to details. There is a risk of “bricking” your router if you do this wrong, so you’ll want to make damn sure that everything you do is correct and that there isn’t some sort of a power disturbance during the install. You’ll have to search around on the DD-WRT site to find an install guide for your router, if it’s supported there will be one there.

In order to set up a wireless router, you will also need some information from your ISP to get things working properly. If you use Comcast, the setup is very simple; the WAN side just gets a DHCP assigned IPv4 address, and you set up your WIFI and LAN as you normally would. DSL users will need to know all of their login credentials, etc. Most of this stuff is either in your computer (if you don’t have a router) or on your router. Just log in and grab it! If you have a T1, you can still use this – I’ve seen it done! Just take note of the subnet mask, routable IP addresses and DNS servers.

All the extra features are a little more geared towards people who know what they’re doing, but I encourage you to jump right in and start playing around with them too. If you have the time and the willingness to learn, this can be a very fun adventure for you.

Finding a router / checking if yours is compatible

DD-WRT.com has a cool little AJAX page that will allow you to search for your current router, or a router you’re thinking of buying. It’s on their supported hardware page. Under where it says “Router Database – Beta” enter in your router’s model number and without even clicking a button, some routers should appear on the page. Find the one you’re looking for and check if it’s supported. If nothing comes up, or it says it’s not supported, you’re out of luck – try another firmware maybe. If it says work in progress, it might be awhile, but eventually you will be able to use DD-WRT on that router.

The Best Routers for DD-WRT

Linksys WRT54GL

Linksys WRT54GL 1.1

Right now there are three routers that are considered to be the “best” for DD-WRT. The first one is obviously the Linksys WRT54GL which is the current model in the line of WRT routers that DD-WRT was designed for. The current model has a 200MHz CPU, 16MB RAM, and 4MB Flash. It usually retails at around $60. This router is claimed to be the most compatible with DD-WRT, and will work right out of the box almost (with a TFTP flash). This isn’t the fastest router though, nor is it the most feature rich.

Asus WL500G Premium V2

Asus WL500G Premium V2

The Asus WL500G Premium V2 is one of the best consumer routers on the market for the price, and it’s also compatible with the beloved DD-WRT. This router boasts two USB ports on the back for perhaps a security webcam or an external hard drive for use as a file server. I cannot attest to the functionality of it’s stock firmware, but I do know that it’s hugely popular with DD-WRT. The CPU runs at 240MHz (not overclock-able as of the latest DD-WRT release). It also has a whopping 32MB of RAM and 8MB of flash memory, making it a great candidate for DD-WRT and blowing the WRT54GL out of the water. It also only retails at $10 higher or around $70.

Linksys WRTSL54GS

Linksys WRTSL54GS

Also worth mentioning is the Linksys WRTSL54GS. It is compatible with DD-WRT and is a lot more powerful than the WRT54GL, but it’s no longer on the market. If you dig around on EBay you may find one, but you’ll probably pay an arm and a leg for it.

The router has a 264MHz CPU, one USB port, 32MB of ram, and 8MB of flash memory. These specs put it in the ring with the WL500G Premium, but unfortunately Linksys decided to stop manufacturing them and hand all the profits over to Asus. I guess it doesn’t surprise me though, and I’m sure Asus’ stock firmware is much more capable and less buggy than the Linksys firmware – I hope.

Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S

Buffalo AirStaion WHR-G54S

The Buffalo AirStation WHR-G54S is perhaps the most sought after router out there. It was the best bang for you buck, and a cheap router for DD-WRT. It was pulled off the market in the USA along with all their wireless products because they were sued for patent infringement by the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). Buffalo is a cool company because they like to push things – some of their products actually used to ship with DD-WRT already on them!

You can find these on EBay once in awhile, but the price usually shoots up pretty fast so you might try to find one that’s listed poorly (if other people can’t find it the price won’t go as high). Paying higher than normal prices for this one kind of defeats the purpose of buying it in the first place.

The specs are: 200MHz Broadcom 5232, 16MB RAM, 4MB Flash. I don’t know what the street price is or was in the USA, nor does it really matter at this point. I do know that this router was pretty cheap, under $50 if I’m not mistaken. Keep your eye peeled though, this one or something better may show up in stores again someday soon.

The Sabrent “IDE + SATA to USB + ESATA” 3.5″ Enclosure

Note: I use IDE, EIDE and PATA interchangeably throughout this article, even though they aren’t technically the same thing. They look alike, but PATA is the faster version used today.  In all actuality, IDE, EIDE, SATA, etc. are all variations of the ATA standard (ATA1 – ATA7).

It began last week.

On my way home from school I stopped by Fry’s Electronics in Downers Grove.  We’re really lucky to have such a large electronics store nearby, though I’ll admit I’m finding it less and less useful.  I have nothing good to say about Fry’s but that’s not the subject of this post.  I really just wanted to warn everyone about how unfathomably awful this drive enclosure I bought is.

Firstly, I specifically bought it because it said “IDE+SATA to USB+ESATA.” Perhaps they should have clarified what that meant a little better.  It doesn’t convert IDE (or PATA, if you will) to ESATA, even though it wouldn’t be hard to do so.  PATA and SATA are both based on the same standard – conversion between the two would not be tough, nor expensive.  A good case in point is the $10 adapter I bought.  It doesn’t really contain much circuitry at all, and does a damn good job at converting between the two. I benchmarked it before and after and saw no noticeable difference in speed.

Here’s what the enclosure does do (besides suck).  It converts SATA to eSATA which isn’t really a conversion anyway, it’s actually a passthrough.  It’s comparable to converting a small USB plug to a bigger one; you’re not really doing anything except changing what kind of plug it uses.  $39.95 is a little pricey for a little plastic, aluminum and an eSATA cord!  Ok ok, it does have a little extra value aside from that ‘conversion’. It also converts IDE or SATA to USB.

So why don’t I just settle for USB?

You might ask why I want to use eSATA versus USB.  Really, the answer is simple: speed.  USB 2.0 has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 60 megabytes per second.  My PATA hard drive has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 133 megabytes per second.  So I’d be bottlenecking the hard drive transfer rates by using USB 2.0.  On the other hand, SATAII has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 300 megabytes per second.  Sata2 is what we’re using here, but even if it was sata1 we’d still be talking about more than 133MB/s.

Wait – there’s more!

There are other reasons why this is the most substandard enclosure I’ve ever seen in my life. Have a look at these captioned pictures I took:

This enclosure scratched my hard drive! It’ll do the same to yours, just jam it in there – you’ll get it eventually. I didn’t have to use a hammer, but you might depending on the manufacturing differences between your drive and mine.

The stand just sucks. If you want your hard drive to fall off the desk or wherever you put it and break then you’ll love this enclosure. Those little foam things are supposed to hold it in I think, but they just fall off and leave sticky goo all over everything.

Assuming you don’t want to use their shitty stand (and you don’t) then you have to have it like this, otherwise the fan would be on the bottom! Had the fan been on the other side, the ports would be right-side-up in this picture. There are also no rubber feet or anything on this POS, so you can count on this thing slipping around your desk and eventually falling off.

As you can see, there’s not much room inside the enclosure. Certainly not enough to put my relatively small IDE to SATA adapter on my hard drive – and beleive me, I tried. Whatever adapter you use, it won’t work – trust me. It just boggles the mind how they could leave this functionality out.

EDIT:  As I’m coming back into this post to edit things, I’m realizing things I’ve forgotten that suck about this drive enclosure and putting them in wherever I can.  One thing I should mention that I’m remembering right now that seems appropriate here is the built in indicator LED’s.  There are two of them on the front, one indicates power and the other disk activity.  If you do plan on using eSATA you won’t be able to see the disk activity LED working, because it isn’t hooked up to the SATA passthrough.

There are more pictures to come farther down, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve read the manual.  These people can’t spell, use grammar, or really do anything right for that matter.  The manual is utterly worthless. The illustrations are also very well done, as you’ll see.  Here it is, in its entirety:  (I made the images a little larger because people complained that they couldn’t read the text in the images.)

Are those official trademarks at the bottom? Also notice it does say “USB & SATA to IDE” which would mean that it’s not a passthrough, but… it is. I also recall seeing something about IEEE 1394 on the back, but there isn’t a firewire port on the enclosure. Weird. At first glance I thought there were no misspellings/grammatical errors on the cover but I didn’t read the black circle: “Please strongly reccomend reading the MANUAL before using the product!” So I guess I’m supposed to go around and reccomend that people read this manual; well isn’t it ironic, that’s exactly what I’m doing by posting it here! Unless MANUAL is an acronym for something else…

Man, there’s a lot of capitalization in here. “Portable Device Disk extrnal [sic.] enclsoure [sic.]. In the next sentence there’s a comma directly before a word, and another misspelling “lightweigh[t].” I’ll just list the rest of the words: detact, enclsoure, thru, you … u, Mp3 FILES (is files an acronym?), applicarion, vidos, wtf? I can’t keep going. In response to the last sentence “read the manual carefully…”: Oh, I will – many times over. What I can understand anyway.

Some of this stuff looks like whoever wrote it was on something, and just didn’t give a $h17. I’ll let them get away with “programme” but some of this stuff is completely un-explainable. By the way, my first “PC” or IBM PC at least was a pentium 133 – a hewlett packard that broke many, many times and eventually got refunded. I miss that machine.

See, they spelled enclosure differently here. This time it’s “enclsoute” and you connect it “thru” the USB port. That part kind of threw me off because I didn’t know what I was supposed to plug it into after I got it thru the USB port, eventually I figured it out though.

ROFLMAO! I love this page! “You’d better connect the Hi-speed device to the Hi-speed USB2.0 port…” Oh yeah? Well you’d better watch how you talk to me. I don’t really like being given unsolicited advice by someone I just bought something off of.

Whopping??? USBcable – that must be a new compound word or something. I’m interested to know what XP theme they used in this screenshot – it looks awful minimalist. Also, if you look below that tooltip screenshot there’s actually a start menu above those last two sentences (yeah, that’s what it is) and it looks exactly like that in the actual manual, it’s not some kind of artifact or reflection or imaging problem on my part.

Usually when I whop the device out the wrong way it’s ok. I suppose if you were writing data to the drive and you unwhopped it you may have an issue, but whopping never caused my computer to crash.

The only reason why this page has less errors is because there’s less written on it, and therefore there’s less room to make errors. They did a good job at starting the title for the next page at the bottom of this one, but I’m sure that was intentional. I’m the one who’s wrong surely, I can’t be right this many times in a row.

Great screenshot… it looks almost like an installsheild extracting before the setup process but I can’t tell.

The one page that they could have possibly not done wrong, the #&!@^ up. Nice job guys – I hope some EU official sees this and bans their products from being imported/exported. Well, that’s the end folks. A pretty good read wouldn’t you say?

Well that’s the end of the manual, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.  It was the one thing that took the edge off of my frustration with this piece of shit.
Here’s some more images I took while I was messing around with it:

Sata drives do work OK in it. I happened to have a spare 80GB laying around and thought I’d try it out, sure enough it worked.

This is what I was trying to use to make the enclosure do what it was supposed to do to begin with, but it didn’t fit. Even if it did fit, it didn’t work – i tested it without putting everything in and it seemed like the adapter and the enclosure didn’t get along very well. Probably racial tension between the green and red PCB’s.

Here’s what the bottom of it looks like. If there’s one good feature on this thing it’s the fan, but they screwed it up too because it doesn’t really cause any airflow whatsoever. It’s pretty much flush against the hard drive. I’m sure it would break in a month or two and get really loud and annoying.

Here’s some of the other stuff you get in the box. USB cable, eSATA cable, short IDE and SATA cable, screwdriver, mounting screws, etc. The back of the box said what it included, but left out the part about the SATA cable so I thought I had to buy one, which I did. I returned it with the drive.

Don’t waste your money buying garbage like this.  Most of these enclosures try to mislead you into thinking they will let you use eSATA with your PATA drive, but they won’t. I guess that’s one problem that a lot of enclosures have, they appear to be IDE to eSATA but they aren’t. I’m sure there is one out there that does actually do the conversion but PATA/IDE/EIDE enclosures are becoming pretty rare to begin with these days.  Unfortunately this one has more problems than not converting EIDE to eSATA, and so does the company.  The manual was laughable at best.  I don’t even understand how something like this could happen.

I also contacted the company through their website for support several days ago.  I haven’t received a reply yet.  I would have called them, but they don’t have any contact info except for that lousy web form that you can’t even read because the text is too small and in a non-standard font.  I’m probably going to do some more research into the company and post my findings.  They sound like a bullshit foreign company that just tries anything to make money. I’m done with Sabrent unless I need some cheap adapter that you can’t go wrong on and they are the only option.