VOGONS


First post, by captain_koloth

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Can anyone explain the pros and cons of various solutions for Win 98 emulation/virtualization as it stands today? Specifically I'm interested in how VMWare, VirtualBox, Virtual PC, PCEm, 86box, maybe even DOSBox stack up against each other from the perspective of getting emulated Win 98 games with hardware acceleration (whether through a passthrough to a real GPU or e.g. emulated Voodoo as in PCEm).

Don't worry; I know all these solutions are kind of terrible and/or not designed for gaming or hardware acceleration in one way or another, and I have multiple real Windows 98 machines I would use if I ever actually need them for gaming; I'm more just trying to get updated on the current state of emulation/virtualization in this area, and most of what I've found in my searches so far is either incomplete or several years out of date.

Reply 1 of 1, by Jo22

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Assuming this thread is about Win98 emulation for gaming purposes,
I'd use PCem/86Box nowaday, since they represent real machines/BIOSes from the 90s.

They also provide real VGA graphics such as ViRGE, Mach64 (?) and Voodoo which 98SE has stock drivers for in its driver's database.
- Okay, the latter is likely overrated (like the Monkey Island of hardware), emulated (not simulated) and sub-par in general,
except for ~100 popular mainstream games using Glide or so and an emulated/simulated Geforce 2/Rage 128 would be far more interesting. 😉

On the downside IMHO, these emulators don't support serial, parallel, Firewire or USB pass-through,
so you can't use special accessories, such as 3D glasses, pedals and so on.

That being said, an old copy of Virtual PC on a Power Macintosh (G3/G4) might be more satisfying perhaps.
VPC 2.x and 3.0 have all/most of this, including a Voodoo pass-through even. As does SoftWindows 98. 😀

On the x86 PC, if you're running some flavour of *nix, you can also use virtualizers with some sort of PCI pass-though and use a real legacy VGA card.
However, you'll also encounter all the quirks of Win 9x in respect to changes to x86 maybe (timing, x64 additions, stuff reported via CPUID etc).

Last but not least, you could also give one of the many cheap (in price) Thin Clients a try.
The HP T5300, for example, has an integrated ATI Rage XL that works in 640x480 (due to little video memory).

However, it has a Transmeta CPU that works better with Win Me (due to focus on 32-Bit code).
A list of thin clients is available at : https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/

Anyway, these are just my two cents and likely not what you were looking for.
I just replied to make a start mainly, with the hope others may follow. 😁

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