Windows 98 running on Dosbox Staging (Tips & Tricks + Findings) #2054
Replies: 7 comments 30 replies
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Yikes, I just found a nasty bug. Moving your mouse too fast causes Windows 98 to freeze and if you continuously do so will make it crash. See: https://youtu.be/IRprhj5nW-A?t=172 for the exact time of the crash. See entire video to confirm it was running. |
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fairly similar situation for win95 while it kind of works, there are limitations that make using win9x not reasonable in dosbox |
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Hello Im trying to run games like age of empires 2 Thank you |
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Most of this guide appears to hold true in the latest build of Staging (0.81.0). I had already worked out most of the above settings based on extensive testing with DOSBox SVN. Personally, I find "mcb_fault_strategy = allow" gives me better results than repair. I was getting a lot of crashes in File Explorer until I made that change. I notice the autoexec bat contains a line to mount an ISO file as E: drive, but that has no effect in the Windows environment because there is currently no IDE emulation in DOSBox Staging, which is one of the reasons DOSBox-X has an advantage in this area. However, the raw speed of the dynamic core in the latest 0.81.0 alpha build does make up for this with demanding games, particularly those requiring 3DFX. When I was using a Mac, I patched the DOSBox Pure implementation of the 3DFX emulation into DOSBox SVN, and it worked great. Much more stable and speedy, even with bilinear filtering enabled. I found the implementation of the older 3DFX patch in DOSBox-X to be very slow. I am happy that the Staging crew have seemingly taken the path of implementing the DOSBox Pure version of the patch into the current code base. If only there was IDE emulation. That is the last remaining hurdle to making Staging a better option than DOSBox-X, at least for the purpose of playing games in a Win9x environment. I am sure DOSBox-X would still be superior for offering stability and a host of refinements to more properly support a fully functioning Win9x install. So we now have:
Missing IDE emulation means that using software like Virtual Clone drive is necessary for installing and running games. It also means that rare Windows-only mixed mode / Redbook audio CD games (i.e. Silent Thunder) still need DOSBox-X if you want to hear the music. I have tried every image-mounting program that ever worked in Win98 and none of them seem capable of reading Rebook audio off a bin/cue image. |
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More is missing regarding Windows 9x support, comparing to DOSBox-X. The CPU core does not handle page faults correctly enough which might lead to emulator crash, S3 card emulation is behind X and you have to be careful which driver you install, lack of FAT32 support makes data exchange less convenient, etc. |
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Yeah, not disputing any of that. DOSBox-X has for years focused on the odds and ends needed to better support Win9x. My objective has been firmly set on maximizing raw performance for games within the Win9x environment, and I found that for the last three years or so, up to date SVN was stable enough for most to work fine - I believe this has carried through into Staging. My day-to-day experience has been very little crashing once a game is running. Any instability, errors, sudden quits etc. have all happened when trying to do various things within the File Explorer. If key features are missing, most games do not seem to need them in order to run. |
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Does this work with the latest main release? I'm having issues. |
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Hello folks,
As I was made aware by @kcgen on Discord, Windows 98 and 95 is outside of the scope of the project... Nonetheless, I got it working with the Fat32 test (see #1964 ). Here some observations I had:
mcb_fault_strategy = repair
because in my testing it made it run (reduced the crashing close to 0)machine = svga_s3
as loading anything above that (svga_et3000, svga_et4000, svga_paradise, vesa_nolfb, vesa_oldvbe) would instantly crash Windows 98vesa_modes = compatible
andvmemsize = 8
works great!startup_verbosity = auto
is recommendedcputype = pentium_slow
is recommended (though 486_slow also works and others probably will)core = dynamic
is recommendedcycles = max 105%
orcycles = max
orcycles = auto
.Besides that, here is the autoexec I was running:
And here are the results on DOOM!:
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