Someone ported the Minecraft launcher into Windows 98, because why not

For a pair of operating systems that are hitting the 30-year mark, Windows 95 and 98 still get a lot of love to this day. Just under a year ago, someone ported thousands of apps from Windows 98 to 95 by reverse-engineering some code. Now, someone is showing Windows 98 some love by creating a Minecraft Launcher that runs on the retro operating system.

The Minecraft Launcher has been unofficially backported to Windows 98

In a post on the Windows 98 subreddit, user jtofexstinction released a version of the Minecraft Launcher that works on Windows 98. To get the project working, jtofexstinction had to adapt the launcher to work on C++ and present all of the information in a way that Windows 98 could understand.

Looking at the screenshot on the project’s GitHub page, the launcher definitely has the same vibe of something I would have played back in my Windows 98 days. Between the textboxes and the plain UI elements, it definitely brings me back to an earlier time.

However, there’s the million-dollar question: how well does Minecraft run on a Windows 98 PC? As you’d expect, playing the latest build is pretty much a no-go; the developer says that running anything at version 1.8.9 or higher requires jamming Java 8 onto the aging operating system. However, if you’re packing a Pentium 3 and a GeForce 3, the developer says that anything at version 1.5.2 or older should be good to go. They even claim that a Voodoo 3 GPU (gosh, remember the days of Voodoo box art?) can hit 20FPS on Minecraft.

If this got you all nostalgic, why not take a trip down Windows memory lane with all the major versions?