VirtualBox Emulation
For most operating systems, VirtualBox works out of the box. However, a few of them may need tweaking for best performance.
For better performance, install this Intel Chipset driver for the CPU that VMWare emulates. You should do this before installing the Sound Card Driver.
Newer versions of VMWare emulate a different sound card than the one this image was designed for. Nevertheless, you can install the right one from here.
Windows 98SE is probably the more stable of the Win9x series of operating systems. Whereas Windows ME was hated for it's instability and lack of real-mode DOS, and Windows 95 lacks much
The best way to run Windows 98SE is to actually have a Pentium III or 486 PC.
Otherwise, the best way to emulate Windows is to use VMWare Player (runs on Windows or Linux). This offers hands down the best support for Windows 9x. VMWare Player is free to use.
First, obtain a Windows 98SE disc or ISO from someplace.
Then, just pop it into VMWare's emulated disc drive, and run a typical Windows 98SE setup. Once setup is complete, move to the next step.
VMWare Tools are drivers that make it much easier to interact with the virtual machine. It adds an improved display driver, an integrated mouse (which you can disable at will for some games), and USB 2.0 support, for joystick passthrough or such.
DirectX 9.0 is a critically important graphics library used by most Windows 9x games.
Note: You must install DirectX 9 before installing this sound card driver, otherwise you will get NTKERN.DLL errors.
VMWare emulates a Creative sound card, so you need to install the drivers for it.
http://www.compdigitec.com/labs/2010/02/27/sound-in-windows-98-on-vmware/
Note: This may increase system instability, so don't do it if you need compatibility.
One of the most controversial additions to Windows 98SE was Internet Explorer. Microsoft even welded the browser into the File Manager, which caused no end of slowdown during initial adoption.
The bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows eventually killed Netscape and cemented Microsoft's dominance of the Internet and major web standards. This appalling abuse of monopoly led to a successful antitrust lawsuit by the US Government.
But of course, all that is in the past. What matters to us now is this:
- Internet Explorer 5 won't load web pages well.
- It goes without saying that modern web pages will look like junk on old browsers. The alternative is to install Firefox 2, which also struggles, but at least functions.
- Windows Explorer with WebView sucks and is slow. And who uses Active Desktop, anyway?
- This requires the help of IEradicator, which completely removes the WebView Explorer and replaces it with the ordinary one.
http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html
Not to worry, the MSHTML engine is left intact for Outlook Express and other HTML applications to use. Though you if you need a library such as thumbsvw.dll, install them from here.
This is the only Windows/MS-DOS system worth using. It is compatible with all MS-DOS and Windows 9x/3.1 apps.
However, it can take a lot of hard work to get running on a virtual machine.
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=9918
This can be hard.
Alternatively, you can get a fully built VirtualBox image from some shady sources...
http://scitechdd.wordpress.com/
Here is a guide which explains the idling issue.
http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html
Use Firefox 2.0 instead.
http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17592
Alternatively, if you are using a non-x86 host system, you can use DOSBox to run windows. DOSBox supports a huge variety of consoles.
- Viper4Android
-
Oculus Rift DK2
- Kinect + Oculus Rift
- Nokia Lumia 1020
- Wolfson DAC
- OpenPandora
- HTC HD2
- Nokia N900
- Sony Ericsson Series
- Compaq Pocket PC Keyboard
- Windows for DOSBox
- Libreboot/Coreboot
- Phoenix BIOS Crisis Recovery - For pre-UEFI ThinkPads.
- Bricked T430 Motherboard
- HPLIP Printers - A massive family of common and cheap printers, that you can probably find from the junkyard. Most of them use open source drivers, and all work out of the box with Linux and HPLIP. Great for printing Bitcoin paper wallets.