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/vr/ - Retro Games

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File: 364 KB, 1920x1200, Microsoft-Windows-Turns-29-Happy-Birthday-to-the-World-s-Number-1-OS-465507-7[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4838805 No.4838805 [Reply] [Original]

best way to play Windows 9X games? Can virtual machines do it?

>> No.4838818

PCem or some fork of it, like 86box
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V09PKcNEgM0

>> No.4838824

>>4838805
The best way is to pick to go find an old desktop machine, (You can get them literally anywhere) then deck it out with 9X computer parts. Install Windows 98 and the corresponding drivers, and you're set. It's not that hard.

>> No.4838851

Chex Quest

>> No.4838932

On linux through wine

>> No.4838940
File: 49 KB, 500x375, interesting squirrel.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4838940

I just use virtual box with Windows XP.

>> No.4839070
File: 1.78 MB, 1976x2706, Hypersonic_ad_Jan_2000.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4839070

Be sure to add the 18" LCD for $3299

>> No.4839118

for most games - run natively on modern Windows with some compatibility shims

>> No.4839125

>>4839070
>Zip drive in a 3.5 to 5.25 bay adapter
>The case has a second 3.5 bay.

$3599 for maximum not smarts

The same dumb stuff happens today though, but it's more in the $100s range than the $1000s range, which is nice.

>> No.4839126

dgVoodoo2 allows you to run most early DirectX games on Windows 10, even with resolution override.

>> No.4839226

>>4838805
No. They can not do it the best way.

>> No.4839273

>>4839126
saw this come up in a few threads lately.
can you give me a run down?

>> No.4839287

>>4838805
I've been messing with various virtual machine programs. XP Mode in MS Virtual PC works the best so far. VMWare for every other OS.

>> No.4839298

>>4839273
>what is google
Sorry, you're beyond help.

>> No.4839375

>>4839298
more concerned with user experiences rather than just downloading it and watching tutorials.

>> No.4839397

>>4838824
This.

>> No.4839408
File: 30 KB, 367x451, faggot.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4839408

>>4839070
>i820
>SDRAM

>> No.4839448

>>4839375
No need to watch any fucking tutorials it just works out of the box. The UI is super friendly. The fuck else do you need nigger.

>> No.4839475

>>4838805
Your current PC can do it and you could figure out how if you weren't a retro gamer ;)

>> No.4839501

>>4838818
fpbp

also dosbox works decently enough too

>> No.4839502

>>4838805
linux wine for me, very reliable for 95/98 games in my experience

>> No.4839520

>>4838805
Try to find the GOG version if possible. That's usually the EASIEST way to do it.

>> No.4839569

>>4838824
>its not hard at all
most of that shit got recycled years ago, if it exists now its expensive as fuck

>> No.4839578

>>4839569
Just get some early 2000's internet cafe/school PC, most hardware should still support Win9x drivers.

>> No.4839587

>>4839569
>most of that shit got recycled years ago

What got recycled years ago?

>> No.4839592

Ebay is swarming with old PC motherboards so even if you can't find a complete machine, you can probably obtain the parts to build one yourself.

>> No.4839601

>>4839569
Spotted the ebayby who wasn't even born when win 95 was released

>> No.4839615

>>4839601
I was born in 87, I've been checking charity shops, tip shops, and multiple other places for a decent CRT monitor, places here dont have that shit anymore, fuck even 15 years ago I did my school work experice at a old computer recycling place that was trashing 98 machines.

>> No.4839767

Well there was a guy on VCFED who rescued (well, really he sticky-fingered) a perfectly good Commodore PET from a city dump (it needed a keyboard repair but was otherwise functional), so...

>> No.4839769

I have a old Dell Optiplex GXMT Pentium 133. It's really hard to even find a reference picture of this particular machine online; perhaps most of them were trashed a long time ago.

You can't have mine though and I'm not selling it.

>> No.4839775

>>4839767
Story?

>> No.4839783

>>4839775
He said he was unloading some trash at the city dump and saw this PET 4016 just sitting there, and after checking to make sure no one was looking, hoisted it into his car trunk.

It powered up into BASIC fine, but wouldn't respond to any key presses and then he found that the keyboard PCB was broken in half for some reason as if someone had been jumping on it. After finding a replacement keyboard online, he upgraded the RAM to 32k.

>> No.4839831

A lot of them will work on Windows 10. Not all, but about 75% of them.

>> No.4839839

>>4839448
not the OP but you're a pompous asshole.. just stop.

>> No.4839852

>>4839615
Sounds like a personal experience, I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying that yours is not a universal rule. As counterpoint I could bring up that I got my higher-end crt and my win98se box from the same electronics thrift shop in one month just two years ago. It doesn't mean that everyone has that experience though.

>> No.4839872

Although since now people have come to realize that neckbeards will buy old computer shit thanks to Youtube celebrities, it's not as likely to get junked now and they'll instead peddle it on Ebay for insanely inflated prices.

>> No.4839967

>>4839872
Win 9x is Pentium iii/4 age right? Those should be pretty cheap in surplus stores. I think Core Duos and Centrinos still have win9x drivers so those will do as well.

>> No.4839970

>>4839967
Pentium IIIs mostly shipped with Windows ME, which was shit so people often just replaced it with 98SE. P4s pretty much all had XP.

>> No.4840002

>>4839970
Doesn't matter what it shipped with, the hardware during that era usually all had Win9x support.

You can install Win9x even on a P4 machine for example.

>> No.4840207

>>4839967
There's Win9k support on machines up to LGA775 but for an actually good experience you want a P2/P3.
P2 is better because a lot of games (specifically those that don't run on modern Windows) don't like machines that are too fast.
A few years back, you could find P2 350mhz in the trash even in eastern europe all the time. Highly doubt prices are all too high now.

>> No.4840481

>>4839615
Sucks to be you then. The rest of the world doesn't have your problems. Sure you see quite a few dumb kids here who cry about high ebay prices because they're afraid to leave their basement. But for the average person finding an old PC for cheap/free is easy.

>> No.4840487
File: 2.47 MB, 1920x1080, microsoft-windows-95.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4840487

>>4838805
95' golden age of windoze
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqi2Jy0UMiA

>> No.4840492
File: 982 KB, 1560x2104, junk2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4840492

>>4839967
More like Pentium and Pentium II. Pentium overlapped with Win 3.x and Win 98 overlapped with Pentium III.
If you take a look in my basement where all the old Win 9x PCs I collected are piled up, you'd see about a dozen Pentiums and PIIs between 100 and 266 MHz, and like one each of 486, PIII, and P4. So those were definitely the most common.

>> No.4840549

>>4840492
Windows 3.x was 386/486 stuff. Consumer level Pentiums essentially all had Windows 9x.

>> No.4840573

>>4838818

Firefox

So like, can you just browse the the net via PCEM? Is that even remotely safe?

>> No.4840594
File: 1.26 MB, 2288x1256, NewBack.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4840594

>>4840549
Most of them were, but the Pentium came out shortly before 95 was released. Pentium Pro and up I've only seen shipped with 95+.
The machine on the far right of this pic is a Pentium MMX that had Windows 3.1 when I got it. But splitting hairs is pointless. We agree, Pentium/Pentium II is the core Win 95/98 era.

>> No.4840743

>>4840573
>safe?
Do you even know what a VM is?

>> No.4842476

>>4840573
VM is sandboxed, no threat

>> No.4842662

>>4840743
>>4842476
Wrong! VMs and emulators are not necessarily safe. There are a lot of proof-of-concept sandbox escape vulnerabilities for VMware and Virtual Box.

>> No.4842791

>>4838940
Wrong. Have fun trying to play anything hardware accelerated that way, let alone via Glide. VMs are not replacements for DOS and Win9x for gaming at all.

The correct answers are PCem for games that require 200mhz or less and dgvoodoo/nglide for more demanding titles.

>> No.4842793

Just find some cheap PC at a thrift store or the dump and slap Win98 on it

>> No.4844668

>>4842793
Where would I even find drivers?

>> No.4844686

>>4844668
Check internet websites

>> No.4845250

>>4840594
I'm glad someone besides me rolls their controller cords up
like that.

>> No.4845289

>>4845250
It's the proper way to coil cables. Anything else damages them. Twisted groups of wires will tolerate bending in certain ways but not in others. I had a teacher in high school who was very adamant about this and forced us to observe it. I guess it stuck.

>> No.4845292

>>4844668
90% of the time it's no problem, and the rest of the time it can usually be solved with some work. I mix and match yard sale and thrift store components all the time. Just think of getting everything to work as a puzzle.

>> No.4845294

>>4838805
Can somebody give me a list of games that wont run in dosbox?

>> No.4845308

>>4842791
For those games I use dgVoodoo2 or a source port.

>> No.4845314

>>4845308
those still don't work for a few titles. don't ask me for a fucking list you retards

>> No.4845328

>>4845314
It works for my needs. I'll consider PCem if I need too, but I use VMs for more than just games so I use what I already have.

>And this is THE correct answer you FUCKING retards

>> No.4845371

>>4845328
You should consider it. It's a bit of a pain to use initially since you have to download a BIOS pack for all the motherboards, set up a hard drive image file, and actually install Windows as you would on a real PC on top of the emulator being stupidly undocumented outside of referring to the forum. Once you get it running with 430VX, S3 Virge, Voodoo 2, 200mhz, and SB16 you'll have an excellent fallback for whatever won't run via Dosbox and various hacks/dlls/tricks for modern OSes as I've seen it run everything fine.

>> No.4845378

Did late 90s/early 2000s machines ever get BIOS support for multiple FDDs? I'd like to run a 3.5" and a 5.25" on my gateway shitbox I got at a store, but the bios only allows recognition for one FDD and I have no idea how I'd correct that and gateway doesn't have any downloads for the model anymore.

>> No.4845626

I can't name a single game from Win 9x era that I can't run on modern Windows assuming 32bit. Sometimes I need Dxwnd or DgVoodoo, but not a big deal. PCGamingWiki is a good tech resource per game.

Anything 16bit I run through SVN Daum DOSBox.

>> No.4846038

daily reminder that if you beat a late 90s PC game without using a period-correct computer powered by 3dfx™ Voodoo™ then it didn't count

>> No.4846041

>>4845378
Windows doesn't even use the BIOS for anything except the initial bootup phase.

>> No.4846043

>>4845626
>I can't name a single game from Win 9x era that I can't run on modern Windows

No one and their mother has ever succeeded in getting Rocket Jockey to run on anything except Windows 9x.

>> No.4846049

>>4845626
>I can't name a single game from Win 9x era that I can't run
Running is one thing. Enjoy your imperfectly rendered graphics though. Shit you might not even notice, like missing lighting effects, etc.

>> No.4846058

Garfield: Caught In The Act wouldn't run in full screen on XP, of course it won't run on W10 at all because it's a Windows 3.x game.

>> No.4846065

>>4840487
Gee, isn't it a thing how that video never ever mentions Windows crashing every 10 minutes or the brutal headaches involved in setting up drivers/devices compared with how it works now.

>> No.4846628

>>4846065
Never had problems like that on my 95 machine.

>> No.4846641

>>4846628
Since you were born in 2001 and probably only know about Windows 9x from LGR videos, I will tell you. I used it. A lot. It was not fun or a stable OS compared to modern Windows. No, not at all.

>> No.4846665

>>4846641
I've used Win 95 since it came out. I have multiple machines running well. There are some problems but it is a fun and stable OS when set up by someone with a brain

>> No.4846669

>>4846049
That's the whole point of Dgvoodoo though. It even emulates those geforce 3/4 exclusive shadows for splinter cell making it the best way to play the game. If you see something rendered wrong just go to the very active support thread since the dev solves all issues.

>> No.4846670

>>4846665
Not him, but nigga please. Win 9x was so bad that you had to re-install it from scratch every few months because SOMETHING would always break. It was pretty much a meme, like "hey my PC is acting weird, guess it's the time to re-install Windows." So fucking glad I don't have to do that anymore.

>> No.4846683

>>4846670
And you can read old Usenet posts on Google Groups if you need proof of that.

>> No.4846686

>>4846670
>>4846683
I don't know if you're trolling but I have literally never had to re-install windows 95 on any of my dell optiplexes and one of them i use at least monthly. This is since about 1996, and I've even done upgrades on these machines like putting in new AGP video cards. maybe i just got lucky but i think i have more experience than you, from the way you talk, and so please fuck off, you're probably just stupid and so have run into a lot of problems.

>> No.4846693

>>4846683
You can look up usenet posts on google groups for Unix and Mac problems too. Probably more linux posts than anything. What are you even saying? Win95 was a breakthrough. What a fucking retard. Summer.

>> No.4846701

>>4846686
Did you own a prebuilt?
Because Windows 95/98 were notorious for only working with a set of specific hardware and going apeshit if you deviated from Microsoft's tested hardware list.

Especially if you used non-standard RAM or an AMD/Cyrix CPU.

>> No.4846710

>>4846701
I once had a Pentium machine that I maxed out to 128MB, but 98SE wouldn't load without crashing. After dropping the RAM to 80MB, then it worked. I mean, that would be overkill anyway; even for a P1, 80MB is pretty huge.

>> No.4846716

>>4846670
Also just jumping into this now, but that was not my experience. I have certainly never re-installed the OS every month, if I had I would have done so hundreds of times by now and all of my old IDE HDDs would have failed.

I did and still do spend a lot of time maintaining the systems though. Yes, setting up new hardware takes some effort. Yes, there will be incompatibilities that will take a ton of trial and error to diagnose. I used to work on three or four PCs at a time, because so much of the "work" was just waiting for the thing to boot up over and over after minor configuration changes.
I didn't mind all that, since with proper care you could get everything running smoothly and stably. If someone lacked the patience or knowledge for that kind of maintenance, I can see why they would think the systems were unusable. That's one of the reasons computers (including phones etc.) are more popular today than they were back then: much easier to use without learning any jargon or esoteric knowledge.

>> No.4846720

>>4846716
>I have certainly never re-installed the OS every month, if I had I would have done so hundreds of times by now and all of my old IDE HDDs would have failed.
Would that really kill a hard disk?

>> No.4846725

>>4846720
Fuck do I know. Probably.

>> No.4846732

>>4846720
Hundreds of cycles of erasing and writing to a low quality cheapo 90s HDD would certainly not be good for it. Nothing lasts forever, but if you want it to last as long as possible, use it less. That is just common sense.

>> No.4846740

>>4846641
I understand that you have the mind of a 14 year with the health of a 85 year old, but calm down those assumptions there. I was born in 1988 and grew up poor, meaning I used 95 well into my teens. As I said, I never once had such problems with my machine because I took care not to ruin or break my things. Were you not a jibbering man-ape slapping your feces encrusted hands on a keyboard perhaps your machine would have worked better for you too.

>> No.4846775

>>4846740
To be fair, some people probably had bad luck with hardware. I collected a lot of stuff over the years, so I've always been able to just switch something out when it causes a problem, but if you only had two NICs (or sticks of DDR, or whatever) and both of them were bricked so badly they prevent the system from POSTing (as one I had did), I can see how you'd think the entire machine is a piece of shit.

>> No.4846779

I'm trying to convince strangers Windows 95 was "good." What the fuck am I doing with my life?

>> No.4846786

>>4846779
Better men have spent their entire adult lives debating philosophical concepts far less relevant, and some even became world-famous for it.

>> No.4846796

>>4846740
Told you this guy was born in 2001 because nobody older than at most 22 would write a post like this.

>> No.4846801

>>4846796
You think someone who claims to be about 29 couldn't have the maturity and language skills of a 22 year old?

Please tell me what my age is with better precision than that.

>> No.4847058

>>4846801
when posting on an imageboard as popular as 4chan one must always keep in mind the possibility that the person he/she is talking to speaks english as a second language

>> No.4847109

>>4847058
English is my first language, but I am touched by autism a bit, ergo my communication skill are a bit lacking. I feel it gets my point across, though, and that's all I care about. 30, by the way, not 29.

>> No.4847291

>>4846669
>It even emulates those geforce 3/4 exclusive shadows for splinter cell
Yeah, but it doesn’t even do that accurately. It tries, though.

>> No.4847551

95 is a lot better than 3.1 and the changes that came along with NTFS and 98 in three years were impressive. Now we just have Windows Botnet.

>> No.4847754

How was Windows ME? That's one that I don't have any experience with and I hear it's VERY polarizing.

>> No.4847847

>>4847754
ME is underrated. As long as you don't use its new features (System Restore, etc), it's the most stable version of Win9x. Activating real DOS mode requires some work though.

>> No.4847987

>>4847754
>How was Windows ME?

Trash. Most people de-installed it in favor of 98SE.