The Windows 98 Toaster is Here

Windows 98 might not immediately bring toasters to mind for the average person today. But anyone who experienced this era of computing firsthand will never forget the famous Flying Toasters screensaver. After stepping away from a game of Doom or a session of America Online for a few minutes, winged toasters and flying slices of bread would fill up the screen to prevent CRT burn-in in the most unlikely way possible.

That gave YouTuber Throaty Mumbo an idea: now that smart toasters exist — and often pack more computing power than a vintage PC — why not run Windows 98 on a toaster? With a vision clearly in mind, Throaty Mumbo picked up a Revolution Cooking High-Speed Smart Toaster and started tearing it down to see if this might be possible.

The first challenge was understanding how the appliance actually worked. Modern smart kitchen devices rely on microcontrollers, digital displays, and tightly integrated control systems rather than simple timers and heating coils. By opening the toaster and attaching a logic analyzer to the wiring between the touchscreen and the control board, Throaty Mumbo began decoding the conversation taking place inside the machine.

He discovered repeating command packets being transmitted roughly every 30 milliseconds to coordinate heating levels, tray motion, and status updates. To take control, he constructed a small bridge circuit on a breadboard and later used a Raspberry Pi Pico to inject spoofed signals. With carefully timed binary messages, the toaster’s mechanisms could be activated without its original user interface.

Actually running Windows 98 required a different approach. Instead of trying to force the operating system onto incompatible embedded hardware, Throaty Mumbo used a Raspberry Pi 5 as an external computer. Windows 98 ran inside a virtual machine configured to resemble a late-1990s Pentium II PC with 256 MB of RAM and Sound Blaster 16 audio. The toaster’s tall display was swapped for a 7-inch HDMI monitor better suited to the classic desktop environment.

To connect the worlds together, he wrote a custom program, “toast.exe,” inside Windows 98. When a user clicks a button in the retro interface, the software signals the host Pi, which toggles GPIO pins through level shifters and sends the decoded hex commands back to the toaster’s hardware.

The final creation sits inside a large 3D-printed beige PC-style shell, complete with period-appropriate styling. Despite cables routed through the crumb tray slot, the system works: the machine boots Windows 98 and, with a click of a mouse, lowers bread and cooks it. It may have taken more than the stock smart toaster to make this happen, but it’s a cool creation all the same.