Windows 95 question

[mysts]

We have windows 7 -> vmware -> windows xp. Everything works very well. Is there anyway to add windows 95 to vmware. We have some games that we would like to play but they were designed to run on win95 only.

[aedipuss]

when running xp try right clicking on the game and setting it to run in w95 compatibility mode.

[jagabo]

I've run Win98 on vmware. You can probably install Win95 but I doubt any Win95-only games will run on it. A lot of Win95 games were really DOS games with a Win95 icon that would shut down Windows and run the game in DOS mode.

[Ethlred]

Why not use Sun's, now Oracles, Virtual Box? Its free and you should be able to install Win95 to it. I don't have my copy of Win95 hanging around to check myself.

Ethelred

[jagabo]

I installed Win95 under the free VMWare Player last night. It's running fine.

[mysts]

jagabo

Which host OS are you using?

[jagabo]

jagabo

Which host OS are you using?

Win7 Ultimate 64 bit. I used a DOS boot floppy with CD drivers and a Win95 install CD.

[ranchhand]

Jagabo... have you tried any old games on the Win95? I tried that once with Win98 for Mechwarrior 3 (old DOS game) and it did run, but it was glitchy and in fast motion, couldn't use it. So I threw together an original Win98 box from old parts and all the old games run great on it.

[jagabo]

I just installed it last night so I haven't tried a lot of software. I still don't have the audio working but I tried running a Tomb Raider II CD. It seemed to be working fine.

[Cornucopia]

The only problem I've found using vm versions of DOS, W95, etc games on either vmware, virtualbox or virtualPC is the virtual audio drivers may not be "generic SB-compatible" enough, or you have to do some major mods to the audio configs to get them to be recognized.

Scott

[mysts]

We have given up trying to install windows 95 into vmware.
Instead we decided to dedicate a harddrive and install ms-dos then windows 95 into that.
In order to do this we have to format the harddrive to fat or fat16. We have searched google and yahoo for information on how to do this and found nothing on fat or fat16. Does anyone know how to format a harddrive to fat of fat16?

[yoda313]

@mysts - I'm not sure how reliable this link is so use at your own risk: (the content of the process - the page itself is safe for viewing )

http://home.pacbell.net/dbk4297/fdiskformat.html

First page on a search for format harddrive for windows 95.

Use fdisk to do this.

[El Heggunte]

Windows 95 SP2 happily supports FAT32 --- which means,
you can use fdisk w/ the option -fprmt
( so you can apply FAT32 on disks with less than 512MB ),
and then, run "format" with the option /z:2 ---
this will give you clusters of 1024 bytes,
if you don't like to waste HDD space.

[jagabo]

The first release of Win95 only supported FAT12 and FAT16 and was limited to a maximum drive size of 2 GB. I'm not sure exactly when, but by the time OSR2 was released FAT32 and larger drives were supported. SwissKnife can create and format both FAT16 and FAT32 partitions.

[intracube]

We have given up trying to install windows 95 into vmware.
Instead we decided to dedicate a harddrive and install ms-dos then windows 95 into that.
In order to do this we have to format the harddrive to fat or fat16. We have searched google and yahoo for information on how to do this and found nothing on fat or fat16. Does anyone know how to format a harddrive to fat of fat16?

Just a word of caution; I tried to install Windows 98* onto my current computer when I first got it, out of curiosity - to see how well it would run on an up to date machine.
*fairly sure it was W98 rather than W95

It didn't. It got through the installation process, but then refused to boot. I think it was complaining about too much RAM. I didn't pursue it any further, and I can't remember if there was an easy way around the problem (this was all 4 years ago), but maybe it'll jog someone else's memory.

Just found this link:
http://forums.cnet.com/7723-6618_102-14734.html

I think I tried the workaround described on that page, but didn't get anywhere (I've got 2GB RAM). The workaround only seems to work with W98, and for machines <= 1GB RAM.

[yoda313]

@intracube - was it on a 64bit machine? Could that have been your issue? Or did it actually complete the install and just refused to load?

[intracube]

@intracube - was it on a 64bit machine? Could that have been your issue?

Yes, AMD Athlon64 x2. I think the error message I got was related to the amount of RAM. I don't know if having a 64bit processor would be an additional problem, as I didn't never resolved the memory issue.

Or did it actually complete the install and just refused to load?

ISTR it got through most/all of the install process, then said it needed to reboot to complete the installation and came up with an error after the BIOS screen. Doing a search of the error code led me to the RAM issue.

[yoda313]

well the 64bit processor probably didn't help.

I'm surprised the install took hold at all. How would a 32bit os know what a 64bit chip was? Was there some forward thinking ms did that nobody knew about? Or was it a fluke it started the install at all? Or something else?

[intracube]

I'm surprised the install took hold at all. How would a 32bit os know what a 64bit chip was? Was there some forward thinking ms did that nobody knew about? Or was it a fluke it started the install at all? Or something else?

I know very little about this area, but x86-64 has a 'compatibility mode':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
- "It is fully backwards compatible with 32-bit code. Because the full 32-bit instruction set remains implemented in hardware without any intervening emulation, existing 32-bit x86 executables run with no compatibility or performance penalties"

also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Legacy_mode

[yoda313]

I'm surprised the install took hold at all. How would a 32bit os know what a 64bit chip was? Was there some forward thinking ms did that nobody knew about? Or was it a fluke it started the install at all? Or something else?

I know very little about this area, but x86-64 has a 'compatibility mode':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
- "It is fully backwards compatible with 32-bit code. Because the full 32-bit instruction set remains implemented in hardware without any intervening emulation, existing 32-bit x86 executables run with no compatibility or performance penalties"

also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Legacy_mode

Duh I'm shooting myself in the foot here...

I run windows vista 32bit on a amd 64 x2

However my thinking is of an older os like 95 BEFORE 64 bit chips were mainstream....


------------thanks for the link on the compatibility issue

[jagabo]

Intel and AMD though about this ahead of time. All x86 processors boot in 16 bit mode. The OS has to enable 32 bit mode or 64 bit mode. So Win98 doesn't have to know about 64 bit mode. The 64 bit CPUs will run fine as 32 bit processors. And, of course, you can still boot DOS which only knows about 16 bit mode.

[Cornucopia]

What, no more 8bit mode???

Scott

[jagabo]

There is no 8 bit mode. The 8088 (used in the original IBM PC) had an external 8 bit data bus but internally had the same 16 bit registers and instruction set as the 8086. Ie, to the software it was a 16 bit CPU.

Before the x86 the 8008 and 8080 CPUs were 8 bit but they had completely different architectures and instruction sets.

[ranchhand]

I thought one of the big problems was FAT32 vs. NTFS file system.

[jagabo]

I thought one of the big problems was FAT32 vs. NTFS file system.

That's not a problem on a VM. Format the virtual drive with whatever file system you need.