Win98 Suggestions Request.

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slopsbucket
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Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by slopsbucket »

For me this is about old games, and they require DirectX. When Win98 was the latest and greatest thing out it was the ultimate gaming platform and many of those games have no modern day equivalents that are any where near as good. They also became buggy with WinXP, and some of them completely unplayable under Win7. Hence the need for an emulator.

I had really high hopes when I saw the new VirtualBox had vmsvga but sadly this is not to be for me. Unless….

Is there some win98 driver that would be compatible with vmsvga? Or are there other 3rd party 3D card emulators that can legally be added to VirtualBox? An old S3 Virge would probably be ideal.

Just hoping some other users out there have some experience with the same thing and can give some advice.

Cheers,

Andrew.
towo2099
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by towo2099 »

Is there some win98 driver that would be compatible with vmsvga?
No.
Or are there other 3rd party 3D card emulators that can legally be added to VirtualBox?
What? And no.
socratis
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by socratis »

slopsbucket wrote:I had really high hopes when I saw the new VirtualBox had vmsvga
Please read the manual, ch. 3.6.1. Screen Tab. The VMSVGA is for Linux guests, not Windows ones.
slopsbucket wrote:Is there some win98 driver that would be compatible with vmsvga?
Not AFAIK.
slopsbucket wrote:Or are there other 3rd party 3D card emulators that can legally be added to VirtualBox? An old S3 Virge would probably be ideal.
Added, how exactly? Someone has to write the code for it! And since there aren't that many paying customers interested in Win98 getting game-compatibility, I don't see it happening any time soon...
slopsbucket wrote:Just hoping some other users out there have some experience with the same thing and can give some advice.
My advice is to either look at another solution, or keep your hopes to a lower level...
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michaln
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by michaln »

Anyone can write a VMSVGA driver for Windows 9x with 3D support. It doesn't have to be Oracle.
mpack
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by mpack »

The obvious question is whether VMWare do one.

Just checked, and apparantly they do, though I'm not in a position to test it: and the graphics drivers would need to be unpicked from the other tools anyway.
https://www.vmware.com/support/ws3/doc/ ... stos9.html

As far as I recall, no one on these forums has verified that the VMSVGA chipset is compatible as claimed/intended.
slopsbucket
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by slopsbucket »

Thank you all for your responses.

I've been playing with quite a few different emulators and have had different successes and failures with each. I can actually play all of my old games, but spread across several emulators or in some cases natively under Wine. I was hoping to consolidate it all under one single emulation and to me VirtualBox appeared to be the most logically laid out solution for doing this.

The vmsvga graphics emulator does appear to work in Win98, but no available driver.
Added, how exactly? Someone has to write the code for it! And since there aren't that many paying customers interested in Win98 getting game-compatibility, I don't see it happening any time soon...
These have already been written and are available with other open source emulators such as PCem.

Maybe VirtualBox isn't what I was hoping for.

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,

Andrew.
mpack
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by mpack »

slopsbucket wrote: The vmsvga graphics emulator does appear to work in Win98, but no available driver.
In fact there does seem to be a driver, as I mentioned above.
slopsbucket wrote: These have already been written and are available with other open source emulators such as PCem.
It would probably take some amount of work to adapt those to the VirtualBox framework. Somebody ultimately would have to pay for that work.
slopsbucket wrote: Maybe VirtualBox isn't what I was hoping for.
Quite possibly. For one thing VirtualBox is not an emulator, it's a hypervisor. You need to be careful what you compare it with.
michaln
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Re: Win98 Suggestions Request.

Post by michaln »

slopsbucket wrote:These have already been written and are available with other open source emulators such as PCem.
Then you really should be using PCem, not VirtualBox.

They're two rather different products, with rather different typical usage. If you want to, for example, run Windows 10 on a Linux host, you are probably not going to pick PCem for that.

The reality is that when VirtualBox was first written, Windows 9x was no longer commercially relevant. And somehow, in all those years since then, Windows 9x has not gotten any more relevant. Though if you can explain why Oracle should be spending time and money on improving Windows 9x support, we're all ears.
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