I've long dabbled with virtual machines to emulate Windows 95 & 98 - this before GOG came along to fix quite a few games. But right now, my huge collection of games has a "dark age" - games spanning from 1996 to 2002 or so. Many many of these games can't be run properly on a modern system and require 3D acceleration meaning my old virtual machines are powerless.

So I ask the question here - does anyone know a good solution for a virtual machine that CAN do 3D support (D3D mainly) for Win95-Win98 and WinXP games? I don't need top end performance - just enough to run these games in a contained environment where they can't screw with my Windows (older games tend to change resolution and if they hang, it messes up my desktop).

If anyone can help me with a solution that suits my needs perfectly and properly links to what I need, I'll let them pick a $6 game as well.

I remember getting Diablo 1 to run in a VM was a bitch, but this is all I could find regarding 3D acceleration in a VM

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualization-3d-support-vmware.html

I've also been on the search for a suitable VM capable of 3D acceleration.

Virtual PC doesn't support it. VirtualBox and VMWare don't provide guest additions for Win95/98 3D acceleration. Bochs (which emulates the processor, and is therefore going to be the most robust on the whole otherwise) doesn't offer it at all.

QEMU has Virgil, but it's far from being ready for purpose and is aimed towards a Linux guest as opposed to Win95/98, so there's no guarantee that drivers will be written for it. That being said, Virgil is open-source, so the odds of a community effort are higher than with VirtualBox.

There's also the chance that development on DOSBox may faciliate the use of its Glide features with Windows 95/98, but the developers of DOSBox are rather hostile to this usage, so any efforts in this field will again be community-driven.

In other words, I'm afraid it's a waiting game for people like us.

Edit: You may want to consider WINE under Linux. I've got lucky with a few games under Ubuntu with WINE set to Windows 98. Also, I believe that if you use the 32-bit version of WINE, you can even run 16-bit applications under 64-bit Linux. I'm not sure if this really works, but I might give it a try later.

That's pretty interesting. I might set up a dual boot to Linux after hearing that.

I assume you already know that hardware 3D acceleration can be enabled on VMWare but you are looking for a cost effective solution to run your old games. I haven't tried it myself but while poking around online I think I may have found something worth looking into. You can enable hardware 3D acceleration on a Virtual Machine by using the free Oracle VirtualBox, which you can download from <span class="bold">here</span>

Following is an excerpt from the VirtualBox manual regarding hardware 3D acceleration :

The 3D acceleration currently has the following preconditions:

1. It is only available for certain Windows, 3D acceleration with Windows guests requires Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7. Both OpenGL and Direct3D 8/9 (not with Windows 2000) are supported (experimental).

2. The Guest Additions must be installed.

3. Because 3D support is still experimental at this time, it is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the VM settings.

For further details regarding the instructions above please refer to section 4.4. Hardware-accelerated graphics in the <span class="bold">user manual</span>

I also found a comprehensive step by step guide that shows how to enable 3D acceleration (specifically Direct3D) on a virtual machine running Windows 7 created on VirtualBox:

<span class="bold">How to enable Hardware 3D acceleration</span>

Although the guide shows Windows 7 it can also definitely be done on Windows XP as well as can be observed from the instructions in the user manual above.

I hope this is what you were looking for, please try it out and let me know as I would be really interested to know how it turned out. :)

Vmware would be the best solution, but yeah maybe expensive.
Even then you won't be able to run all games, i know that from experience. It's always missing some old driver/program/hanging on something unknown. And i assume that will be for other programs too.
For example i am trying Dark Side of the Moon, and it's hanging on the loading screen of the game engine, and nothing shows up in an error log or on google on how to fix it.
Let's say 90% of your games will work, if you have Win 95/98 and XP installed (yes sometimes a game is very picky like Star Trek Generations and will just run on one of the three OS).

A good second choice will always be a real old pc like a pentium 2 or something and multiboot win95/98/xp on it, it wouldn't have to cost that much.

VMWare Player, it is free. Forget VirtualBox, the performance is not comparable.

Or Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012 R2 if you have the crazy GPU to use RemoteFX.

I do not know about the performance as I haven't tested myself but if you'd rather alternatively like to try VMWare Player like Elenarie suggests instead of VirtualBox then you could do as follows:

- Download VMWare Player <span class="bold">here</span>

- Following the instructions for enabling accelerated 3D on Windows XP using these <span class="bold">instructions</span>

Wow a lot of info here.

I'll check out VMWare Player and see if I can get DX5-8 games running. I see a lot of DX8-9 stuff but those still run fine on Windows 8 so its rather pointless to use a Virtual Machine for that. It's exactly the older Windows games that run into issues exactly because early DX version support had dropped in Vista, 7 & 8.

Thanks in advance for all the help - I'm sure others will be interested in all this info as well since there's still a lot of games GOG can't add because of compatibility issues on modern systems. If VMWare Player works, I'll post back.

Still better performance compared to VirtualBox, at least in my experience. Have used both for several years. Using Hyper-V now, though not for gaming.

I know that both VMWare and VirtualBox do not support 3D acceleration for Win95/98 but I still think Windows XP compatibility has a better chance of running Win 95/98 games. Therefore, I just provided RedAvatar with something to try out and as far as fixed resolution is concerned it wouldn't be a big problem on a Virtual Machine as that is the reason RedAvatar wants to run his old games in a virtual environment.

Also I would argue that what would be the practical use of providing support for 3D acceleration or any other features on virtual machines running legacy Windows operating systems like Win 95/98 other then playing old games, because in this day and age I don't think the primary use of virtual machines by home and enterprise users is to run Win 95/98. So if RedAvatar wants a fool proof solution than it would be best to just get an old PC and run Windows 95/98 on it like lugum suggested. Anyway, like everyone else I was just trying to help with a suggestion and its up to RedAvatar to try it or not. :)

I actually had a Win98 work station but transferring files is a nightmare. In a virtual station, you can usually mount an ISO file which is a fast way to do things but older PCs don't even have USB ports so you're forced to burn CDs all the time.

Also, because I have limited space, I can't have an old CRT screen sitting about and the advantage of a virtual machine, is that it runs in a window meaning I can have 1:1 pixel quality vs using an LCD on an old PC and having jaggy pixels due to 800x600 being shown as 1280x1024 i.e. about 1,5 pixels for every pixel leading to warped text, etc.

From the sound of it, there's no real solution. Windows XP DOES offer some better compatibility - BUT if it only works with DX9 games, it's useless for what I need it for. Can anyone confirm that DX5, 6, 7 & 8 games also work in VMWare under Windows XP?

Oops... never mind. Good luck! It sounds like the old hardware is going to be the only real way.

Do you have 2 empty PCI slots? If yes you could buy SB Live, Voodoo 3 and try to dual boot Win98 and your contemporary system. Works well for me. For files transfer I have shared fat32 partition. I also use 1 LCD with singal switching (VGA + 3dfx and DVI is connected with my main card)