Well I would never consider 95 to be stable......my preference has always been 98SE.

The Nforce2 chipset is supported just fine under 9x. Just make sure you get the latest Nforce drivers.
Geforce is also supported nicely under 9x.

I believe there's an issue with 9x and memory over 768mb but I can't remember what that is at the moment.

The later video chipsets seem to not have as good VESA support as earlier video chipset so that may be something to watch out for. I have used a Geforce since the Geforce FX tho so I don't know how well VESA support and speed is with the 6600GT. (VESA speed also seems to be alot slower than earlier video chipsets).

My experience after testing over 2100 games in NT4/2000/XP/2003/Linux is that most games work fine in Windows XP. For those games that don't a combination of DosBox/Qemu/Vmware (Vmware for those games that run too slowly in Qemu) works very well. There are a few games tho around 20-30 that I have (Heavy Gear 2 and some demos) that don't work under XP so I have to boot into 98SE for those but thankfully most of those are demos and I think that HG2 is the only full game I have that I need to boot into 98SE for.

Looks like DirectX 8.1 is the last ver supported for Win95.
DX 9 is still supported for 98/ME.

Probably won't affect you much since you want to run old games but IIRC later Geforce/Nforce/Ati drivers require DX 9 to be installed (although you can probably bypass that).

I had Windows 98 Second Edition before I finally upgraded to XP, which I agree with you on the stability; 98SE was very good. Heck, the only reason I made the jump to XP was because of the games of today only working for 2000/XP. Before that, 98SE was the perfect balance between new and old, IMO. It's just something about 95; like a nostalgic charm, that makes me want to use it again. Never had any problems with Windows 95 either that I remember.

That sucks to hear about the VESA support; I haven't really looked into that at all, but I am pleased to hear that you managed to make most of 2100 games work fine on XP.

If DirectX 8.1 is supported by Windows 95, that's more then enough. I don't think I'll be using anything past DirectX 6 on Windows 95, if even that new.

I'm just thinking toward the near future. The way Windows Vista is progressing it looks like backward compatibility won't get much worse, but then again it's still in beta form. 😀 I'm just trying to find a happy medium for all my PC games without buying another older computer. I really don't have the room for it. 🙁 So I came up with the idea of having the latest Microsoft OS on my 200GB drive, and having 9x on my 40GB drive. I'm certainly open to any other alternatives anyone has; I can't think of anything else to do.

On the other hand...I'm thinking about upgrading my whole PC again next year when Vista and DirectX 10 arrive with such enhancements as 2GBs of RAM, 64-bit processor, etc. Wouldn't specs like that cause my Windows 95 drive to freak out? Sorry if I seem to be talking in circles here; I'm thinking out loud. 😁

Your kidding right?

AUDIO

Audio has been totally rewritten for Vista. I'm expecting lots of problems with audio in older games.

DIRECTX

DX 10 is supposed to be a major change from earlier DirectX's (It doesn't look that different to me....and it still has to at least be compatible with GDI/DX7-9, otherwise MS will be in a world of trouble).
Saying that tho.....I have plenty of games with D3D/Ddraw issues in 2000/XP/2003.....and they seem to get more incompatible as newer video cards and drivers come out. Unless DX 10 has a full D3D software emulation layer for DX1-DX7.....I expect Vista to be less compatible with older games than XP......at least on release (But really if you buy an MS product before at least SP1 you deserve to get owned).

NTVDM
2000/XP NTVDM were about the same but there were a few DOS games that worked in 2000 that didn't work in XP NTVDM ( and vice versa).......considering that MS hasn't really done much with NTVDM except security fixes since NT 3.51 I wouldn't expect anything new for DOS gaming in Vista. (I'm not counting the pathetic sound emulation and the CLI/OP fix....wow....5 minutes of work there)

I'm not sure how well Windows 95 would work on a PC from next year......I shudder to think of it. Best bet is to just make sure that all of the parts you buy for it are certified for 9x......which is getting rarer and rarer. Your really just better off keeping an old computer around instead of sticking an 11 year old OS on a brand new computer. (Unless of course you are emulating that OS) 😀

Really, Vmware is very nice and I can run most of the 9x games that don't work in XP just fine under Windows 98 use Vmware. Since Vmware runs at about 70-80% of host processor speed and these games are from 1995-1997 they run just fine on my XP 2800+.

Thanks for your replies and thoughts, DosFreak. 😀

Nah, I wasn't kidding about the whole "backward compatibility won't get much worse" in Windows Vista; just wishful thinking I guess. I'm assuming you meant "from XP" or "for Vista" instead of "for XP" concerning audio? That's awesome news for playing older games in Vista!! 😒

DirectX 10 has to at least support the last few years of software. How retarded would it be to have zero support for DirectX 8 and/or 9 games that came out recently and use very modern hardware? I hope that isn't the case.
And why would you deserve to get owned by buying a Microsoft product before a major patch? It's not like their initial releases are buggy or anything. 🙄

I'm not suprised to hear about minimal patching to NTVDM. It's like Microsoft and "older" games (1998 and before) have been in a car chase ever since they merged the NT and 9x kernels, and just when the legacy software gains a little speed, Microsoft hits the afterburners. Bah. I miss the old 9x days where I would pop in a CD-ROM without even giving compatibility a second thought.

Now would loading Windows 9x on VMWare on XP/Vista be a more suitable retro gaming solution then to force my new hardware to get along with a Windows 95 drive? I didn't know VMWare ran even close to 70-80% of the host processor speed. That sounds promising. I'll look into that today.

I can't tell if VMWare or Win95 on your extra drive is a better solution. I only think that it will be easier to start VMWare when you are currently in WinXP and want to play a game, rather than reboot your computer just to reboot it again later when you want to go into the internet, for example.

Nevertheless, why don't you just try out if Win95 will work on your system? 🙄
I suggest you remove your 200GB drive (in bios or better physically) and then install Win95 from scratch on your empty 40GB drive (maybe even after you first installed DOS6.22 on that drive!). When you install an older Windows, it will corrupt your XP when you don't remove your drive first.

I have DOS6.22 & Win98SE installed on my first partition, then I installed XP on a second partition. When you install in this order, you won't have any problems, XP automaticaly sets up a bootmenu for you. But I understand you don't want to reinstall XP.

I think it should work when you install 95 with your XP-drive removed and then, after you reinstalled your XP-drive, you should edit the file on your XP-drive called "boot.ini", to get a boot menu. My "boot.ini" looks like that:

1[boot loader]
2timeout=5
3default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
4[operating systems]
5multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
6C:\="MS-DOS 6.22 & Windows 98 SE"

You just have to add the line

1D:\="Title that will appear in menu"

to your boot.ini (where "D:" is your 40GB drive) and set a timeout (the amount of seconds the menu will show before your computer boots from "default").

I'm not sure if this is all you have to do for the boot menu, but it's worth a try.

Yeah, I've been fooling around with my DOS games since I last posted, and concluded that the older ones work great in DOSBox. Luckily, I've run into a fix for every "older" Windows game I try to run too. 😁 I've tried every compatibility mode trying to see if Hellbender will install on XP, and nothing worked, however, I've found a nifty little trick to get it to work on XP. I'll post it here if anyone else needs it:

go to a dos prompt navigate to your cd-rom and type:

D:\>cd setup
D:\SETUP>acmsetup /Z customui /T Furyw32.stf

The only big deal I've ran into is the "late" DOS games that require a Pentium or above for optimal gameplay. They play too slow in DOSBox, but most of them are FPS games with the BUILD engine, so those work great in XP with some tweaking. So, I'm going to hold off on trying a dual-boot solution, for now anyway. Thanks for the suggestions though mandark.

If you are talking about going to a 64bit processor, one other thing to remember about 64 bit Windows, there is no NTVDM and WOW has been replaced with WOW 64. In other words, NO 16bit programs will run. For these you will need DOSBox or one of the other emulators.

Rumour was that OpenGL and DX9 and less will be emulated through DX10 wrapper in Vista, so expect problems and loss of performance here. This is probably needed to get Avalon running at the same time with other GPU-using apps. But I think driver developers,(nvidia,ati) will get around this somehow. Maybe running app will turn off fancy graphics and revert to old-style windows manager. I expect same situation for audio.

Actually I think Vista will be slowly adopted if they don't handle legacy gaming well enough. XP at least had equal or better support of graphic API's compared to Windows 98/ME.

ok,how do you get DOSbox to work?I try to play DOS games with no success,What steps do i need to take in order for them to work w.DOSbox/XP?Also,what's the deal when a windows 95/98 game simply will not install on xp,after running all of the compatibility cominations?Thanks in advance.

Don't post in other people's threads.

Start a new thread describing your problem with a SPECIFIC GAME.

Different games have different fix actions. There is no one-stop solution to get your games working.

THREAD CLOSED.