So, Steam is so convenient for obtaining lots of cheap games. The problem is the steam client doesnt work with Windows98. Porting DOS games to a DOS machine is easy. Doing the same with Windows 98 not so much. I know Phil had a video on getting GOG releases to run on Windows 98 but what about Steam releases?
The biggest problem is how steam wraps the executable to its own client as a form of copy protection, you can download the game from a XP machine and simply grab either the original executable if you are lucky enough to own the game or a not soo legit exe, then copy it over to the 9x which kindof defeats the purpose of owning a legitimate game.
If you are extremely lucky the game has some modern ports that work on win9x, Doom, Quake, Quake2, duke 3d come to mind.
Other thing I noticed is some games have the cd audio completely missing and a simple batch of mp3s in its place, sure you can possibly convert them to wav and burn them as a audio cd but that defeats the entire purpose.
GOG aswell has patched some games to the point where it breaks 9x compatibility for the windows version of the game, Dungeon Keeper 1 gave me some problems to get working.
What would possibly be best is if GOG offered untouched ISO downloads for games you allready own... and you can just patch them yourself, but I doubt that will ever happen.
My suggestion is to not bother and to get yourself ISO copies. I tend to buy from GOG and find my ISOs for a weird middle ground of legitimacy.
Some 9x compatible games do ship on Steam without the wrapper DRM. As for a list of these which actually can run on Win9x (or at least 98se+KernelEx) that's up to trial and error 😀 you could try sharing your steamapps folder to a win9x vm and try to execute everything as a pre-test.
Windows 9x games are the largest chunk of original games I have.
GOG / Steam games are a hit and miss. Many games you just copy the game folder and they run without issues: Unreal, Quake II, Q3A for example. On occasions remove the nGlide DLL files and that gets games going also.
Unpacking the installer gets a few more games going. I think I played Hitman that way.
Still, there is always the question in the back of your mind: Is there anything missing from this game that got removed to make it more compatible?
Good info about the Steam games, that's worth checking out.
But yea, I found that often buying the original on eBay can costs about the same as the GOG version. Unless it's on a 80% sale of course 😀
yeah I tend to wait for the Steam sales most of the time. I've found that Steam has most of the things GOG has so I try to keep it all on steam as a matter of convenience. Looks like I have some trial and error ahead of me!
