But for simplicity and just tinkering around, this particular approach with Win95 is hard to beat. This is obviously mostly for fun – I wasted at least 15 minutes tinkering around – but if you’re serious about running Windows, than going with a virtual machine is a much better approach, using an app like VirtualBox, VMware, or Parallels, and then actually installing Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, XP, ME, 7, 8, or Windows 10 into a virtual machine (which can be free with VirtualBox), or just use Boot Camp for a complete experience. The app has full keyboard support too, but unfortunately it appears that networking and internet access it not available (or at least I couldn’t get any networking functionality working even after fiddling around with various control panel settings, if you do then share with us how you accomplished that in the comments). Once you launch the “Windows95.app”, you’ll use the Escape key to toggle the mouse and keyboard lock in and out of the self-contained app. The zip file is about 135mb and the entire Windows 95 application is about 450mb after it has been unzipped.

Launch the resulting ‘windows95.app’ in MacOS to immediately start Windows 95.

Unzip the “windows95.zip” file as usual.Go to the Github project page here to download the release for Mac (labeled as windows95-1-macos.zip *).Running Windows 95 on a modern Mac is incredibly simple, here’s how: If you want to horse around and get nostalgic with a nearly 20 year old PC operating system, complete with the Windows Explorer, MSDOS prompt, Windows Paint, Notepad, Minesweeper, Internet Explorer, and all the rest, this is a remarkably simple way to do so. And believe it or not, Windows 95 actually runs pretty well this way too, at least on a MacBook Pro test machine.

Windows exe to mac app