tayyare wrote:

I of course remember SimCity, Simcity 2000 and Civilization 1 and 2, some Sierra adventures (Larry, Kings Quest, Police Quest) and even a kind of Strip Poker but you already know what I mean 🤣

First of all, all of these minorities have their (proper 😊) DOS versions. Before Windows 95, not much people were seriously considering playing games under Windows. The games that were hip during that period (1994-1996) were all very demanding and almost all had nothing to do with Windows 3.x whatsoever.

While in general, yes, that's the way things were for most games, there were a handful of titles which were only available under Windows for the x86 platform. Both Myst and Robosport were ported across from Mac, but never had a DOS release. Civ 2 was an original title which was released for Mac, Win95, and Win 3.1, but never had a DOS release.

Civ 2 was released Feb 29th 1996, so I'd say that was more of a win95 game than a win3.1 game.

SkiFree !!!!

Shagittarius wrote:

Civ 2 was released Feb 29th 1996, so I'd say that was more of a win95 game than a win3.1 game.

I agree. In many ways, I think there isn't much reason to not move to Win95. However, you could run Civ 2 on Win 3.1 whereas with only DOS this was not possible.

tayyare wrote:

Windows 3.1 gaming? What is it exactly? 🤣

I'll tell you what it is.

Loderunner:The Legend Returns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoMR8rVJbQg

tayyare wrote:

Windows 3.1 gaming? What is it exactly? 🤣

Way back in the 90s, -in the dark ages before youtube and UHD pr*n- I played many games on Windows 3.1. 😀
They came on this shiny new media, "CD-ROM". That's what it was called.

I really liked these little games from the Shareware, Public Domain and Freeware scene.
I had much fun reading all these readme files and *.hlp files from the authors.
Some of them wrote a bit of them self, their lifes and why they made these games.

This was before every game had to be made and sold by mega brands or "gaming studios".
No, just some guys who wrote them and asked for a little registration fee sometimes or a postcard.

Of couse, there also were many commercial titles (which I missed, sadly).
Especially edutainment stuff, simulations (SimCity, Creatures, etc) and conversations of arcade games.

Anyway, I also played on consoles for "real" gaming. Like SNES and Gameboy. 😀
To me, the PC was more of a faszinating, magical device and less of a gaming platform.

I mean, yes, I loved to play on it, but I wasn't THAT dead serious about it.
It was more about the fascination and exploration that I liked.

When my knowledge of the English language was good enough, the gate to adventure games
opened for me. Now I was able to understand all these foreign adventures (mostly Freeware)
and had a happy time playing them. Especially those based on novels or other interesting
genres (gruesome tales, lonely islands, etc.), yay! ^^

But back to the topic. This is about Win95, right ?
Hmm.. I fondly remember the times when Win95 was the new, hot sh*t.
When my father and me were in a large store, they had these big, blue boxes everywhere.

There was a big fuss about Win95 everywhere. I mean it, everyhwere!
Even non tech savy people talked about it (just to be cool, I guess ?), and
about every magazine wrote about it at some point, and the news mentioned it, of course..

It also was the era of these insulting computer jokes. Hmm.. a coincidence ? 😉
Anyway, despite it's questionable quality, it was part of our pop culture.

My dad had it installed on his "hot-rod" 386DX40 (16Megs of RAM!) and I was allowed to use it.
Under restraint, of couse. After a while -when nothing happened-, I was allowed to use it on myself.

It is hard to explain, but Win95 was a strange beast to me. I mean, It was part of my youth
but to me, it wasn't that much of the hip and trendy multimedia OS every one rememebers
(that was W98, maybe XP).

In some way or another, to me it was like the serious "parent-version" of Windows.
Perhaps I'm just a bit biased here, because it ran on a business machine, but Windows 3.1 was much more friendly to me.

Win 3.1 was quick, bright and forgiveable. If it got hurt, you could just cure it by copying back system.ini
and win.ini and it was fine again. Well, most of the time.

Win95 was much more mature, but I always had to be on the look-out to not trigger a warning message.
"Jo, what was that sound ?" Argh.. Yeah, I really lived in fear back then. 😅

Anyway, Win95 was a big part of pop culture, my youth and the early Web.
However, I'm also seriously glad I was allowed to have got my copy of Win 3.1.^^

gdjacobs wrote:

[..]I agree. In many ways, I think there isn't much reason to not move to Win95.[..]

Having a 286 is a reason. Well, at least it was.. For me. 😁

Jo22 wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

[..]I agree. In many ways, I think there isn't much reason to not move to Win95.[..]

Having a 286 is a reason. Well, at least it was.. For me. 😁

Do you have any Win 3.1 titles which are speed sensitive and require a 286?

I like Windows 98SE, with old Explorer.exe and with kernel extentions, i install it to my 486 to Pentium III 😉

gdjacobs wrote:

Jo22 wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

[..]I agree. In many ways, I think there isn't much reason to not move to Win95.[..]

Having a 286 is a reason. Well, at least it was.. For me. 😁

Do you have any Win 3.1 titles which are speed sensitive and require a 286?

Oh, well I have to check. I recall Jiji1+2 was, Spexp1, some BreakOut! clone and I think Lander 3 was also speend sensitve.
That's a Win 3.0 game, though. So it is more of a PC/XT thing. I really have to check! I wished Mobygames had a "speed sensitive" rubric..

Anyway, what I meant was that I couldn't have Win95 on my own PC, because I had a 286.
It was not meant as a offense, though. Nothing was wrong with you post. 😊

Just found something, a home video about a 486 PC taken in '96 by a guy named Josh.
What a coincidence. We also had Netscape back then. Boy, this brings back memories!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5614H7DiHI

(PS: I hope you guys/gals don't mind for another post of mine. My sister says I'm talking too much. Guess she's right. 😅
I thought that clip would fit, since the OP mentioned a POD83, which is a Pentium overdrive chip I suppose (?).
Which in turn was just released a year before this video was made.. Anyway, it's an authentic 486 machine, after all.
So I thought it would help to get into the mood / get back that nostalgia feeling. It's an authentic video, showing old web pages of that time.
Please don't mind that it doesn't include W95, but W3.1;I was browsing YT for Win 3.1 when I found this one by accident.)

bbhaag wrote:

Based on these hardware specs would installing Win95 be a good idea? Would it be usable or would WFW3.11 be a better fit? […]
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Based on these hardware specs would installing Win95 be a good idea? Would it be usable or would WFW3.11 be a better fit?

POD83 w/128kb L2 cache
16mb ram
S3trio64 2mb vram (integrated)
SB16 ct1740
540mb hdd (controller is integrated)
ps/2 mouse and keyboard ports (integrated)
3Com 3C509TP

MB is unknown. DEC Venturi 466fp is the make and model of the pc. Last BIOS notes indicate that Win95 was functional on this machine.

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13. Changes since Venturis 4xx BIOS version 2.02.
2
3           o Fixed the bug that in Win 95, reserve IO 17C0 - 17CF will cause
4             VGA can not be init, the screen is blank.
5           o Fixed the bug that when exit from Win95, the OS will update
6             ESCD and some time cause bios corrupt.

PC would be mainly used for gaming and some media playback. Logging onto IRC and Usenet are a possibility as well.

Do you have a photo of the motherboard? I thought I knew all the 486 boards with integrated PS/2. You noted logging int IRC - so it will be networked? In which case, I suggest 64 MB of RAM so you can run the vogons.org website more smoothly. Last I checked, IE 5.5 still loaded this website on my 486. However, you will need to increase your cache amount to 256 KB (if using cache in write-through mode).

Jo22 wrote:

Oh, well I have to check. I recall Jiji1+2 was, Spexp1, some BreakOut! clone and I think Lander 3 was also speend sensitve. That […]
Show full quote

Oh, well I have to check. I recall Jiji1+2 was, Spexp1, some BreakOut! clone and I think Lander 3 was also speend sensitve.
That's a Win 3.0 game, though. So it is more of a PC/XT thing. I really have to check! I wished Mobygames had a "speed sensitive" rubric..

Anyway, what I meant was that I couldn't have Win95 on my own PC, because I had a 286.
It was not meant as a offense, though. Nothing was wrong with you post. 😊

No worries, I was just wondering if something you were running specifically required Win 3.1 on a 286. It would be a somewhat unusual setup, even for the period, as MS quickly made use of 386 enhanced mode with Windows.

I remember there was that 32-bit patch for Win 3.1, which came with something (a game?) called freecell, which, if it ran, meant your 32-bit patch worked. Were there any 32-bit games which ran in Win3.1 32-bit?

feipoa wrote:

I remember there was that 32-bit patch for Win 3.1, which came with something (a game?) called freecell, which, if it ran, meant your 32-bit patch worked. Were there any 32-bit games which ran in Win3.1 32-bit?

That's what called Win32s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

feipoa wrote:

Do you have a photo of the motherboard? I thought I knew all the 486 boards with integrated PS/2. You noted logging int IRC - so it will be networked? In which case, I suggest 64 MB of RAM so you can run the vogons.org website more smoothly. Last I checked, IE 5.5 still loaded this website on my 486. However, you will need to increase your cache amount to 256 KB (if using cache in write-through mode).

It's already networked using a 3com ethernet card under WFW3.11. Unfortunately the motherboard has a hard limit of 128kb cache. I have a couple 32mb sticks I can pop in to get me up to 68mb ram if need be.
Here is a link to the th99 page https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/C-D/35187.htm and here is a pic of the mb like you asked for.

EDIT:Please note that some of the information on the th99 page is incorrect.

bbhaag wrote:

keenmaster486 wrote:

Boy, I'd say that sounds like a pretty good machine for Windows 95. Gaming I assume would be mostly DOS, in which case you might want to set up a typical CONFIG.SYS menu system to choose whether to boot into 95 or an optimal DOS config at bootup.

Dos games yes but also I would like to run games like Diablo. Would that be possible?

Diablo 1's minimum requirements are a Pentium 60 with 8MB of RAM so you're probably fine with the POD83 even with the cut-down 486 motherboard. You might turn off the CD music (just slide the music volume all the way down I think) for better performance, supposedly it was playable even on a real 486DX2-66 this way, but it might be more beneficial to keep it on since it keeps the CD spun up so it won't stutter and stop when loading new sounds.

I also never had issues playing D1 (or even D2 in DirectDraw mode, as it was on a PIII) on a Trio64V+ 2MB PCI.

Interesting OEM board. What case do you have it in? I assume you acquired the board came with the case? Nice that it comes with a VLB Trio64 - those are hard to come by. Since you are stuck with 128 KB of cache, it is best not to exceed 32 MB of RAM. If there is an option in the BIOS, esnure that your cache is set to write-through mode.

Kamerat wrote:

feipoa wrote:

I remember there was that 32-bit patch for Win 3.1, which came with something (a game?) called freecell, which, if it ran, meant your 32-bit patch worked. Were there any 32-bit games which ran in Win3.1 32-bit?

That's what called Win32s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

Created to run 32 bit Windows 95 applications on Windows 3.1, but I believe the applications had to be specifically developed to also work with Win32s. There was also WinG, the predecessor of DirectX, which provided special functions for games. IIRC, it came with a set of pretty neat demos showcasing what it could do (early 3D animation, amongst others).

From Google:

System requirements for installing Windows 95:

Personal computer with a 386DX or higher processor (486 recommended)
4 megabytes (MB) of memory (8 MB recommended)
Typical hard disk space required to upgrade to Windows 95: 35-40 MB The actual requirement varies depending on the features you choose to install.

So your system is more than capable

yawetaG wrote:

Kamerat wrote:

feipoa wrote:

I remember there was that 32-bit patch for Win 3.1, which came with something (a game?) called freecell, which, if it ran, meant your 32-bit patch worked. Were there any 32-bit games which ran in Win3.1 32-bit?

That's what called Win32s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s

Created to run 32 bit Windows 95 applications on Windows 3.1, but I believe the applications had to be specifically developed to also work with Win32s. There was also WinG, the predecessor of DirectX, which provided special functions for games. IIRC, it came with a set of pretty neat demos showcasing what it could do (early 3D animation, amongst others).

Yes, they must not use threading and had to include relocation tables.
This was necessary, because Win32s was built on the foundation of a cooperative multi-tasking system.
As such, Win32s programs had to share memory and required the ability to co-exist side-by-side in nearby locations of the same memory.
In contrast, ordinary Win32 programs usually execute at a fixed (virtual) address, such as 0x00400000 or 0x00010000.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ … 003-00/?p=43923
http://stephan.win31.de/w32slist.htm