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
and rename the dll there for the hypervisor you chose.