First post, by Great Hierophant
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The last version of Daemon Tools that supports Windows 9x is v3.4.7. Daemon Tools supports virtually every CD image format, bin/cue, img/cue, mdf/mds. ccd/img/sub, nrg, iso and more and can emulate most of the CD protections in use at the time. Installing Daemon Tools, v3.4.7 in Windows 95 requires three additions. First is the Windows Installer 2.0 which is fairly innocuous.
Second is the USB Supplement, which is located on the Windows 95 OSR 2.1 CD. OSR 2.1 is the earliest version of Windows 95 which supports USB officially. I am not sure if OSR 2.5 installs the USB Supplement automatically. Considering the somewhat limited support for USB devices in Windows 95, I see little reason to install it.
Third is Internet Explorer 4.0, which can be downloaded from OldApps.com. IE4.0 also comes with Windows 95 OSR 2.5 and adds the additional features even with a standalone install on OSR 2.1. These features seriously impact the performance of the Windows Explorer shell and are generally not considered a desirable addition.
Why install Daemon Tools at all on a Windows 9x machine? As a CD emulator it works very well on Windows 98SE. No stress is added to the CD drive, loading times are decreased and you can even enjoy CD audio if your game and image supports it. If you store your CD Images on a network drive, you can enjoy access to nearly unlimited storage for these images instead of the 128GB max safely allowed by Windows 98SE. While you still need to use a physical CD in real mode DOS, many DOS CD games are Windows 9x tolerant.
After installing all the above, at this point, Windows 95 is so close to Windows 98 that you may want to just install Windows 98SE. I did all this and I did not enjoy the new Windows Explorer shell. Plus, CDs loaded with Daemon Tools crashed hard. I uninstalled DT and the rest of these updates. Even after removing IE 4.0 it left remnants of itself in my Program Files, Windows and who knows where else. Anyone else have a more positive experience or a CD emulator that works but does not require things like an IE update?
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