How well/does Windows 95 run in VB?

DOS4dinner · Post by **DOS4dinner** » 15. Aug 2008, 02:00

I noticed in the FAQ/other spots that no one mentioned Windows 95. Does it work? I am using Ubuntu 8.04, and I may need 95 specifically to run an old favorite of mine (Sonic CD to be exact). Anybody tried it?

Post by **chungy** » 15. Aug 2008, 02:29

All the tips/tricks for Windows 98 posted around apply just as equally to Windows 95 (they're practically the same operating system, except Win95 doesn't integrate IE4/5 into the desktop).

Windows 9x's performance in VirtualBox isn't too bad for most work-related uses after you've got the VBE9X video driver installed, but I'm not sure it would be suitable for a fast-paced video game like Sonic CD. It might be desirable to see if it runs in Wine before VirtualBox+Win95.

Alternatively, if you have a copy of Windows XP, you might get away with that provided SonicCDfix is used to patch the game to be compatible with WinXP. As VirtualBox comes with accelerated video drivers for WinXP in the guest additions, I would wager you have a bigger chance of getting the game to run smoothly in it rather than Win95.

DOS4dinner · Post by **DOS4dinner** » 15. Aug 2008, 03:01

I see. Thanks! I will try it Wine first, but I have a feeling it will have some issues (namely, it will complain about not having 256 colors).

Post by **TerryE** » 15. Aug 2008, 12:00

Win95 won't run on a CPU with a clock speed > 2Ghz. If you search the posts, in one of my earlier responses to this Q which gets asked routinely, I reference the KB article.

Post by **ghr** » 15. Aug 2008, 17:18

As far as my experience & knowledge goes: the MS KB assumes a physical PC, not a virtual one. Given that, it 'll take a little while before you hit this limit, and (I'd expect) even more so if you use a "CPU cooler" utility like rain or amnhlt... oh and the MS KB is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/312108; applies to Win95 and Win98 standard edition.

Post by **TerryE** » 15. Aug 2008, 18:22

ghr, as far as my experience & knowledge goes , I think your statement is a dangerous assumption. If I recall I first came across this in 2002/3 when I was a CTO for a mutli-national. We wanted to move to 100% W2K, so we were looking at virtualising legacy W9x apps that were business critical and our migration teams couldn't get working on W2K. We were using VirtualPC (before MS bought them), and we just couldn't get our W95 VirtualPCs to boot on our high end boxes. The bug was in fixed in W98SE, so we just migrated those apps we could to W98SE.

If you read the papers on virtualisation techniques you will see that any 32 non-privileged code run at 100%. Privileged code once patched will still achieve roughly 60-90% depending on patch density, though clearly if you are executing a call-out to virtualised I/O then this could cause a local drop in rate. Likewise 16-bit code has to go through the QEMU translator and this can be 10x slower. So it all depends on where the timing loop is, what mode it is running in, and whether it is touching the I/O space inside the loop.

If I recall this one was just a for (i=0;i<BIG_NO;i++){} loop to "wait a few milliseconds for the device to initialise". The only prob was that BIG_NO was chosen in the days when a fast CPU was 50MHz and not 2GHz. Nonetheless as I said, my recollection could be mistaken and it could be that this loop was in 286 code or had an I/O port reference in the middle. I would be really interested to hear if anyone has managed to get W95 working. I have searched the forum in the past and all I found were posts from people who couldn't get it working.

Technologov · Post by **Technologov** » 15. Aug 2008, 19:53

Windows 95 runs fine in VirtualBox. Including Sound.

There is no problem of fast CPU. (running on Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz)

DOS4dinner · Post by **DOS4dinner** » 15. Aug 2008, 22:30

I doubt it will hit 2.2 ghz. I only have a Pentium 4 2.6 ghz in the first place, and I doubt VB is THAT efficient.

Technologov · Post by **Technologov** » 15. Aug 2008, 22:33

I'm not speaking about performance, I said that it works.

DOS4dinner · Post by **DOS4dinner** » 15. Aug 2008, 23:30

Technologov wrote:I'm not speaking about performance, I said that it works.

I wasn't meaning that towards you, it was mostly for everyone talking about that 2 ghz bug in Windows 95. Glad to hear it works, though. I haven't played sonic in a LONG time.

Post by **TerryE** » 16. Aug 2008, 00:12

TerryE wrote:Win95 won't run on a CPU with a clock speed > 2Ghz.

Technologov wrote:Windows 95 runs fine in VirtualBox. Including Sound. There is no problem of fast CPU. (running on Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 2.4 GHz)

Thanks Alexey, I stand corrected. If the NDIS driver is 16bit code then were probably good to 10GHz

Technologov · Post by **Technologov** » 16. Aug 2008, 00:18

I haven't tried networking, so can't tell about NDIS driver.

Anyway, from the Win 9x family - Windows 98 SE is the best OS by far IMHO.

Post by **TerryE** » 16. Aug 2008, 00:32

+1 I prefer it to ME.