Windows 98 Emulator?

Sandi1987

Member
Dec 28, 2015
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Is there any 100% working Windows 95/98 Emulator with 3D-Acceleration for Windows 9x games? VMware and VirtualBox doesn't support 3D-Acceleration in Win 9x. PCem is slow. In DOSBox many Win 9x games not working. I really want Win 98 Emulator which works 100% for old games.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,678
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www.betteroff.ca
Emulation is never going to be 100%. Best bet is probably to install win98 on actual hardware, if you can get lucky and find a Pentium 3 era PC or parts you could put together an old box. Something I sometimes think of doing for nostalgia myself. Roller Coaster Tycoon FTW.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
69,678
13,316
126
www.betteroff.ca
Yeah any VM I've tried most games won't run as they want direct 3D or w/e. Even in VM solutions that state to support Direct 3D, so maybe it's not that and something else. Basically the game will just error out on launch and not play at all.
 

Sandi1987

Member
Dec 28, 2015
40
2
51
TOCA Touring Car Championship bug in Windows 98 in DOSBox:

zajeta-slika-2.png


In PCem not even run.
 
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Sandi1987

Member
Dec 28, 2015
40
2
51
There is no working emulator for Win 9x games. Many games crash in PCem or not even run and emulator it's slow. VirtualBox and VMware it's not for old games. DOSBox it's good only for MS-DOS games not Windows 9x.

I have AMD Athlon XP 1600+ but i'm not using because room space. Is this CPU good for Windows 98/XP?
 

Sandi1987

Member
Dec 28, 2015
40
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3D-Acceleration in VM:

VMware Workstation 5.5 - Experimental support for DirectX 8; also supported with VMGL
VMware Workstation 7.0 and 8.0 - Support for DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.13D
Oracle VirtualBox - with Extension Pack and Guest Additions (PUEL) - OpenGL 2.0 and Direct3D 8/9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_platform_vi...

VMware and VirtualBox supports 3D-Acceleration only in DX 8 and 9 games. Games with lower DirectX will not work.

From other forum:

Last time I tested it, it was not a great deal. Virtualbox only supports DirectX8 and later, in 2000 and later guests. That means that:

- Windows 9x has no 3D acceleration.
- Games using DirectX 7 or earlier (Final Fantasy VII, Diablo II, those things) won't work. You can try this with dxdiag... it works, but fails some tests.

I think that VMWare has the same limitations, but I've not tried.

Vmware is the same. DX8+ and OGL in Windows 2000+ guests.
 
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Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
Oct 2, 2011
3,477
233
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In the last two months I messed with the following boxes:

Pentium 133 64MB S3 Vision 968 + Voodoo1 + AWE64 Gold DOS/WIN2K
Pentium 3 1400-S 512MB Voodoo5 / AWE64 Value (built-in amplifier) DOS/WIN98/WINXP

A lot of pain I went thru setting these up and running. Main problem lacking SSE/SSE2 instructions, as lots of apps require these days. If you can, avoid using old hardware. It's fun but it requires A TON of effort and googling around.
 

PingSpike

Lifer
Feb 25, 2004
21,754
599
126
I've been testing out my voodoo card passed through to a VM. I only tested the UT demo.

I'm not sure I'm going to continue on the project though because I couldn't get my nvidia PCX 5750 to work on this z77 platform in a VM. It sort of works but its unstable. I was going to retry with a Ryzen build but you almost can't even buy motherboards right now and I'm picky about them.

Vogons.org is a good source for old drivers btw.