I think it would be pretty novel to run a Win32s program with a little more action than freecell.

Hmm.. It's hard to tell now which games were also Win32s compatible, because Win95 was in the focus back in the 90s.
Win 3.1 support was mentioned on as side note at best. But before DirectX was born, Win32s had quite a few good titles.
Here are a few games I can think of. I would have to check the CDs' content for the other games.

Creatures and Freddi Fish (Humongous) used Win32s and WinG.
The Activision Atari 2600 Action Pack for Windows used WinG in its Win 3.1 version.
Myst was also released for both Win95 and Windows 3.1, but used QuickTime (incl. Mac version).
Later Sierra titles (KQ VII, etc.) also used WinG, but I don't know about Win32s.
(Fun fact: Back in time, Freddi Fish was advertised as beeing the first WinG game.)

But the real irony is that Win32s was actually the first version of Win32 to be avaiable for a wider audience.
The idea of Win32s was to ease transition from Win16 to Win32. Early Win NT programs were in fact Win32s applications.
And as time went on, Windows 3.1+Win32s could run some programs that Windows NT 3.1 couldn't.
This was because Win32s got a few Win95 additions which NT 3.1 hadn't have yet.
Advanced things like multi-threading, certain GDI brushes, etc. were still out of reach, though.

Anything that lists the minimum requirements as "Windows 3.1(1), Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95" is likely Win32s compatible...

There are also a very few programs that were designed for Windows 3.1, but that can't run on Windows 95 at all. The one I know of is CorelDraw 3.0.

yawetaG wrote:

There are also a very few programs that were designed for Windows 3.1, but that can't run on Windows 95 at all. The one I know of is CorelDraw 3.0.

Yes, I heard of this. There are indeed a few programs that where made to work with Windows 3.1 only.
What's also interesting is that some articles said that special programs (database stuff, etc) were only compatible with Win32s, but not Win32c(9x) or Win32(NT).
I don't remember all of the details, but it was related to 32/16Bit DLLs, thunking mechanisms and how they interacted whith each others.

The other way round was also true. The old Windows version of Lemmings would execute on Win32s, but wasn't playable there (but ran on Win95).
I tried this with the latest Win32s versions and some unofficial patches. I wonder what the issue was.
So yeah, Win95 has its place - especially for titles from the mid-90s (say, DirectX1-3), while Windows 3.1 might be a tad more WinG friendly. ^^

Windows 95 is the best OS ever.

oeuvre wrote:

Windows 95 is the best OS ever.

No.

Sedrosken wrote:

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.

Thank you. This was the other nagging question I had that had not been answered yet. Thanks for the tip about the turning off the cd music for better performance.

feipoa wrote:

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.

It came in the original OEM case that Digital made for it. Nothing special about it. Just another boring beige box from the mid '90's. Unfortunately there is no option in the BIOS or jumper settings on the mb to change what mode the cache uses.

I just want to say thanks to everyone who replied. After reading all of your posts I decided that I will use one of my spare Quantum 540mb drives too install Windows 95. I must say I'm looking forward too it and I can't wait too see how it performs on this pc.

^ Be sure to use at least the version of Windows 95 with USB support (OSR2.1), as it has a number of bug fixes. Although Windows 98SE would probably be better, more hardware support and better stability, plus all Windows 95 software ought to be able to run on it anyway...

Working with the bugs of Win95 is what brings back the times for me. I jumped over Win98 though, going from Win95 to NT4 to W2K to XP.

yawetaG wrote:

Although Windows 98SE would probably be better, more hardware support and better stability, plus all Windows 95 software ought to be able to run on it anyway...

The downside of Win98SE is that it takes considerably more memory and HDD space than Win95.
You can run Win95 quite acceptably on a system with 8 MB, where Win98SE needs at least 16 MB to become somewhat acceptable.
Also, you need at least 140 MB for Win98SE alone, usually much more (500 MB is recommended). My 486 only has a 540 MB harddrive, so it's not an option. Win95 only needs 50 MB, so it's much smaller, and easier to fit on small harddrives.

MS Windows 98's cache/memory manager offers also an intersting feature.
It can execute 4K-aligned executables directly from cache..
https://bug98304.bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=130372

I always wondered if the DOSBox devs took care of that, when they compiled their official binaries. 😉

Cyberdyne wrote:

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

Win98FE/SE along with the Win95 shell is a good compromise. 😀

yawetaG wrote:

^ Be sure to use at least the version of Windows 95 with USB support (OSR2.1), as it has a number of bug fixes. Although Windows 98SE would probably be better, more hardware support and better stability, plus all Windows 95 software ought to be able to run on it anyway...

In a full VxD driven system without USB, is better to keep the USB update out, as its WDM core increases memory requeriments without any visible gain, and these old NTKERN MiniNT VxD module versions are well know to get the system unstable and slow in combination with certain VxD drivers.