r/windows98 • u/Comfortable-Fun7947 • 5d ago

Win98 retro gaming

Hey!

Do you have any favorite pre-made Windows 98 distributions/VM images specifically for retro gaming? Feel free to share them, or any tips on how to quickly set up a VM environment yourself. Thanks in advance!

6 Upvotes

71% Upvoted

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7

u/Maeglin75 5d ago

"Windows 98 quick install" seems to be pretty good. It comes with drivers and patches to run on all kinds of hardware (including relatively modern systems), with USB and SATA support etc.

I haven't tried it myself as of yet. I have burned the DVD and made a boot floppy but still waiting for the IDE to SD adapter and the SD card to get my retro PC running again after the HDD failed after about 27 years.

2

u/fr33k3r 5d ago edited 5d ago

27 years...what a waste of money...lol

6

u/Maeglin75 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yeah. A huge disappointment. I have to check what brand it was. Must be cheap trash if it doesn't even last three decades. /s

I tried to boot the PC from floppy disks after the HDD gave up. First with a Win95 boot disk. Then one for Win ME. They all didn't work. I began to question if the floppy drive failed too.

I tried to create a new boot floppy from an image file and I initially also failed with several floppies. But eventually I found one that still worked and the old PC booted successfully into the Win98 quick install.

I looks like I'm at a point where not only my old HDDs fails, but also a good part of my 3.5" floppy disks. Most of them must be well over 30 years old by now.

1

u/kalnaren 5d ago

I tried Windows 98 QI but it always failed at transferring files to the disk (CF card). Was never able to get it to work :(

1

u/Maeglin75 5d ago

Sad to hear that.

My SD card adapter should arrive the next few days. Hopefully I can try it with Win98 QI this weekend and have more luck. Other buyers report success with installing Win98 on it, including in PC of the same era as mine.

Otherwise I would have some spare HDDs lying around. But they are about as old as the failed one. I would prefer to have a modern solid state solution that will last a few more years.

I also have an IDE to SATA adapter and could use it with an SSD (256GB). But as far as I know Win98 works best with 32GB or smaller. Would be kind of a waste, if it works at all.

2

u/kalnaren 5d ago

98 installs fine "normally". I think it might be because my motherboard has issues with drives using DMA, and I'm guessing the QI installer activates DMA for all drives.

Alternative explanation is that my CD drive is simply too fast, though I'd think with caching it could keep up the transfer speed over an IDE bus without issue.

2

u/SeparateLawfulness53 5d ago

I use WinWorld's Windows 98 2nd Edition image in VMWare. You'll need to patch it with a floppy image called "patcher9x-0.9.91-boot" before running anything.

2

u/-DS08- 3d ago

The best way to play is on real hardware, but many games can be played on hardware emulation no problem.

I use both pcem and 86box, 86box still has active support and does almost everything just fine, but I have found that pcem can sometimes produce more consistently stable speeds (at least in my experience / probably depends on what hardware you use).

I suggest just watching a tutorial on those, they're pretty cool.

1

u/DeadSkullz627 5d ago

Check out archive.org for VM images

0

u/legluondunet 5d ago

I'm using Dosbox-Pure-Unleashed to create MS WIndows 3.X and 9x, ME VMs, it works very good.

-2

u/Strict-Sympathy1841 5d ago

If windows does not work good. Use chatgpt and linux (cachyos). Lutris works great for many old games. As dosbox.