I just bought some old CDROM games and some of them require Win95\Win98. I've tried DOSBox and VirtualBox but neither seems to do a very good job of playing games from about 1995-1997. Does anyone have any advice for me about the best way to play these? I'm using Windows 8 Pro X64.

Here's the games I bought if you're interested:

http://twitpic.com/bwlpry/full

http://twitpic.com/bvaajm/full


Thanks very much!

NOLF 2 should run just fine as is with a regular windows setup. I had trouble getting it to work on my old system but that was years ago. Whatever you do, you must get it working because it is one the funniest, funnest, and groovy baby stealth FPS games on the whole shagadelic planet baby! Install it and screw around with combatibility mode untill it works.

Well you shouldn't have any problem with NOLF2, you can bypass the CD-key check (which is often problematic with older games) simply by launching the game with a different command line and it works on modern systems (haven't tried on W8 but it worked on W7).

For real Win95/98 games it might be a lot harder, there is no real easy solution except having older hardware available with a real 95/98 installation. Alternatively you can try installing 95/98 in DOSBOX, I heard it works for some games but I never actually tried it myself.

If you have Win98 then VMWare Player Lite virtual machine works too. I have VM98 set up on my 7 64 Home Premium computer.

Thanks for the pics. :) Very cool stuff.

Quest for Glory V soundtrack #)&$#@&$#)@&ER#@&E#@

The stuff on the Creative disc will work on DOSBox. I have that so it should run without problems.

I -think- Borg has DOS binaries in there too.

you could install a virtual machine with Windows 98 on it, or buy a Windows 98 or XP computer from ebay.
[ i still have my old XP computer and it works fine]

Time travel.

(sorry, I just had to do it)

edit: Oh man, I loved In The 1st Degree! I wish I still had it.

Have you tried Wine? Sometimes it works better for old games than the Windows options.

Or, you could probably find a copy of Win 98 at the local used book shop, I remember years ago them having dozens of copies for like $1 each.

You guys are awesome. I've been playing with VMware all evening and am getting closer. Maybe I'll try the game through WINE on virtualized Ubuntu. How meta is that? Best answer so far. If VMware doesn't work this will be my fallback.

That would be very unstable and particularly sluggish.
Your best option is to simply get Microsft's Virtual PC. I don't know if it'd work on Windows 8, but it's free and from Microsoft themselves, so no compatibility issues there.
There is also Virtual Box, but that one doesn't seem to run on Windows 8.

Ooh Fade to Black.

Remember playing that in playstation.. I remember it being quite awesome.

Ya know...

You could probably pick up an old Win 95 box for a pittance. Use a KVM switch to go between monitors and you could be dual boxing without having to do any finagling with Win8.

So far I've only had luck getting Borg to run on Win98 in VMware. I got confused trying to set up WINE but I'll give it another shot tonight.

I'm greatly disappointed that NOLF2 doesn't run so far. I had little trouble running it in Win7 but Win8 has been a problem. Working on it.

Virtual PC doesn't run on Win8, unfortunately. Sun Virtualbox runs very well on Win8 but it doesn't have VM extensions for Win95 through WinME so it's very sluggish and no good for gaming. VMware and DOSbox seem to be my best bet so far. I'll let you guys know how it goes with my experimentation!

No, not "unfortunately". That's a good thing given how utterly useless VirtualPC got after Microsoft took over after Connectix. What you want is the replacement, Hyper-V, which is built-in in Windows 8.

http://winsupersite.com/article/windows8/windows-8-feature-focus-client-hyperv-142889.

Then again, I'm quite sure the only VM hypervisor that may (perhaps) offer 3D acceleration under 9x is VirtualBox (and Xen, but that one requires a Linux host and a graphics card that you can dedicate to the guest so that Windows uses it directly rather than through virtualization).