VirtualBox Windows 98se step by step

[medowe]

Has anyone installed this on VirtualBox 5.1 or higher?  I'm trying a few and I'm getting occasional random crashes and random complete sound loss until reboot.  Is there a way to create a virtual USB stick?

[Kurt_Aust]

It works for me using VirtualBox 5.2.x on multiple systems using several different operating systems.

Have you checked the troubleshooting section of the guide?

[medowe]

On 6/21/2019 at 6:45 AM, Kurt_Aust said:

It works for me using VirtualBox 5.2.x on multiple systems using several different operating systems.

Have you checked the troubleshooting section of the guide?

What host OS are you using?  I've been doing some testing things are running ok with a Debian Host but with a Windows 7 Host, I keep getting errors everywhere. 

[ZaPbUzZ]

um i tried virtualbox 6.1 and it didn't go well can someone please tell me the last known good version?

[jumper]

5.2.x on a Debian host....

[Kurt_Aust]

I'd recommend sticking 5.2.x for the foreseeable future, not just for Win 98se but also because they dropped 3D graphics support for Win XP in 6.1.x

[ZaPbUzZ]

oh my .... i got Virtualbox v5.02.002.38 and i had to turn off hardware virtualisation or blue screen in guest. Then when i went to put in a generic opengl display driver

for 32mb memory in guest i gots another BSOD.

It doesn't like my AMD cpu by the looks.

the latest v6 virtualbox allows virtualisation and graphics driver doesn't bsod in guest but sound is not working properly. I found there was internet communications it turned out to be microsoft error reports about vb runtime?

If i use millennium with AC97 audio its a bit better but when i go to play music or use midi it chops and mutes.

Has anyone experienced virtualbox menu screen crashes with pure virtualisation error? i noticed internet traffic about that error vbox v6.x

yes, its microsoft online error reporting in the background its related to its vc library support maybe broken due to security fixes in vb runtime.

well, it looks pretty but i cant rely on it for audio and been to vmware land and behold i hate it too lol

guess nothing beats real hardware support so i will stick to the old pc now.

besides got myself a yamaha xg ymf soundcard only windows 9x supports it's hardware midi tone bank frankly ive alwys hated nt

-edit-

Its windows 10's fault i found out older versions of windows 10 didn't cause this to me but linux i don't use. Maybe its time.

Edited December 6, 2020 by ZaPbUzZ
spelling and info update

[shelby]

Is there usb drivers for greek edition? I found the english edition but it change the system languange to english

[jumper]

Try rloew's usb mass storage driver, USB.

 

Edited January 28, 2023 by jumper

[Kurt_Aust]

Updated the guide, main change is to use the newly available SoftGPU video driver.

[UCyborg]

I tried SoftGPU and GL Checker reports 3D HW acceleration works. I got an error from the installer that it didn't find the working PCI bus. Not sure if related, but on the old VM I was testing, USB 2.0 was enabled and NUSB drivers were installed. VM was run with VirtualBox 7.0.10 (current version ATM).

Still, games are very slow, about 20 - 50 FPS in Half-Life in OpenGL mode in Hazard Course. Task Manager on the host indicated GPU's 3D capabilities were in use. Half-Life is pretty primitive, I guess anything more demanding would be a slideshow. In fact, even Half-Life's D3D renderer ran at about 10 FPS or less, that's all in 640x480. Haven't used such low resolution in practice in many years.

[Kurt_Aust]

On 8/10/2023 at 5:45 PM, UCyborg said:

I tried SoftGPU and GL Checker reports 3D HW acceleration works. I got an error from the installer that it didn't find the working PCI bus. Not sure if related, but on the old VM I was testing, USB 2.0 was enabled and NUSB drivers were installed. VM was run with VirtualBox 7.0.10 (current version ATM).

Still, games are very slow, about 20 - 50 FPS in Half-Life in OpenGL mode in Hazard Course. Task Manager on the host indicated GPU's 3D capabilities were in use. Half-Life is pretty primitive, I guess anything more demanding would be a slideshow. In fact, even Half-Life's D3D renderer ran at about 10 FPS or less, that's all in 640x480. Haven't used such low resolution in practice in many years.

The guide as written is meant for a new install, I can't know what legacy issues might be in an existing Win 98se VM.

However the failed PCI bus is a known issue when using SoftGPU on QEMU, as indicated of the main SoftGPU page.

Your best bet for advice on performance limitations is to ask there and hopefully get a response from the creator of SoftGPU.

Still in the end it is just an advanced software driver/GPU, it can't be expected to achieve the performance of real physical GPU.

 

Now if you're agnostic about how you get to playing old games that no longer work on modern versions of Windows, you may want to consider a Linux distribution.

Counter-intuitive I know, but I've gotten good results playing older games on Linux Mint using the Play on Linux front end for WinE.

For one thing it sends the graphics commands to your actual physical hardware, for instance it had no problems running King's Bounty: Armoured Princess (including the 3D effects) on my system (i7-5930K, 32GB RAM, GTX 960-4G).

Edited August 11, 2023 by Kurt_Aust

[UCyborg]

There's nothing particularly special about the old VM, it was setup few years ago (2018-2020) with Win98 SE, drivers, KernelEx 4.5.2, VLC Player and practically left alone ever since, so technically it's still fresh install. Guess I could start again from zero and use USB 1.1 instead and no KernelEx (the latter is disabled by default on current install, though). I suspect "broken PCI bus" doesn't really have anything to do with performance, turning off 3D acceleration in VirtualBox slows down things further. 3D performance was always poor in my experience in both VirtualBox and VMware, even on supported OS.

Anyway, I just tried it out of curiosity, not for seriously running games on it. All my old games work on Windows 10.

[Kurt_Aust]

Changes -11 Sep 2023

• Updated SoftGPU to v0.4.2023.19-alpha
• Added Visual C++ 2008 and .NET Framework 2.0 to the installed applications
• Added more terminal commands and adjusted the guide in order be able to install on AMD Zen2 Host CPUs (still unstable though)
• Found fix for Media Player Classic showing a black screen

[Kurt_Aust]

Changes - 19 Sep 2023

• Added support for the Revolutions Pack
• Wrote a script for Windows users to apply the required VM settings
• Included updated info from JHRobotics in the VMWare Player install guide