Which OS for Emulating Mid-90's Games

[Revolution 11]

Since I bought my desktop, I have slowly been attacking the backlog of old games that I either wanted to revisit or play for the first time. With my Win 7 desktop and my XP laptop, and programs like DOSBox, Dolphin, and ScummVM, most classic games lying in my closet are playable.

There is one category of games that is easily playable though. Games like Flight Simulator 98, Age of Empires (1), and Star Wars games like Episode 1 Racer, require too much tinkering on Windows XP and don't work at all on Windows 7.

I will be installing a old OS on one of my laptop's SSD partitions. Strictly no internet access, no Windows updates, completely offline. Games that run on DOS are covered by DOSBox, games that run on XP or later work fine, but games that run on Windows 95/98 are the target here.

Which OS should it be? How well does Window 98 run Win 95 (non-DOS) games? Does the SE version differ in this?

 

[lupi]

I recall 98 being like a really good version of 95, but been so long since I used either would be hard to give any specifics.

 

[MustISO]

Win 98SE was the shit back in the day. I held onto that for a long time before I switched to XP. I've installed it on a virtual machine just to see how bad it looks and man does it load and run fast.

 

[StinkyPinky]

Would think any of the 9x based OS's would do the job, although obviously 98SE would be the best option.

Would those old operating systems install on an SSD though, and there is always the drivers you need to think about. Also some of those older games did not limit cycles and would run at 500 fps during the game (IIRC, games like Ultima 7 did that)

 

[TheELF]

I will be installing a old OS on one of my laptop's SSD partitions.

Not gonna happen.
Windows 95/98 is gonna see that new chipset and just selfdestroy itself out of shame.

(but if you manage to do it make a guide about it)


A lot of those games run fine on windows 7/8 even 64bit as long as you install a glidewrapper for the graphics,since that is the problem.
Stone age directX (version 5 I believe was the turning point)is not supported on newer OS'es anymore,but almost all games back than supported voodoo glide as well,check out nglide .

 

[DaveSimmons]

Win98 Second Edition was the classic 16-bit OS.

Using VirtualBox or VMWare Player (free for home use) might make more sense than setting up a partition and trying to get drivers to work.

 

[BSim500]

There is one category of games that is easily playable though. Games like Flight Simulator 98, Age of Empires (1), and Star Wars games like Episode 1 Racer, require too much tinkering on Windows XP and don't work at all on Windows 7.

Yeah as most classic PC gamers eventually discover, there's a certain "bell curve" compatibility difficulty where pre-1995 MS-DOS games mostly run fine in DOSBox & ScummVM, newer 1999+ DirectX 7-9 games still mostly work fine natively, but those DirectX 1-6 games stuck in that 4-year gap in the middle (1995-1999) can be notoriously finicky on modern OS's.

Win98SE is probably the least worst choice of older OS, but as others have said it may not even work on your laptop or at least be chronically unstable due to lack of chipset drivers, GFX drivers, sound card drivers, etc. SATA & PCI-E were created in 2003 and may have "issues" on modern drives (let alone with modern SSD's - even Win XP doesn't support TRIM). The 4k sector alignment thing on modern HDD's is another issue I'm not sure about. Failing to boot with large amounts of RAM is another common issue I've heard.

My first choice would be getting it to run natively. I have older DX6 (Diablo 2) and even DX5 (Commandos Behind Enemy Lines) games that not only work perfectly but do so in 1080p widescreen due to great modding communities. As TheELF said, try nglide and any other custom wrappers / renderers for the game first. A lot of older games that have trouble reading an optical disk often work with a ripped virtualized ISO (Virtual Clone Drive, etc). Failing that second choice would be an attempt at virtualizing 98 via VirtualBox. Actually installing Windows 98 "native" would pretty much be the last resort, and even then I'd try it on older hardware that wasn't sharing a drive with anything important...

As for AoE 1 in Windows 7, have you read this thread?
http://aoe.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/aoecgi/display.cgi?action=ct&f=1,6325,,10

 

[TheELF]

Using VirtualBox or VMWare Player (free for home use) might make more sense than setting up a partition and trying to get drivers to work.

Same problem,virtual machines have way too modern emulated hardware and only very basic vga support.

(No vmwaretools for poor old win98 )

 

[sweenish]

You don't need more than basic vga support for those games. It's possible they may still emulate a too fast chip, but I'd take a virtual machine over partitioning an SSD for an OS that won't treat it well any day.

 

[Revolution 11]

Win98SE is probably the least worst choice of older OS, but as others have said it may not even work on your laptop or at least be chronically unstable due to lack of chipset drivers, GFX drivers, sound card drivers, etc. SATA & PCI-E were created in 2003 and may have "issues" on modern drives (let alone with modern SSD's - even Win XP doesn't support TRIM). The 4k sector alignment thing on modern HDD's is another issue I'm not sure about. Failing to boot with large amounts of RAM is another common issue I've heard.

My first choice would be getting it to run natively. I have older DX6 (Diablo 2) and even DX5 (Commandos Behind Enemy Lines) games that not only work perfectly but do so in 1080p widescreen due to great modding communities. As TheELF said, try nglide and any other custom wrappers / renderers for the game first. A lot of older games that have trouble reading an optical disk often work with a ripped virtualized ISO (Virtual Clone Drive, etc). Failing that second choice would be an attempt at virtualizing 98 via VirtualBox. Actually installing Windows 98 "native" would pretty much be the last resort, and even then I'd try it on older hardware that wasn't sharing a drive with anything important...

Good points overall, but sadly I have tried VirtualBox, it's very clunky as a solution, many games still don't work well, and it is a pain to use.

The SSD partition is being setup because in a few months, I will be wiping the SSD anyway so I figure I can try out a new setup for a while. If it does not work out, no harm done.

How exactly does a old OS kill a SSD anyway? I should mention that the existing partition is running a cloned XP system, several years old, with several previous virus infections. It is a unaligned partition because no matter how many times I did try to align it with GParted, the partition refuses to boot to the Windows login screen. When I went back and un-aligned it to the original state, it booted up fine.

Anyway, the existing partition is messy, definitely not optimal (which pains me but it is the only way to make it work), and performance is low for a SSD. Still a vast improvement over the failing hard drive, the feel of the 2007 Core 2 Duo laptop matches that of the 2014 Haswell i5 desktop.

 

[BSim500]

How exactly does a old OS kill a SSD anyway? I should mention that the existing partition is running a cloned XP system, several years old, with several previous virus infections. It is a unaligned partition because no matter how many times I did try to align it with GParted, the partition refuses to boot to the Windows login screen. When I went back and un-aligned it to the original state, it booted up fine.

I don't think it'll kill it. The worst case is simply that the older SATA drivers don't work on modern chips or freeze during boot (even with "Legacy IDE" enabled in BIOS). BTW, you can solve the unaligned problem for XP in general by removing the drive, temporarily put it in a Windows 7 desktop / laptop, have Windows 7 destroy then create an NTFS partition (aligned) in Disk Management, then put the drive back and format and reinstall XP. Only needs to be done once and persists even between reformats & OS reinstalls as long as the partition structure isn't changed and is far more reliable than 3rd party utilities.

Biggest issue I see though are the drivers. Depending on how old your laptop is, if no Win98SE GFX drivers are available it's going to resort to using the unaccelerated Windows standard driver which aside from running slowly, a lot of games won't work as they can't "detect" a GFX card, and it'll be no better than Virtualization. Same goes for sound drivers - during the 90's some attempts at driver standardization were made and in 1997 Intel created the AC97 standard. It's probable that Win98SE has support for this and may detect such old sound chips natively - but in 2004 this was replaced by the Intel HD Audio standard which is not backwards compatible. It's almost certain that your 2007 laptop's sound chip is HD Audio rather than AC97, so you'll probably need a Windows 98 sound driver (Realtek or whatever), or you may end up gaming in silence. Another confusing thing to look for is WDM vs VxD drivers. At the time, Realtek often used VxD drivers for Win 95/98 but WDM drivers for Win 98SE.

I'll be honest though and say that a lot of people trying to run old games that modern OS's won't run, often go to the trouble of building a dedicated "retro rig" made out of much older hardware salvaged from Ebay primarily due to the chipset / audio / GFX driver support on an OS that's now 17 years old. Best of luck anyway. :thumbsup:

 

[SPBHM]

Windows 98se wont work well with modern hardware... the best you can go with no problems is probably around 2003-2004 hardware,

 

[Borealis7]

DOS games? no problem! over 2000 games to play in your browser.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos_games/v2

 

[Revolution 11]

I don't think it'll kill it. The worst case is simply that the older SATA drivers don't work on modern chips or freeze during boot (even with "Legacy IDE" enabled in BIOS). BTW, you can solve the unaligned problem for XP in general by removing the drive, temporarily put it in a Windows 7 desktop / laptop, have Windows 7 destroy then create an NTFS partition (aligned) in Disk Management, then put the drive back and format and reinstall XP. Only needs to be done once and persists even between reformats & OS reinstalls as long as the partition structure isn't changed and is far more reliable than 3rd party utilities.
:thumbsup:

Well, this is a wonky XP image, not a brand-new install so please inform me if your method is still valid.

You may be right in that this is a hopeless endeavor. The thought of buying dedicated old hardware has also occurred to me. I will update this thread as I install Win 98 SE this weekend.

One final question. My old hard drive was about 113 GiB and I had used about 112 GiB of that. The new SSD is 220 GiB, roughly, and I currently have about 100 GiB left. How big should the Win 98 partition be? I will be putting at least 10 different games on it, maybe much more. Is 50 GiB enough? 64 GB was the drive limit for vanilla 98, yes?

 

[DeathReborn]

Windows 98SE is definitely the best choice for 90's Windows games. I personally use a Dual Pentium 3 1GHz based workstation with a GeForce 4 Ti-4800 & 2GB of RAM. Might be worth looking on ebay for a P3 laptop or something, should be dirt cheap.

 

[BSim500]

Well, this is a wonky XP image, not a brand-new install so please inform me if your method is still valid.

Not sure about that. Depends on how it writes the image as a partition.

One final question. My old hard drive was about 113 GiB and I had used about 112 GiB of that. The new SSD is 220 GiB, roughly, and I currently have about 100 GiB left. How big should the Win 98 partition be? I will be putting at least 10 different games on it, maybe much more. Is 50 GiB enough? 64 GB was the drive limit for vanilla 98, yes?

50GB should be more than enough. You could probably get away with 15-30GB. Old games are unlikely to suck up that much HDD space. Eg, AoE 1 system requirements is 80MB HDD space. Flight Sim 98 says 100MB disk space. 10x of those barely eat up 1GB. Personally I'd only put the "problem" games on it.

 

[Revolution 11]

I might end up trying VMWare Player (free software?) before I install the partition. How does it compare to VirtualBox? VirtualBox is fine for regular usage but sucks for gaming applications.

 

[BSim500]

I might end up trying VMWare Player (free software?) before I install the partition. How does it compare to VirtualBox? VirtualBox is fine for regular usage but sucks for gaming applications.

Sorry, I honestly don't know and can't help you with that. I only played around with VirtualBox for a short while and even then not for gaming because I've been lucky enough to get all my old games to run natively under Win7 via modding community patches.

 

[TheELF]

I might end up trying VMWare Player (free software?) before I install the partition. How does it compare to VirtualBox? VirtualBox is fine for regular usage but sucks for gaming applications.

No VMwaretools for win98 so it will suck just as hard as virtualbox only that the latter has sound blaster emulation which will give you sound support at least.

 

[SPBHM]

I think most of the VM softwares don't support D3D7 and lower

 

[MeldarthX]

what games are you thinking about?

Tales of Monkey Island was re-released with updated graphics; but you could switch to old scumm version.

a ton of old dos/98SE games are here that work on modern OSes.....www.gog.com also someone also posted 2000+ dos games that can be played in your browser through java That works also......

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I would first of all check out gog.com (good old games) for any old games you want to get working on modern operating systems.

After that i'd probably set up VMs for older operating systems, look at VMware as that's free, then you can have one of each OS and simply boot the one that works best for the specific game you want to play.

I believe Microsoft provide ISO images of all older OS's to anyone with a valid key for Vista onwards? I'm not sure, but it's something like that, so getting a hold of legit images for VMware is super easy.

 

[exar333]

Sometimes it is worth your time to just grab a cheap, old computer and use that if you are having compatibility issues. You could pick-up a cheap P4/A64/AXP build with 2-4GB RAM and run Win98SE on that. Make sure to check/research the computer or components for compatibility first though...

 

[SunnyD]

Why not just run DosBox?

 

[Fox5]

Generally games didn't require 3d acceleration before dx7, so I'd imagine a VM can do software graphics for all the older games.