I want to get into Windows 95/98 era gaming and play stuff I missed out on as a kid. Is there a more streamlined or recommended way of doing this, or is it a case-by-case thing for each game to research and find the right fan-made solutions to get it to run? I figure it's the latter, but might as well see if there's another way.
>>12128629prioritize games on gog as they usually come with patches to get things running on modern hardware. otherwise pcgamingwiki is helpfulhttps://vsrecommendedgames.miraheze.org/wiki/PC/Windows_95https://vsrecommendedgames.miraheze.org/wiki/PC/Windows_98good jumping off point
>>12128634Thanks for the links.
>>12128629If you want to run everything natively, an old Windows XP era computer circa 2001-2005ish would do the trick for very little money.If you want to run everything natively without a lot of space or gear, hunt for a mid-2000s laptop with a Pentium M and dedicated graphics. Those will have full Windows 98 driver support and have the hardware to run virtually anything from the year 2000 and prior
>>12128634>>12128648I've not been using windows for a while, can GOG games (or the EXEs extracted from their installers rather) run on windows XP?
>>12128685If you're on XP then you don't need to bother with GOG installers for compatibility. Just download the real ISOs mount theme and install the games. No CD cracks for just about every game can be found on gamecopyworld.
>>12128629PCem/DOSBox
>>12128648note that a 2005 era laptop with integrated graphics will struggle with any 3d games starting around 2002
>>12128685as the other anon said you can indeed run the OG discs to install these games and they work fine, but to answer your question, yes windows 95-98 GOG games do work on XP.
>>12128629There's quite a few ways to go about it, but there's pros and cons to all of them. The premium solution would be a more-or-less period-correct build, but here there's a bunch of considerations to make based on which era of games you want to play. In general, anything up to 1998 is probably best played on a build centered around a high-end Pentium II and a Voodoo 3 since this is the era of Glide games. After that, up to about 2002, you're better served by a Pentium III build with a GeForce 4 Ti. The problem? Putting all of this together today is expensive as fuck, and let's face it, all the parts are old and likely on the cusp of failing and/or needing some form of maintenance. Not recommended unless you've got the knowledge, patience, and dosh for it.Sticking to dedicated hardware, a far easier solution is a newer PC based around a high-end Pentium 4 or even a Core 2 Duo. It won't be quite as compatible, and you'll definitely have to use a Glide wrapper for the earlier games and perhaps some tweaking here and there, but the parts are more likely to be in serviceable condition, with much more reasonable prices (in some cases you may even be able to get them for dirt cheap or even free if you know where to look), and you'll have far greater performance to boot.But let's say you don't want to put together and maintain a whole separate machine. In that case, we get into another whole subset of options. A lot of older games still work on modern Windows, but in many cases you'll have to do some work to get them to run correctly (or at all). This is where PCGamingWiki is very helpful. Another option is setting up a virtual machine running an older version of Windows, though this can be hit and miss, and you may or may not get hardware acceleration. The last option is setting up PCem or 86Box, which is almost guaranteed to get games working properly, but they are VERY demanding and require a very powerful CPU to run at higher speeds.
>>1212881910/10 post, much appreciated.
>>12128727Yeah, integrated graphics were pretty bad well into the late 2000s. If I remember right, Intel HD was a huge step up. If buying a laptop with dedicated graphics, it's good to do some homework on the GPU and CPU pairs and see how much power both draw. Avoid higher-end GPUs made in the 360 RRoD/PS3 YLoD era (2005-07). Lots of problems in the early HD times.Generally speaking, bulky gaming and workstation laptops with high end GPUs are like the Italian sports cars of the laptop world. They tend to run very hot and overall more problematic. They require a lot more maintenance and upkeep and have zero chance of a good battery life. This was true 20 years ago and it's still true now.A classic Thinkpad with a modest GPU is bulletproof and decently mobile. I got a T42 for free and it's my go-to retro laptop.>one of the very last fully-IBM made and manufactured laptops pre-Lenovo>built extremely well>full driver compatibility as far back as Win 3.1/OS2 and as far ahead as Windows 7>Pentium M chip (overkill powerful single core CPU with full Win 98 compatibility)>runs with as little as 128MB RAM for running older OSes (3.x/9x) and as much as 2GB RAM for newer ones>easy to convert to SSD>good screen>good GPU, but not one that runs hot like the T42p/T43p
>>12128705PCEM or 86Box? DOSbox is shit and is full of bugs.
>>12129671PCem is faster, 86Box is more accurate and has a lot more features and hardware options. Either way, you'll need a decent rig to emulate anything above a Pentium.
>>12129683Ryzen 5 3600RX 6600 XT32GB of RAMShould I be good?
>>12129795You may be able to go up to a Pentium MMX at around 166 to 200 MHz or so on PCem, but it'll probably struggle on 86Box above 133 MHz, though it depends on the task at hand.
>>12129080>Yeah, integrated graphics were pretty bad well into the late 2000s. S3, Cirrus Logic, Trident etc. IGPs were more than adequate for pretty much all DOS games, as long as they had at least 2 MB VRAM. >If I remember right, Intel HD was a huge step up. Intel integrated graphics were pretty shitty up until circa Ivy Bridge. They just happened to have good compatibility with non-3D Windows games (which wasn't always the case with IGPs from other companies).
>>12128819>high-end Pentium II and a Voodoo 3 Anything with a 3dfx logo is going to cost blood-pissingly high amounts of money, so wrapper is the way to go, tbdesufamalampai.
>>12128629It depends how dedicated you want to go to find out, and what you want to play. One way to have things so they just (with some tinkering) work is a vintage machine with 95/98 - but one of the fun things of that era is things often didn't just 'work' in the same way as with consoles, there was often a lot of driver, patch and setting tinkering until the XP+ era to make your specific hardware (specifically your specific 3D accelerator or sound card) work with certain games. There's also acquiring the hardware, making sure it's actually working etc.The much easier way (as others have said, if your machine is powerful enough) would probably be 86 box or PCem - DOSbox works fine for me generally, but I don't use it for Windows emulation, these platforms are much more stable for that. These programs have the benefit of being able to swap out different elements of the hardware config to make things work for certain games more easily.If you want to run things on your current windows system, then it's a case of (as you mentioned) going through different games and seeing what's possible, though I will say a surprising amount of games (the Age of Empires series for instance) run completely native in Windows 10. There are also a surprising amount of dedicated people who are working to make games playable - GOG are the obvious ones, but if you search for the following terms spelled correctly "Kollechsun Chaymbre" you will find some people doing it as hobbyists, usually with Abandonware. My experiences with his work have been fantastic so far. My recommendation is to search by game rather than by system, and then you'll find the easiest route that way.
>>12129080>good GPU, but not one that runs hot like the T42p/T43p Yea, the FireGL in the T42p isn't worth the extra heat. Radeon 9600 64 MB is quite sufficient. Though, if looking for a T42, it should be one with the second-gen Pentium M (Dothan, not Banias), and the classic 1024x768 15'' display. The top model had a screen with one of those weird pre-HD resolutions (1400x1050), which aren't fully-supported by many games. Besides, given the relatively modest capabilities of the 9600, you're not going to go above XGA res in the first place.
>>12128638You're welcome
>>12129880>a surprising amount of games (the Age of Empires series for instance) run completely native in Windows 10. Conversely, there is a(n admittedly small) handful of titles which refuse to work even in WinXP. I've been unable to make Shadow Watch run reliably in XP. I was able to get it to start once, but it refused to run when I tried later, and I was unable to make it go again, despite the various tricks mentioned in the GOG forum. I think it has to do with the temporary exe file it creates on start.
>>12130524hell even vanilla RCT crashes on windows XP and it came out in like 1998
>>12128629qemu3dfx, but it requires a bit of tinkering and you use it from a terminal
>>12128629frankly building a dedicated machine running win 98 might be less of an hassle than fighting against a modern OS being able to play these games
>>12128685If they didn't change anything recently, then probably yes. But some games using DOSBOX got updated to use the most recent version of DOSBOX staging, which dropped support for older Windowses, but if you use DOSBOX you don't really need to use XP and XP can just run DOS games natively.
>>12132181Several fine folks over at /emugen/ have been beating their heads against a wall for the past couple of weeks trying to get it to work, and while they've found some success, they all appear to attest that setting up QEMU is for fucking psychopaths.
>>12129795no. fire likely
