ReactOS Joins VCF Southwest for the First Time | ReactOS Project

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ReactOS Joins VCF Southwest for the First Time

by Carl Bialorucki | June 3, 2026

Our first VCF Southwest booth

I had no idea how unprepared I was until it was too late to back out.<br>I had just set up my booth, with nothing to show off.<br>Bracing for the worst, I reached out to strangers who quickly became friends.<br>I expected to confidently show off ReactOS but instead found a resourceful and friendly community willing to help me when my plans fell apart.

A Last-Minute Opportunity

While I was talking with Justin Miller at our appearance at Chemnitz Linux Days in late March, we talked about how we want ReactOS to appear at more conventions.<br>I mentioned VCF, but thought we might not be a good fit because we were focusing on supporting newer hardware.<br>But Justin reminded me that we have an original Xbox port, we have an NEC PC-98 port, and we run on original Pentium PCs.<br>After doing some research, I found that I recently moved close enough to attend VCF Southwest without needing to book a hotel.

I decided to put myself on the wait list, not expecting to get in.<br>About a month before VCF Southwest, I was invited to sign up for a table because another vendor canceled.<br>I took the opportunity not knowing what I signed myself up for.<br>Lots of late nights trying to figure out how I would get the swag, banners, and hardware needed to run the booth.<br>I wasn&rsquo;t much of a hardware collector so I had to quickly become one.

I bought, then immediately returned a 3D printer after changing my mind on what free swag to hand out.<br>I got a 6&rsquo; x 2&rsquo; ReactOS banner made at a local print shop. Unhappy with commercial sticker options, I opted to learn how to make professional looking stickers at home.<br>I printed them on a high end wide format inkjet (which I hope to use to make big boxes in the future!), laminated them, and used a consumer vinyl cutter to cut the stickers out.<br>I got several bags of candy at a local wholesale club.<br>I scoured eBay and local classified ads to find hardware for my booth.<br>All I was able to get at a reasonable price in time was an original Xbox and an eMachines 366i2 with an original Celeron.

Everything Went Wrong

After all the other preparation work I needed to do, I only had the night before the convention to get ReactOS working on the hardware I got.<br>I started with the eMachines, figuring it would be trivial to get ReactOS to boot.<br>Unfortunately, the disc drive on the eMachines PC did not work.<br>Luckily, I had some floppy disks and a USB floppy disk drive, so I imaged a copy of Plop Boot Manager to the floppy disk and tried booting ReactOS from USB.<br>Freeldr, the bootloader for ReactOS, could not load the first stage setup because of some weird memory layout settings baked into the BIOS of that machine.<br>I also tried running it directly from the hard disk of the machine and ran into the same issue.<br>I then tried to find a generic BIOS image for that board that may have had a more normal layout but was unsuccessful.

After failing to get ReactOS running on the eMachines, I turned my attention to the original Xbox.<br>I built ReactOS and confirmed that it ran in an emulator.<br>The original Xbox port of ReactOS requires Cromwell BIOS to be loaded.<br>I opted to install a hardware modchip which necessitated soldering a wire to a small via (d0) on the back of the board.<br>After installing my modchip it acted very strangely, only working in about 1 in every 15 boots or so.<br>I resoldered it multiple times hoping to fix the issue, it never got better.<br>In desperation, I flashed Cromwell to the modchip anyways hoping I could get it to boot at least sometimes.<br>This bricked the modchip and I had to reflash it, which fixed all the issues I was having with it.<br>Or so I thought.<br>With the Xbox reliably booting into Cromwell, I burned a ReactOS CD for an Xbox build and it wouldn&rsquo;t get to Freeldr.<br>After some investigation, it appeared that my disk drive was burning CDs too fast for the Xbox to read them properly.<br>By the time I came to this realization, I needed to leave to set up the convention.<br>At this point I had not slept since the previous day and I still needed to run the booth.<br>I felt defeated.

The Community Saved the Booth

Desperate to find any piece of hardware that could run ReactOS, I rummaged through all the desktop PCs in the free pile at the convention.<br>Most of the PCs were stripped for parts and missing something to prevent them from being fully operational.<br>However, I found a Lenovo Thinkcenter that was complete and could run ReactOS if I disabled USB.<br>Unfortunately this machine had no PS/2 ports so it sat at the LiveCD install screen.

As I was burning a new copy of the Xbox port to a CD, the modchip on the Xbox suddenly stopped working.<br>I took it to another booth to see if we could take a look at that problematic d0 via again.<br>We removed it and ripped the via.<br>I stopped by the Obtainium Retro booth...