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What's the best way to virtualize Windows 95/98? I've read VMware no longer supports it.
by nope96 5y ago
What's the best way to virtualize Windows 95/98? I've read VMware no longer supports it.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoNo one has mentioned VirtualBox yet?
- breakingcups 5y agoFor good reason. Oracle's licensing is nefarious. They changed the licensing of the extension pack between versions, so now if you run it for personal use but connect to your company's wifi, they'll get your company on the hook for "violating" their license.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoHowever, you don't need the extension pack at all to run 3.11 or 9x.
- Sunspark 5y agoOut of curiosity, if one was to bring their laptop to Starbucks, would Oracle lawyers attack Starbucks?
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y agoSurprisingly plausible; there's precedent: https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_merula/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/04/oracle_virtualbox_mer...
- Narishma 5y agoIt doesn't run those OSes very well.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoNeither do VMware nor qemu, but they are being announced here. They even fix my (almost periodical) choppy audio regressions when I report them, and that's more support than I get from VMware.
- aninteger 5y agoNon-support does not necessarily imply non-working. Anyway, QEMU still work just fine.
- mikeroySoft 5y agoStill VMware. “Not Supported” in this context just means it’s not continually tested.
- wila 5y agoThere's plenty of hardware Windows 98 no longer works on Mike. Just tried it on my 2012 mac with Fusion Player 12.1.2 the other day. Windows 98 does no longer boot. Worked fine on Fusion 8. My guess is that it needs Binary Translation support and that's not available with 12.x edit: My bad. Figured to see if I could find out why. Upgrading from virtual hardware 4 to virtual hardware 6 seems to help. (yeah yeah, it's an old VM) edit 2: With some of the more recent AMD processors however you are out of luck, they really need BT.
- calvin_ 5y agothey don't need BT, but rather, you can't let the VM manage its own PTEs. virtualbox lets you configure that - just turn off nested paging. vmware unfortunately doesn't do that. if you can get the VM booting in safe mode, flipping the safety options from system properties perf button might help too. (I will say ME runs fine where 98 doesn't. weird!)
- wila 5y agoIf that's true then perhaps Mike can have someone take a look ;) It would be nice if Win98 works for everyone still.
- userbinator 5y agobut rather, you can't let the VM manage its own PTEs. virtualbox lets you configure that - just turn off nested paging The background information for that reason is contained in these two detailed articles: https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/pagewalk-coherence/ https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/pagewalk-coherence/ https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/win9x-tlb-invalidation-bug/ https://blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/win9x-tlb-invalidation-b... tl;dr: newer AMD processors have non-coherent pagewalks. Intel has maintained coherent pagewalks despite that not being explicitly guaranteed in their documentation. Win9x depends on that. I will say ME runs fine where 98 doesn't. weird! Caching/speculative execution related bugs are very sensitive to patterns of memory access.
- paulryanrogers 5y agoAs mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I've had good luck with DOSBox-X. If you need specialty hardware support then you may need to look elsewhere.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y agoMicrosoft VirtualPC 2005 was pretty good, it had in-box sound and graphics drivers for Windows 9x. I'm unsure to what extent it runs on modern Windows versions though.
- stuaxo 5y agoI wonder if the guest API of virtualpc is emulatable?
- x86_64Ubuntu 5y agoThis is a stupid question, but can you run a VMWare Modern instance, and inside of that have a VMWare Ancient instance that runs Windows 95/98? I've never heard of nesting VMs, but I've never looked either.
- sgtnoodle 5y agoIf the VM depends on hardware virtualization support, you can only go one layer deep. If the VM does not depend on hardware support, then sure you should be able to nest multiple layers. For really old software, you can probably get away with fairly high overhead emulation rather than virtualization, and it would probably be less buggy. I would imagine something like qemu would have no trouble booting up windows 95.
- AshamedCaptain 5y ago> f the VM depends on hardware virtualization support, you can only go one layer deep Most VM support nesting of hardware virtualization, with glaring exceptions being Windows's HyperV (until W11 apparently) and Xen.
- mook 5y agoWas there even hardware virtualization support to take advantage of if you're going that old?
- wila 5y agoYes, that's exactly what I do. This way you get the binary translation feature from the older VMware version while you can use the hardware accelerated virtualisation in the outer layer.
- mysterydip 5y agoThat's actually how the VMware training courses I participated in were run: each student had their own virtual datacenter made up of multiple VMs.
- orbital-decay 5y agoPCem is great for this; it's been made to emulate a wide range of old PC hardware.
- calvin_ 5y agoVMware still supports it, it just uses an old version of Tools to do so.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anthk 5y agoVirtualbox 5.x with Windows 2000 setting up compatibility mode: regsvr32 %WINDIR%\AppPatch\slayerui.dll