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Windows 95/98 gaming!
February 11, 2010

Have you ever had a retro flashback when looking through your old collections of games? I found a copy of the game “Neverhood” and wanted to install it on Windows XP. No luck. Not even with compability settings (windows 95) turned on. I did a quick google-search and found many threads ending with “.. this game will not work in Windows XP”. I do have a valid Windows 98 SE serial, but i don’t have any computer to install it. The sollution (after many hours of trying and failing) was acutally quite easy, and was made possible by Microsoft themselves!

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (free)

What you need is this :

A computer running Windows XP/Vista or 7
A copy of Windows Virtual PC 2007
A valid copy of Windows 95, Windows 98 or Windows 98 SE
All the retro windows-games you can’t get running in Windows XP or above

A great tutorial here, with screen shots : http://system-log.com/2010/02/11/windows-9598-gaming/

Indeed.

And if you want to run old Windows 9x games on a Mac or Linux machine you can use VirtualBox. http://www.virtualbox.org/

Usually I just run DOS Box, but sometimes I wonder if having a virtual machine would be better... I'll have to give this a try when I get my new pc. :3

Thanks for the tutorial.

But I always use VMware (vmware player, vmware workstation and on the server vmware ESXi).
All great for emulating. Especially if you happen to have some cores and memory left .

The original idea of my post was to create discussion an d ideas of what others do. It seems that to some extent , that seems to be working. Thanks all for your responses.

Kherr wrote:Usually I just run DOS Box, but sometimes I wonder if having a virtual machine would be better... I'll have to give this a try when I get my new pc. :3

I also use dos box for eeehh dos games. Sometimes it's a bit tricky to get the game running. Only use virtual machine for windows 95 and 98. And of course ScummVM for a lot's of old Point-n-Clik adventures.

works great for early games. Here I struggle to get NFS: HS to get up to speed

te_lanus wrote:works great for early games. Here I struggle to get NFS: HS to get up to speed

In what way lad? It doesn't run fast enough... or doesn't it run at all?

stinow wrote:

te_lanus wrote:works great for early games. Here I struggle to get NFS: HS to get up to speed

In what way lad? It doesn't run fast enough... or doesn't it run at all?

not fast enough. Installed Win98SE with the drivers, and installed the Game, but it runs about 10fps

The problem is that the game cannot connect directly to your video card, but uses an emulated video card. So when you try to run newer games they won't run on maximum speed. For the best performance you could install a second OS like XP or 98 next to your Windows 7 installation, so you have dual boot.