Windows Emulators/VMs and stuff

[drbockwurst]

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Hey everyone,

just joined the forum and thought about how I could contribute on this journey. 🙂

For many people it’s just not feasible nowadays to get exclusive old Hardware to install Windows 3.1, 95, 98 etc.., so usually VMs or Emulaltors are the way to go.
In my experience VMs for Windows are not that fun, there are at least two approaches that I would rather recommend:

DOSBox-Pure (Standalone or via Retroarch-Core)
or
x86Box (and before that was a thing: PCem)

What are your experiences in that regard?
Do you have other ways to use old Software?
Does someone need some help or tutorials setting up machines in the 2 Ways I mentioned?

Love to hear from you all! 😉

Cheers from Germany

[Watchful]

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Good topic!

Most of the Windows 9x and newer games, I’ve been able to get working on newer Windows, albeit sometimes with fan patches or ports. IME, DOSBox-X (DBX) can run both Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, with some effort. I’ve been meaning to try DOSBox-Pure with RetroArch for its rewind capability. DBX only has save states, and they don’t work well with complex games.

I recommend casual players try Windows 3 games directly on Archive.org.

Steam and GOG have pretty solid coverage of the Win 9x and XP eras, with only some Win 3.x games. For a comprehensive collection, ExoWin3x facilitates a proper game install, if you want saving and loading, as well as more performance. Just take care if you insist on combining with ExoDOS proper as I’ve found ExoWin3x works best as a standalone install.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by Watchful.
• This reply was modified 2 months, 2 weeks ago by Watchful.

[Jozxyqk]

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For the few games I have that don’t work with wine/proton I use a virtualbox vm with win2k installed, which I set up back at the start of the vista days (when I, purely coincidentally, moved away from windows for my main os). At the time, it was still possible/safe to have a win2k system connected to the internet to grab all windows updates, so other people’s mileages *will* vary if they are silly enough to try that method now.

Nowadays, though, most windows games work fine for me when installed with the heroic launcher. However, there may be a selection bias in that statement since I tend to grab them from gog.

[Martli]

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I personally found PCem and 86Box quite limited performance-wise. It tends to struggle beyond a pentium/pentium ii. I understand you need to have a CPU with quite beefy single-core/thread performance.

Windows XP will run on intel systems up to ivy bridge, and Nvidia GPUs up to a 980ti (needs some tweaks to the drivers if beyond 960) – so if you’ve got an old PC lying around from that era it could be a viable option and should cover games from 2000 onwards pretty comfortably. That narrows your incompatibility window to ~96-99. Most early windows games were really DOS games and so DOS box serves well into 97 or so.

I find the early win 95 era the trickiest, where some games won’t even run natively in win 98 (I haven’t been able to get interstate ’76 to run on windows 98, for example).

One cool method I’ve seen is to use a PCIe-PCI converter (or a motherboard with native PCI slots) and pass-through a period-correct graphics card and sound card to a virtual machine. See here for an example using Unraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgIF8uG-2G0 . A bit of a middleground between using old hardware and new. Probably not practical for most of us (and to be honest unless you can get a Voodoo3 PCI the graphics options mostly suck), but still a cool concept.

The folks over at VOGONS (very old games on new systems) are also a great source of help on this topic :-).

[Watchful]

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I love the idea of a PCIe-PCI bridge and passthrough to OG hardware. I’ll have to read up on how that’d work for Win9x era. My VM experiments with VMWare and VirtualBox make that seem impractical since they dropped support for Win9x guests long ago.

SoftGPU has been working for me as a middleground. It’s just tricky getting Win98 installed without it always asking for the install CD, getting a version of VMWare that works (like WS17), getting SoftGPU working there, and working around sound crackling.

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