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Ask HN: Best way to play old games that require Windows 98/XP?

50 points by sandreas ↗ HN
Hey HN,

I'm trying to install some old (german) Win 98 / 32 bit games for kids, but unfortunately they cannot be installed on modern operating systems. I already tried:

  Not working:
  - Dosbox (windows is required, I tried all tricks I found)
  - Windows 7 or greater (even with compatibility mode)
  - Wine on Linux (installer crash)
The only way I could get them to work (see references) is to install a Virtual Machine running Windows 98 SE, but on my wife's Windows 10 notebook this did not work (Virtual Box crashed).

Is there any better way, that I did not find?

References:

https://archive.org/details/windows-98se-vmdk

https://archive.org/details/Microsoft_Windows_98_Second_Edition_Virtual_Machine_VMware_WinWorld

https://archive.org/details/Windows98vdi

https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x/releases/

87 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread
berbec
If you have Windows 10 Pro, Hyper-V[1] might work better than VirtualBox. I'd check why VirtualBox crashed, though. It's possible you don't have virtualization enabled in your bios.

1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-...

numlock86
Hyper-V is terrible in regards of video output performance and input responsiveness as its meant primarily for virtual machines running in the background.
lostmsu
Not related to the original topic, but now Hyper-V supports GPU virtualization. E.g. guest Windows 10 (starting from some build) can see and use host GPU.
realitythreek
I’ve looked into this recently. Microsoft has ended support for RemoteFx [1] and Discrete Device Assignments requires a supported gpu dedicated to that VM.

From my perspective, Hyper-V lacks a good vGPU story but would love to hear otherwise.

1. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb4570006-update-t...

numlock86
> but now Hyper-V supports GPU virtualization

Yes, but getting that to display still is bound to low performance and delay. It's meant for GPU related tasks to utilize resources solely for computing.

sandreas
I'm not a fan of Hyper-V... in the past I killed a whole system just by installing it as windows component.

But maybe as a last resort :-) Thanks.

ocdtrekkie
So the biggest issue you will find is that the standard virtualization platforms like VMware and Hyper-V aren't suited to this: Many games need support for extremely old DirectX versions and that generally isn't implemented for things like VMware especially prior to XP.

PCem is the one I've seen that seems ideal to the task, but I haven't had the time recently to experiment with the configurations for it.

https://www.pcem-emulator.co.uk/

The key distinction is that it actually emulates various legacy graphics and sound hardware that games may have been intended to run on.

mmozeiko
There's also dxwrapper that implements old DirectDraw/3D interfaces with newer D3D9 api for better compatibility with newer Windows versions:

https://github.com/elishacloud/dxwrapper

AlexeyBrin
https://86box.net/

Is pretty good for running old OS like Windows 98 SE.

LeoPanthera
It will run 95 just fine, but 98 is a stretch. The "best" hardware it can emulate is a Pentium 1.

Edit: I stand corrected, I guess I am out of date.

minimaul
86box will do right up to and including Pentium II or K6/2 if your CPU is fast enough.

edit: also, Win 98 works very well - I use it often in 86box.

minimaul
^ this can work pretty well with the caveats that:

1. 3D card support is pretty limited - only 3dfx cards, and the voodoo 3 support is fairly buggy

2. you need a pretty solid CPU to use it well.

sandreas
Cool, thats something I could try.
low_tech_love
I’ve had much more stable results and better performance with Win98 over DosBox instead of 86box. Especially with DosBox-X.
sp332
What are some of the games you're having trouble with?

You could try Steam's Proton, which is based on Wine but has a lot more compatibility work done on top. You might even find your games in https://www.protondb.com/ to see if someone else has tried them first.

sandreas
Some german links:

Neues von Pettersson und Findus: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neues_von_Pettersson_und_Findu...

Bernd das Brot und die Unmöglichen: https://www.nat-games.de/bernd-das-brot-und-die-unmoeglichen...

Schinken_
I know "Peterson und Findus" Runs in VMware (Windows XP). Did it myself. Also "Kapitän Säbelzahns Piratenprüfung" und "Pferd und Pony: Mein Pferdehof" work in VMware but not in Virtual box.

Also some games (I believe "Petersson und Findus" as well as "Autos bauen mit Willy Werkel") have 16 bit installers but 32 bit executables. So as long as you can install/extract the files in a VM, you can just copy over the installation and run it on Windows 10.

edenstrom
I've installed the Swedish version of the sequel (https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pettson_o_Findus_och_mucklor...) on my Linux desktop. Used Lutris configured with Proton and that worked great. Had to change some resolution settings but otherwise pretty seamless.

Also tried it on macOS with only wine, and that crashed during installation.

Otherwise Windows XP VM works for pretty much all games.

CSMastermind
Not OP but I once lost a day trying to get Oregon Trail 3rd Edition working. I never managed to even though I had the original CDs and everything.
aidenn0
If they are old enough to work without hardware video acceleration, then XP inside qemu works. I have several old games that are incredibly far from working in wine, and I have run them this way. They are all late 90s though, and games from that era mostly will work without hardware video acceleration.
sandreas
Seems like WinXP in Qemu is the way... I would prefer a ready to use image, but I could also run this. Got an old licence here :-)
Jiro
You can try dosbox-x. It was forked from dosbox a while back and has enough compatibility to run Windows 98. (Regular dosbox 0.74 was released in 2010.)
sandreas
Cool, that sounds interesting. I'll give it a try.
oslac
Build / buy an old enough computer.
minimaul
This is an underrated solution.

It's not cheap (especially with how badly people are gouging on the right eras of hardware), but there's nothing like period hardware for compatibility with that early 3D era.

eschneider
Never underestimate the convenience of just keeping an older computer around...
sandreas
Yeah thank you... I already thought of buying an used old WinXP Notebook for 45 Bucks or so, but then I thought: If this thing breaks after a while I must invest another 45 bucks and so on... And I have so much stuff laying around, I would prefer a virtualized solution :-)
MrFoof
I’ve simply installed Windows XP in a guest virtual machine (VMWare, Hyper-V) and that’s been that. Hyper-V will require a Professional version of Windows, but the VMWare Player (you don’t need Workstation) is free and will work just fine.

I play even Windows 3.1 games that require 16-bit libraries just fine. Nothing special. Install and go. Maybe a bit of ye olde config for really old DOS games where you had to set up a sound card in a separate config tool from the game :). Some games may require you to right-click on the executable, go to Properties, and set the Compatibility Mode to an older version of Windows. This is built into XP itself. Honestly, I think I only have 1 or 2 total games that have ever required it.

Been doing this forever (15 years?) on both Intel Macs and x86 desktops for as long as I can remember. Moreover, this isn’t just my old memories — literally played a Windows 3.1/95 game (came out in 1994) this weekend while watching Le Mans.

sandreas
Sounds reasonable... maybe Windows XP will work on VMWare Player... that's something I could try. Thank you.
cfn
It does, I still have some software applications that are developed in a Windows XP VM under VmWare Player (the VM is more than 10 years old!). It is also quite cheap if you need to do professional work with it.
MrFoof
I’ve been using VMWare exclusively for virtualization for old games, old dev environments, etc. forever. It’ll do what you need just fine. I think I started using VMWare when a story originally hit Slashdot 20+ years ago. I use kvm and xcp-ng mostly nowadays for professional work, but VMWare is tried and tested for Windows desktop use.

There’s really only two things you’ll run into:

* Games that rely on some esoteric third party library, that for whatever reason wasn’t included in the installer because it relied on a redistributable from Windows Update or the audio driver installer for the sound card. Rare, but happens. Almost always an audio library. Quick search will find it on abandonware sites. Think I’ve done this for 2-3 games ever, last one being Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol.

* Games that relied on early DirectDraw (not DirectX) and were released before Windows 2000, and used fade in/out effects. With how DirectX was changed under the hood for the NT 5.0 kernel in Windows 2000, it ends up being a slideshow. This isn’t a virtualization issue, but a Windows 2000 or later instead of Windows ME or prior issue — you’d see the same issue on 20-25 year old hardware (I did back then)! However this is super rare. I think the only game I have affected by this is the installer (not the game itself) for Dark Reign, which was an RTS by Relic.

pizza234
VMware also has the best¹ 3D acceleration, which allows playing 3D games for Windows XP, like Fallout 3.

¹ actually, the only, since Virtualbox's acceleration is broken and limited, even on v7

MegaDeKay
I've run Windows XP under QEmu / KVM with GPU passthrough of an old nVidia NVS300 graphics card. Running an old nVidia driver, I had perfect 3D acceleration and HDMI sound. A good option if the OP has the right bits lying around, though not the most straightforward.
lostmsu
Fallout 3 from Steam seems to work fine on mine Win 11.
blooalien
I run Fallout 3 on modern variants of Linux with Valve's Proton (a WINE fork) using "Heroic Game Launcher" (an Epic game store front-end) just fine as well. Because it's running fine in Proton, I assume if I owned the game on Steam, the same would hold true there for me as well.
nottorp
I'd second that. I haven't had to deal with educational ish kids' games in a while, but I remember one of my daughter's favorites (something about crayola and castle creator?) already stopped working when I upgraded her from xp to win 7.

Wine may work for popular games (maybe try something like playonmac/playonlinux that can pull older wine versions for you if it has a recipe) but kids' games won't get a lot of attention. Not like Fallout 3.

sneed_chucker
Where does one get a trustworthy windows XP iso these days?
Sakos
Does it matter if you're running it in a VM just to play games? In any case, mydigitallife is a trustworthy source. They provide checksums and you can also check elsewhere to verify if you calculate the checksum. I've done this and every ISO I downloaded through MDL was identical to the original ISOs. They used to just link to the originals on Microsoft's servers, but MS removed access to them years ago. So, thanks for that, MS. Moloch strikes again, I guess.
dannyphantom
What a coincidence: I was literally doing this today.

I used this:

https://archive.org/details/WinXPProSP3x86

It was linked from one of those college subdomains; I’ll try editing that link in a few since it had a different serial

Someone
I think that is trustworthy, yes.

Given the phrase “For historical research or museum quality display“, licensing may be problematic, though. I wouldn’t know whether Microsoft cares about that.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
organman91
It's a long shot, but some old games are available via https://www.scummvm.org/
sandreas
Yeah I know this, but this is mainly for Lucas Arts stuff and the games I would like to use don't run there.

Anyway thank you.

justsomehnguy
It really depends on the game (particulary old DirectX <5 and are PITA).

Without the game name and it's requirements I only can advise to seek advice on Vogons or Old-games.ru

Topgamer7
Did you look at the wine appdb for your games? There might be some things you can do to get it running.
sandreas
yeah the games are not popular enough, unfortunately.
rasse
Wine may still be the way to go. You should check the logs, if you haven't already. If the crash occurs because of missing runtime libraries, the issue might be fixed with Winetricks. https://wiki.winehq.org/Winetricks
kgm
There's a whole generation of games from the mid to late 90s (and perhaps into the early 00s) that's remarkably annoying to play these days because of this issue. The game I've personally tried to get running, every once in a while, is Mechwarrior 3, but it's a complete disaster. The last time I tried to run it, I actually managed to load into the first mission, but the in-game physics were remarkably broken, with the amusing result where the first enemies you face in the game (a couple of little tanks) drove up towards me, hit a little bump, and then immediately rocketed into the sky.

At least part of the issue is that the game uses multiple threads, but was designed for systems with a single CPU, with a clock speed that's considerably slower than is present in modern systems. Something about this difference in timing breaks the whole thing in ways which are diverse and inexplicable.

Now, this comment thread contains plenty of possible solutions I could attempt, but if it's really a matter of the game relying on something like the CPU speeds of contemporary hardware (not to mention contemporary graphics hardware) then I start to think that I'd need to track down some kind of Pentium 3-era gaming PC to really make it work.

2OEH8eoCRo0
Mechwarrior 2 (ATI 3D Rage Edition) is my white whale. I cannot for the life of me get that working.
kgm
Part of the issue there is that the 3D-acceleration-enabled versions of Mechwarrior 2 (and Mercenaries) were buggy as heck even at the time. (Mercenaries was even pretty buggy before they did the 3D card patch, and it only got moreso.) It really doesn't help this kind of games preservation that the games themselves could be kind of junk, from a technical standpoint.
deeesstoronto
I played a ton of Mechwarrior 2 (ATI 3D Rage Edition) - the Aptiva bundle version - and didn't notice it being buggy.... Maybe this is a later version and earlier versions were more buggy?
deeesstoronto
Although I do remember the ATi drivers on the later Rage Pro could get pretty buggy. I remember the most problems with OpenGL games....
kgm
My own experience was with the 3D-enhanced version of Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, specifically. It is possible that the equivalent version for Mechwarrior 2 was more stable. It's also possible my 3D drivers of the time were the cause of the issues I had, but Mercenaries was sufficiently buggy in all sorts of other ways (even the DOS version loved to crash) that I always just blamed the game.
CoastalCoder
Does anyone still have the source code for those games?
treve
On Linux, have you seen the Lutris project?

It's basically a launcher for games, and the community maintains Wine/DOSBox/etc configurations.

sandreas
Another interesting one... maybe I'll give it a shot if I fail with vmware player and windows xp
snthd
Copy the installed version, and run that with wine.
sandreas
That may work, but I need a way to install it first... nice idea though
dzek69
I'm not an expert but Dosbox can be run in browser.

I've seen entire oses in browser too, but that would be too much CPU to waste. Anyway, if your game is dos based that could help you.

weare138
I've had pretty good luck with Virtualbox and legacy OSs. It's open-source. WINE works surprisingly well with older Windows games and apps too.
BlackLotus89
Try installing windows 95 in dosbox and save that as a base image for your software.

Don't know if this was o e of the "tricks" you tried... anyway worked for most old games that required windows I tried