I need to run Win 95 to play an old game; should I run under bochs or VMWare?

January 13, 2005 6:54 PM

Cleanse, Fold, Emulate: If you found yourself needing to run Windows 95 and only Windows 95 to play an old game (neither WINE nor Win2k under VMWare work - it has to be Win95), would you run Win95 under bochs or VMWare? VMWare is certainly a lot more straightforward, but it looks like bochs might give you more control over the emulated machine.
posted by Captain_Tenille to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Huh? How does that work? I had a rather expensive software toy that would only run on Win95 and no other Win. On my Win95 machine, it was always to slow. When I got a better machine, it wouldn't run because it did not support anything later than Win95. Is there hope I can actually run it on an XP machine????
posted by Doohickie at 7:34 PM on January 13, 2005

If you have a VMWare license, use VMWare. If not, use bochs or Microsoft's VirtualPC.
posted by cmonkey at 7:37 PM on January 13, 2005

Huh? How does that work? I had a rather expensive software toy that would only run on Win95 and no other Win. On my Win95 machine, it was always to slow. When I got a better machine, it wouldn't run because it did not support anything later than Win95. Is there hope I can actually run it on an XP machine????

What you could do, doohickie, is buy either VMWare Workstation or VirtualPC, install it on your Windows XP machine, put Windows 95 in the virtual machine, and then install your software on the virtual Windows 95 install. It works quite well.
posted by cmonkey at 7:47 PM on January 13, 2005

bochs has pretty rotten performance; consider QEMU instead. But really, cmonkey's got it right: I'm sure you'd be happiest with VMWare if you can afford it.
posted by Galvatron at 7:52 PM on January 13, 2005

When you upgrade, keep your old machines. I have Win 95, Win 98, Win XP, Win 2000 and Linux boxes, many of them a little long in the tooth. I need an Apple box. Nevertheless, by keeping all the old crap, I can run any Windows program. Mostly this allows me to enjoy old history, but every now an then I get an old game or whatnot that requires the ancient operating system. (I am almost too embarrassed to mention the DOS box that only recently met its demise.)
posted by caddis at 9:25 PM on January 13, 2005

If you don't have an old box lying around then VMWare or VirtualPC like others said. BOCHS and Qemu actually emulate an entire machine on top of your existing hardware right down to the CPU. Emulating CPUs is slow, and probably pointless if you're running one with a superset of the instruction set (even if the processor speed is an order of magnitude faster)
posted by substrate at 5:19 AM on January 14, 2005

XP has a Win95 compatibility mode. Go to the EXE properties and the "Compatibility" tab. Worth a shot.
posted by neckro23 at 7:56 AM on January 14, 2005