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windows 95/98 emulator for win 10 /11

sigard

Not Excidium
Joined
Jun 9, 2019
Messages
102
This may be dumb question but hey...
Why such emulator was never created??? Where is the problem?
Why you can emulate windows on linux, mac os on windows but when it comes to emulating fucking win98 on fucking win 10 or 11 there is fucking nothing???
Overwhelming majority of games from 1996-2000 does not work on win10 and yet nowbody bothered to create such emulator???
Why is that?
And no, virtual machine is not a good alternative... It is easier to emulate fucking nintendo 64 or ps1 on win10 then make virtual machine with win 98 installed on it...
Even some games from 2001+ refuse to work on win10...
???
You would think that creating f.e ps2 emulator when you must emulate cpu+gpu+ram+os is harder than only os but apparently it is the other way around. Why?
 

Narushima

Cipher
Joined
Jun 14, 2019
Messages
2,035
And no, virtual machine is not a good alternative
:nocountryforshitposters:

Seriously, it's not hard. Get Oracle. Get the ISO you want. Install.

oracle.png
 

sigard

Not Excidium
Joined
Jun 9, 2019
Messages
102
last time i tried to create virtual machine i was told by program that i used ( cant remember name ) that i need to turn on "virtualization" . I did that in bios. My pc crashed when win10 started to boot uo... And i have cpu that support virtualization (i5 7500 from 2016)...
 

Colonel

Novice
Joined
Oct 2, 2012
Messages
6
I use dxwnd to run most games from the windows 95/98 era. Dxwnd + lossless scaling is your best friend.
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,647
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Bruh, VMs aren't as complicated as you seem to think they are. I install VMs for fun.
 

Naraya

Arcane
Joined
Oct 19, 2014
Messages
1,513
Location
Tuono-Tabr
This may be dumb question but hey...
Why such emulator was never created??? Where is the problem?
Why you can emulate windows on linux, mac os on windows but when it comes to emulating fucking win98 on fucking win 10 or 11 there is fucking nothing???
Overwhelming majority of games from 1996-2000 does not work on win10 and yet nowbody bothered to create such emulator???
Why is that?
And no, virtual machine is not a good alternative... It is easier to emulate fucking nintendo 64 or ps1 on win10 then make virtual machine with win 98 installed on it...
Even some games from 2001+ refuse to work on win10...
???
You would think that creating f.e ps2 emulator when you must emulate cpu+gpu+ram+os is harder than only os but apparently it is the other way around. Why?

Seriously, a VM is your best best. For Windows I'd try Hyper-V *) first, before using software like VirtualBox or VMWare as it's just simpler and more performant.

*) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/vi...dows/quick-start/quick-create-virtual-machine
*) https://petri.com/how-to-install-windows-10-in-a-virtual-machine/
 

sigard

Not Excidium
Joined
Jun 9, 2019
Messages
102
Overwhelming majority of games from 1996-2000 does not work on win10

A few examples?
fmv adventures games:

Johnny Mnemonic
Voyeur II
Days of Oblivion
Riana Rouge
Blue Heat
The Daedalus Encounter

and many more fmv's from 1995-2001...

all either refuse to install "this instalator requires win 95 to run, you are using windows nt, fuck you"
or will install but the moment you double click exe you see: "this game don't support windows from nt family, fuck you"


and non fmv that i tried: Shadow Company: Left for Dead from 1999 refuses to work.
 

catfood

AGAIN
Joined
Aug 28, 2008
Messages
9,314
Location
Nirvana for mice
Getting hardware acceleration to work with Virtual Box is complicated, so good luck getting any game that requires it to run under it. Use Hyper-V instead if you are on Windows 10.
 

visions

Arcane
Joined
Jun 10, 2007
Messages
1,801
Location
here
I remember a local PC mag picked Voyeur 2 as the worst adventure game of all time around 20 years ago.
 

A horse of course

Guest
i will try Hyper-V, i hope it will work

Update? I'm interested in this too. At the moment pcem seems like the best option for win95/98 stuff but it needs a really powerful PC just to do 166mhz
 

Morpheus Kitami

Liturgist
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
2,476
Use this or this. You can use the pre-built emulators this guy makes for other games. With a few modifications to the config files so that they don't go automatically to the game, then quit immediately afterwards.
 

sigard

Not Excidium
Joined
Jun 9, 2019
Messages
102
i will try Hyper-V, i hope it will work

Update? I'm interested in this too. At the moment pcem seems like the best option for win95/98 stuff but it needs a really powerful PC just to do 166mhz
there will be no update until i complete fallout nev vegas + all its dlc, and this will take a while.
 

Jigby

Augur
Joined
May 9, 2009
Messages
332
There are plenty of ways of emulating Win95, but they're all last desperate hail mary attempts at running the game. All unhappy gamers are unhappy in their own unique ways and all happy gamers are happy in exactly the same way - in that they play Win95 games without emulating Win95. With that said I was playing with winevdm lately so I wanted to look at Johnny Mnemonic and the rest.

A lot of them have Win16 installers, use winevdm to install them.

VoyeurII - This is a DOS game, it even has a DOS installer (install.bat). Unless there's some bad interplay with DOSbox, I don't see the need for Win95. It ran fine on my DOSbox.

Daedalus Encounter DVD - Win32 game, a pain in the butt to get it running, fortunately there's the CD version

Daedalus CD & Johnny Mnemonic - Win16 games, I tried them in winevdm and they ran very nicely. I had to enable a hypervisor in winevdm to get smooth videos though. More on that down below. Still, they'd need to be tested, maybe there are some problems down the road? I only played them a bit.

Days of Oblivion - This is a Win32 game, but it has a 16 bit installer. Also it uses quicktime 2.1.2, but it already comes with it on CD3, you can just install it (with administrator privileges). The game wants to run in 800x600x16. For the 16bit colors just enable them in the compatibility tab. For the resolution, you can change your desktop resolution manually, to get it fullscreen, or play it at a higher res and have it in a 800x600 box. Other than that, there were no problems with the game, it ran 100% on Win10.

Blue Heat - Win16 installer, game is both Win16 and Win32. I haven't tried the 16bit version. The 32bit has a fix online (https://web.archive.org/web/2006050...hlink.net/~jwmuse/walks/blueheat/WINXPFIX.zip). Overwrite the original executable with that. After applying the 640x480 and WinXPSP2 compatibility flags on the exe, the game ran perfectly fine on Win10.

Shadow Company - Safedisc. Copy files from the CD on HDD and replace setup.exe with the installshield launcher (http://toastytech.com/files/Is5Launcher.zip). Install the game, patch to 1.31, extract dgvoodoo2 to make it run and... it works, except for the music. The CD is a mixed mode data+audio, I had it mounted with wincdemu which does not do mixed mode, after mounting it with imgdrive music worked. The logic behind it is a bit dumbfounding though. The game looks for the CDdrive that has the CD from which the videos are played afterwards (logical). But the audio track is played from the first CDdrive in your system, even if that CDdrive is not the ShadowCompany CD. Most likely it's going be to your physical CDdrive, which presuming you got the game from pirate bay is empty. So there's no music! To have music, the image has to be mounted alphabetically as the first CDdrive of all CDdrives. You can change drive letters in Windows drive management. I suppose back in the day with only one physical drive and no virtual drive, this was not noticeable. That said, music is played only in the main menu? Not ingame. So no biggie. Also just to be sure, have some directshow codecs installed like LAVfilters, so that videos are playing.

Riana Rouge - This one had more problems to say the least. A win32 game, but the installer damages the executable during the installation. Win95 doesn't care about that and just runs with the damaged .exe, but XP and newer OS care and they complain. Manually copy riana.exe from the CD to the install dir. Sound was grainy, indirectsound fixes that. And then, the game is filled with Win95 behavior, you have to use Microsoft's Application compatibility toolkit to get that on a modern OS. Just for the sake of reproducibility, the shims I used were:

DisableFilterKeys+DisableThemes - to get the basic Win95 window theme
EmulateCDFS - there are some graphical/audio problems without it
IEUnharden - without it, the game freezes whenever an explorer.exe window is called (like during saving/loading)
ForceDXSetupSuccess - without it audio doesn't play after a load.
Force 640x480x16
ForceDirectDrawEmulation

All of that put together it ran OKayish I thought. There were some graphical glitches, but then I tried the game in a Win95 emulator and there were also graphical glitches. So it's just a poorly coded game. Would definitely benefit from a ScummVM treatment. Certainly better than another zmachine intepreter. This package ->
Code:
https://mega.nz/file/6kFkBA7K#mveUjgpg1vKCURpjwJSDch4W0fbmAgBu36Lcx_j8wvI
has all of that combined, start the game with RianaLauncher.exe with administrator privileges (so that shims can be applied); or apply them manually and run riana.exe.

As far as winevdm is concerned, I've made a winevdm Johnny Mnemonic package ->
Code:
https://mega.nz/file/n8t2VSoL#ykBt-hQ9IVIRhD6IULdSPBsoTxoSlUVxeQBjQRrTL5c
It has quicktime 2.03 installed. You can run the game just by executing start.bat. It's without a hypervisor, so the videos are going to be slow. Winevdm supports 3 hypervisors, HAXM (for Intel CPUs), GVM (for AMD CPUs) and Hyper-V (both CPUs but you want to have Win10+). The setup is really simple, check otvdm-master-2306/otvdm.ini for instructions, but in a nutshell if you want to use HAXM/GVM, Hyper-V has to be disabled (there's a simple GUI app that disables the Hyper-V service -> https://github.com/ygoe/HyperVSwitch/releases, restart PC afterwards; it doesn't uninstall Hyper-V, just the service is disabled, which is good enough).

For Hyper-V, Hyper-V obviously has to be installed (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/quick-start/enable-hyper-v) and the service has to be running (so if you disabled it with the app, reenable and restart). Also there are some Hyper-V specific dll load files (check otvdm.ini), but I already included them in the Johnny Mnemonic package.

If you have the hypervisor correctly installed and setup, enable it in otvdm.ini by uncommenting the line
Code:
;vm=haxmvm.dll
and rename the dll there for the hypervisor you chose.
 

Rincewind

Magister
Patron
Joined
Feb 8, 2020
Messages
2,427
Location
down under
Codex+ Now Streaming!
Use DOSBox for Win3.1, it's perfect.
Use PCem for the Win95/Win98 stuff. Works very well, but you can't really emulate a fast 3D accelerated card or Pentiums above 200 Mhz.
Better yet, just build a retro PC for the Win98 stuff.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
there's DOSBox-X, which is a fork of DOSBox (which you never would have guessed) providing explicit support for Windows. I haven't tried it but that doesn't mean you can't
 

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