PC0 is PC without hard disk.
It's a local term creation, you won't hear about it outside this forum.
Since there is no hard disk there is no windows.
It's a way to create a console from an old pc.
The demo provided is a bootable cd image. If your bios allows to boot cdrom it will boot.
Only a small list of network card is supported.
I suggest the cheapest and most common Realtek8139 PCI network card.
At boot time (you have to setup URL or FTP connection details first inside the image before burning)
it will download some interpreted code to run from another machine (ftp server or web server has to run on it).
This is the very early stage of some dashboard creation for a "PC turned into a console" i.e PC0.
Nouveau project attempts to create open source drivers for the most powerful NVidia graphic cards for PC.
Depending how far they go, (and I since I'm trying to search in that domain too), this "PC turned into a console" may be very powerful.
Alone PC0 is not very interesting. But if the dash and the interpreter engine is ported at the same time on all other consoles (I'm trying), then it brings sense. You reuse old consoles, you reuse old computers and turn them into consoles, and let all your kids play together with same software on your local ethernet network, even if the hardware of each machine is different. Maintenance is easy because all software is downloaded from your single ftp or web server and written in same interpreted low level language (think xn/a).
If you see cd under windows, it won't help you. There is no .exe file. That's something that has sense only for dos or windows. A bootable image has assembly code stored in first sectors of cd. It's x86 assembly code running in real mode. But with a few tricks we can access all memory in linear 32 bits addressing mode. So with 512Mb you really have around 508 Mb to play with!
If you have a hard disk connected, don't worry the demo will ignore it.
In bios is defined the order in which bootable sectors are launched : the one from hard disk, the one from a floppy disk, the one from a cdrom. You have to put cdrom before hard disk if you want to try the demo. So you have to enter your bios (press delete a boot time usually, and find where to choose the boot order). Note that bootable sectors on cd is something defined strictly with a standard named "El Torito" (don't ask me the meaning, I dunno). I know a few drives models (old ones) don't accept this standard. But if a windows cd installation boots on your machine (not under windows, right at pc boot time), that means you are all set for testing the minidash demo.
