leileilol wrote:VirtualBox's guest additions (required to use the additional virtualization features) only work for XP at the least IIRC. You'll be stuck in VGA for Win9x with no acceleration whatsoever, and on top of that, activating virtualization for the CPU will just GPF it to hell.
There's also the unsaid issue of input locking issues in these virtualization software as they're designed for IT pros dealing with files, spreadsheets, access, databases, security, etcetera... and not gaming, which require locked mice iin the center of their windows in context, less latency on input presses, etc.
Mainline PCem does support Mobile Pentium MMX 300MHz, but you'd really really really need a nice highest of the highest end computer for it (at the time of this writing - sarah's focused on the recompiler optimisations currently). The 3dfx Voodoo software emulation there is much faster than the DOSbox patch too, and it does support harddrive images up to 8GB and running Windows 9X on them. The only real problem is preparing to use it before playing games on it, as it emulates a personal computer 😀 that means for pure dos gaming you'd have to bring your own memory extenders and manage memory and get your sound card working, and you're going to have to fdisk/format either way
The entire "center window input locking" often requires a relative mouse feature to be turned on to make it useable for games.
I had a thought about this (disk space question) earlier today and rebuilt the SDL2 r3998 dosbox with the debugger enabled (the dosbox debugger) and installed Windows 95 OEM on a drive image mount and tried to see what I can get to work. It is is a much worse crapshoot than I figured it was.
- I think the best way to actually get Win95 in some kind of "supported" shape would require dosbox to emulate all the needed DOS 7 bits(apparently the -LFN patch adds a bunch of this, but I'm not using that build) win95 actually uses. This at best would let it run in compatibility mode and function the same way Win3.x does. eg, dangerously. That would at least let the MSCDEX in DOSBOX work in theory. When Win95 is in compatibility mode it has poorer disk access, but if you're emulating it on a system that is 100 times faster, probably a moot point. Though I think it would also freak out at seeing disks in the GB size.
- in Auto mode, it looks like the Normal core is used, but Pentium_Slow the Full core is used, the latter seems to crash if the S3 driver is installed, or runs in VGA 16 color mode with no problems. If it's in normal core, the graphics rendering is really messed up.
- I think we're going about this all wrong anyway. If you're going to emulate Win 3.1/3.11 or 95/95B you'd want to install video and sound drivers that communicate with the GDI/x11, DX or openal/opengl api in the host-os and not try to emulate the physical hardware itself.
Seems like it's more difficult to setup Win95 in dosbox than the actual hardware emulators.
As far as games go, I can't actually think of anything that needs Win95 that I have, and I could not get Win95 to a state where it was operable for more than 10 seconds (as soon as the start menu was clicked, several pages of invalid opcode's appeared and then the debugger crashed) Running the same build without the debugger, crashed it in the same place, so *shrug*.
I'm not looking for help with this (I'm guessing there's a load of hacks in the ykhwong-daum build that enables it to function better,) but I think DOSBOX is a long way from ever being able to just run stock Win95 and be able to anything practical with it, so it's probably better to find a wrapper solution (eg dgvoodoo2) if you want to play games.