I've been using this for a few years. I have a legal copy of Win98 with several games from my physical collection fully set-up. Getting to the desktop is just one click away on Win11. Also, my setup is fully portable and can run on any PC from a USB stick. Dosbox-X and Dosbox-staging is what powers my retro PC game collection!
I wonder why they were never able to replicate the same level of "virtualization" they managed with Windows 3.11 / Dos while running win9x-based OSes - like mounting a folder as the root drive or a cd rom drive. I guess at that point it would become simply a clone of the wine environment while using the original os binaries instead?
DOS box basically provides its own BIOS and DOS, so int 21h and friends are implemented by the emulator, so it can do things like redirecting access to the real file system.
Windows 9x doesn’t (normally) use real mode DOS / BIOS calls for disk access, it has its own 32 bit disk drivers and file systems running in the virtual machine manager kernel (vfat.vxd and so on). So DOSbox has to do things in a far more traditional way, presenting a virtual hard disc device etc.
While I completely agree with you -- that's what I would want too, I want Win98 without the pain, click or type and it's there, it's a very 2025 expectation -- I laughed because of the huge disparity between this and what installing DOS and Windows were really like. Part of the experience is selecting drivers and configuration :D (Even better in DOS with the IRQs and config.sys and whatnot.)
PCem does it relatively pain free; also emulates voodoo 2 so you can play GPU accelerated games on it. The network is pig-slow and i haven't figured out why, though. All in all PCem is the exact amount of jank and awesome to use for retro-emulation.
it emulates ~8086 through Pentium II or so. maybe a bit further on both sides; my machine struggled to maintain 100% emulation speed with the highest end CPU selected.
oh, i've used that too, but i didn't know that - it's been a while.
This gives me the opportunity to test out my wiki install for note-taking in real time; set up 86box and do the same things i've been doing with pcem (clone the drives (copy/paste)), screenshots, the works. +1
Different boot disks and later different menu items in configsys and autoexecbat to control which drivers were loaded and where (himem etc) to launch different games
I don’t recall how it was all figured out int he days before modems. I remember dos came with a nice chunky set of manuals, I guess games might have had information in there too, but I for one don’t really understand the different between high and low in the first megabyte, or between extended and expanded memory, or what an Irq really was, I just knew you had to live the jumpers on the sound card - which I assume I got from the manual.
I agree with that, but then I tried the setup, and i found it was straightforward.
playing with it gives you a sense of mastery (even if small), is satisfying, and may be the necessary "training" to get used to using/installing/configuring the full windows 98.
How is it even doing this? A full DOS/Windows 9x environment—running on an M1 Mac?? On so many architectures and OSes? With a ton of options, yet somehow everything just works—games, operating systems, all of it. Like a time machine you can configure. Seriously cool
i got windows 98 networking working (on macos needs sudo dosbox-x) and browsed google from ie 5. most websites will not work (due to TLS/cipher mismatch).
i want to write a very thin, old JS client for BrowserBox to let you connect to bbx running on local network so that old OS like this can browse the modern web.
I actually did this just a few weeks ago. I was hunting for a shareware card game from 25 years ago. The installer was buried in a shareware DVD image; I could tear out the installer but of course couldn't run it.
W98+DosBox-X did the job. With a sufficiently powerful machine, the phony system was at least as speedy as machines of the era. And there are enough tweaks to speed up the boring parts. That one worked so well, I tried some demos from that time frame, and most did fine.
W98SE was the last windows that actually felt polished to me. Also I had the feeling that while using it (a fresh install) my computer was faster than with any other windows versions from around that time.
Later windows came with different looks, UI toolkits, ribbons, and what nots. It became a messy UI. And what the NT-stack was probably better in all kinds of ways, it always felt like it was slowing things down...
UI-wise, perhaps, but the underlying foundation was far from solid. A single poorly written program would bring the entire system to its knees. Same for drivers. System startup files would occasionally randomly break, requiring booting with a startup floppy and manually restoring them. Plus a ~512MB RAM limit. Windows NT (even 4.0 at the time) was light years ahead of that.
Oh, and I think we're forgetting the Ad Panel on the desktop, absolutely huge (at least on 800x600) toolbar buttons in Explorer, and other "bloat" IE integration brought us in W98 ;)
This. Active X was a bit of a turd; by disabling IE preloading W98SE was almost snapppy... until a heavy threaded working environment crawled it down; was very subpar compared to w2k/XP, even under a Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM.
Just a note: this is not something new, this is well-explored, you can even run Windows 98 in the web version of DOSBox-X - see https://github.com/nbarkhina/doswasmx?tab=readme-ov-file#ins...
I've been using this for a few years. I have a legal copy of Win98 with several games from my physical collection fully set-up. Getting to the desktop is just one click away on Win11. Also, my setup is fully portable and can run on any PC from a USB stick. Dosbox-X and Dosbox-staging is what powers my retro PC game collection!
I wonder why they were never able to replicate the same level of "virtualization" they managed with Windows 3.11 / Dos while running win9x-based OSes - like mounting a folder as the root drive or a cd rom drive. I guess at that point it would become simply a clone of the wine environment while using the original os binaries instead?
DOS box basically provides its own BIOS and DOS, so int 21h and friends are implemented by the emulator, so it can do things like redirecting access to the real file system.
Windows 9x doesn’t (normally) use real mode DOS / BIOS calls for disk access, it has its own 32 bit disk drivers and file systems running in the virtual machine manager kernel (vfat.vxd and so on). So DOSbox has to do things in a far more traditional way, presenting a virtual hard disc device etc.
The software is very impressive...
But I think could do with usability improvements, for example typing 'dosbox win98.iso' at a prompt should end up with me at the win98 desktop.
All the config should be auto detected and auto set unless overridden.
While I completely agree with you -- that's what I would want too, I want Win98 without the pain, click or type and it's there, it's a very 2025 expectation -- I laughed because of the huge disparity between this and what installing DOS and Windows were really like. Part of the experience is selecting drivers and configuration :D (Even better in DOS with the IRQs and config.sys and whatnot.)
PCem does it relatively pain free; also emulates voodoo 2 so you can play GPU accelerated games on it. The network is pig-slow and i haven't figured out why, though. All in all PCem is the exact amount of jank and awesome to use for retro-emulation.
it emulates ~8086 through Pentium II or so. maybe a bit further on both sides; my machine struggled to maintain 100% emulation speed with the highest end CPU selected.
There's also 86Box which builds on the foundations of PCem and provides way more machines and options.
oh, i've used that too, but i didn't know that - it's been a while.
This gives me the opportunity to test out my wiki install for note-taking in real time; set up 86box and do the same things i've been doing with pcem (clone the drives (copy/paste)), screenshots, the works. +1
Different boot disks and later different menu items in configsys and autoexecbat to control which drivers were loaded and where (himem etc) to launch different games
I don’t recall how it was all figured out int he days before modems. I remember dos came with a nice chunky set of manuals, I guess games might have had information in there too, but I for one don’t really understand the different between high and low in the first megabyte, or between extended and expanded memory, or what an Irq really was, I just knew you had to live the jumpers on the sound card - which I assume I got from the manual.
I agree with that, but then I tried the setup, and i found it was straightforward.
playing with it gives you a sense of mastery (even if small), is satisfying, and may be the necessary "training" to get used to using/installing/configuring the full windows 98.
How is it even doing this? A full DOS/Windows 9x environment—running on an M1 Mac?? On so many architectures and OSes? With a ton of options, yet somehow everything just works—games, operating systems, all of it. Like a time machine you can configure. Seriously cool
i got windows 98 networking working (on macos needs sudo dosbox-x) and browsed google from ie 5. most websites will not work (due to TLS/cipher mismatch).
i want to write a very thin, old JS client for BrowserBox to let you connect to bbx running on local network so that old OS like this can browse the modern web.
Retrozilla will work with the TLS settings at about:config. Search DDG/GG. ALso, gopher runs fine: gopher://magical.fish
HN, read only over gopher: gopher://magical.fish
Why do you do this? What software requires it?
I actually did this just a few weeks ago. I was hunting for a shareware card game from 25 years ago. The installer was buried in a shareware DVD image; I could tear out the installer but of course couldn't run it.
W98+DosBox-X did the job. With a sufficiently powerful machine, the phony system was at least as speedy as machines of the era. And there are enough tweaks to speed up the boring parts. That one worked so well, I tried some demos from that time frame, and most did fine.
Some old software doesn’t play nicely on NT based Windows, notably old games tend to be finicky.
Other than that, why not? It’s interesting to see how things used to be…
Windows 2000 will run 2D games/stuff fine:
Start->Run
regsrv32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
This enabled the Windows 95/98 compatibility options for desktop shortcuts a la XP. Just set them with the right mouse button and they will run fine.
On DOSBox-X, once w98se it's installed, the dynamic core will run it much faster.
W98SE was the last windows that actually felt polished to me. Also I had the feeling that while using it (a fresh install) my computer was faster than with any other windows versions from around that time.
Later windows came with different looks, UI toolkits, ribbons, and what nots. It became a messy UI. And what the NT-stack was probably better in all kinds of ways, it always felt like it was slowing things down...
UI-wise, perhaps, but the underlying foundation was far from solid. A single poorly written program would bring the entire system to its knees. Same for drivers. System startup files would occasionally randomly break, requiring booting with a startup floppy and manually restoring them. Plus a ~512MB RAM limit. Windows NT (even 4.0 at the time) was light years ahead of that.
Oh, and I think we're forgetting the Ad Panel on the desktop, absolutely huge (at least on 800x600) toolbar buttons in Explorer, and other "bloat" IE integration brought us in W98 ;)
If you want to install NT 4.0 on DosBox-X I found this guide helpful: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x/discussions/4907#...
This. Active X was a bit of a turd; by disabling IE preloading W98SE was almost snapppy... until a heavy threaded working environment crawled it down; was very subpar compared to w2k/XP, even under a Pentium 4 and 512 MB of RAM.
interesting