Instead of mounting the vhd (which takes a lot of clicks and time), you can simply put all those drivers folders inside a folder to mount the folder as a CD driver. By the way, this is the best solution for those who, for whatever reason, chose to make an HDD image other than .vhd format. Edit: by using this method, the only thing that one must be aware of is that the sb16 installation file MUST BE copied from the CD to a folder in the win98 hd (cuz it will decompress itself, and it wont work while it is on the "CD", because CD medium is read-only, and 86box treat the mounted CD as that.
Nice video covering this gem of a program, I use it for all kinds of old emulating stuff as well as benchmarking it vs. some other programs like DOSBox. I've found 86Box's results being quite close vs. real world benchmark results as well. Some notes from me: The CPU emulation speed is highly dependant on your host CPU's speed. With my Ryzen 5800x3D, which has 8 cores and 16 threads, I cannot reliably go over 200MHZ with a Pentium II without games and even the OS itself stuttering constantly. This can be alleviated a bit by being content in running a original Pentium and Windows 95, but I'd forget using this emulator past the 486 era without a beefy host CPU. I also don't think this emulator is multitreaded, so you'll get better performance the better your single core speed is. Another way to move files to the emulated OS is by mounting a host OS folder as a CD-ROM drive in the emulator's settings. Not as fast as copying them inside the host OS, but requires less hassle and is maybe a bit more "authentic". I also recommend constricting the emulated HDD speed to the 1995 - 1998 speed settings since this reduces throughput and thus increases performance of the emulator. The CD drive rarely needs to be higher than 8x either.
Great work showing this emulator! One other option for transferring files into the emulated machine, is to mount a directory as a CD-ROM. It works really well too.
nice detailed video, thanks Phil! I watched somewhere, to make one "empty" emulated system and use it as a template for individual games: you copy the VM, install and configure single game and put EXE in autostart, so as machine boots game starts its like a ROM for consoles, and windows installation adds about 500 mb itself to the game file, which is not a big issue and you have console like experience :) did not find detailed instructions for it, would love to do it though
I'm Playing Unreal Gold on my Nintendo Switch, it's like a dream come true experience, really good performance, the onlt caveat being no real time lights which disables the flashlight and flares, and volumetrics which is just for the visual flair, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. From someone who finished Unreal in 1998 with a Pentium 233MMX without any 3d accelarator, having this game fully portable that is not the Steam Deck and other PC Handhelds is a dream for sure.
I have a i3 10100f and it struggles to emulate accurately anything above Pentium 166mmx... even though it's like -5% performance from a stock i7 7700 the IPC is not good enough. Luckly I run win98se natively on the same i3 system :)))) just by using the PCI slots I managed to get everything recognised: gpu, sound, usb 2.0.
My 7900x overclocked, just about accurately does a 233mmx, the p2-300 nope. That's just how poor the emulation performance is. I have athlon system with AGP and ISA slot that works well
Impressive the number of systems in the configuration. Good for testing of software and hardware combos and if you have limited space. I don't think I'll be getting rid of my original hardware and not as fun as dealing with real world hardware compatibility and repairs, but as a supplement and quick usage cases it's very good..
that signal pitch spike noise at 20:10 is horrible. why people bother providing links to stuff instead of just providing a direct link, preferably a pre-made vhd, is beyond me . Like hey we don't do piracy here, but we provide everything you need to replicate it just too scared to use my own storage... - just a general gripe nothing at this channel personally. The guide is pretty useful becuase 86box has terrible documentation just like all emulators. Virtual PC 2007 still beats any of these emulators, would be much better for people to get that working than having 64 thousand dosbox builds, 86box, qemu and the endles list of worse alternatives. Win 10 32Bit still has NVTDM support and if people stopped focussing on borked replicants of emulators and instead focussed on the github projects related to directx , nvtdm and the like then we could have everything working in a 64bit OS within a month
Love this channel. All the other tech youtubers I watch have just uploaded videos about the RTX 4070 Super as the NDA has expired, and here we are on a Pentium II and Voodoo 3 😁
Man, it is a good video, but what a machine you choose to emulate on 86Box: Step 1 to emulate a Pentium II on 86Box: Break in into NASA and steal at least four supercomputers you can run in parallel! Seriously: A high end last gen Ryzen 7 would struggle with anything over a Pentium MMX 133, it is super unoptimised! (But still, so accurate and with so many options that it might be the only viable option alongside PCem, which is less feature rich, better performant, but still not great in speed, and has not seen development for years.)
This emulator is so GREAT... been using it for quite some time, the only missing thing is Sound Blaster Live with EAX emulation, once it has that, it can very well replace a true retro computer for late-DOS & Win98 gaming. But people have to keep the expectations under control, this an emulator focused on accuracy, it's not the typical console emulator, and emulating a true PC computer with 200 Mhz or more require a beast of a CPU with an immense single core performance and there's no benefit on multicore CPUs. a PII 450Mhz is out of reach for any existing consumer CPU rght now.
My Ryzen 9 7945HX can emulate PII 450Mhz without any issues in DOS. I have only tested Screamer Rally in SVGA 65k colors. Many popular games like quake are not free unfortunately. Hwinfo reports performance closer to PIII 800. Screamer rally is a smooth experience with no sound glitches. I believe modern CPUs fare much better than those 10 years ago and we are able to emulate much more than Pentium 200.
To everyone making dumb comments about performance, this is cycle exact EMULATION and not VIRTUALIZATION. And in PCEm/86Box, it's even worse than usual because they're doing it across a whole range of hardware, not just the cpu and a few chips. VirtuaBox/VMWare will do a lot better because they "offload" a ton of crap using custom drivers and don't even emulate the CPU. But it comes with it's own set of problems. QEMU will "offload" some with custom drivers, but... it's own set of problems. As before, use PCEm/86Box for the really old stuff that has a lot of problem on anything but old hardware, DosBox for most DOS stuff and find some 2nd/3rd gen Core i3 office pc in the dumpster for W98/WXP stuff. Hard part will be finding a (good) old graphics card that supports W98.
If your CPU is on the weak side, forget about emulating Windows 9x on a PII, it's going to throttle pretty bad. The best you can get is a Pentium MMX. And even that is going to require something somewhat beefy. You can get some extra performance by running Windows 2000 instead but that might not be a very good system for games.
Awesome overview of 86Box! Exactly the machine I'd want to emulate, I own two Slot 1 systems but rarely have the room to set them up. Hoping the performance improves in the future! I love how true to the hardware this emulator is, this will be how most retro enthusiasts in future generations experience it.
Out of curiosity, can you review DosBox Enhanced Community Edition? I think it has 3Dfx acceleration! A comparison with 86Box & PCEM might also be a good idea, Resource usage (RAM, CPU, harddisk footprint) Stuttering, Glitches Sound emulation Ease of integrating into a launcher (You already showed eXoDos using launchBox & the manager) especially try to run them on oldest supported hardware (maybe from XP ERA Core 2 Duo built in graphics , 4GB RAM) but using newer Operating system that support .NET Framework 4.6? Imagine how many e-waste can be used as a DOS machines BTW I noticed Unreal Tournament Gold GOG on intel965 graphics, windows8.1 runs average 120+ fps using openGl backend while it slowsdown using directX Did you know Terminal Velocity had a sequel released in same year? its called Fury3 1995
DosBOX ECE is dead, and even when it was alive it was easily eclipsed by DOSBox Staging. PCEM is also way behind in development compared to 86Box. Therefore it's easy to recommend 86Box and DOSBox Staging over these.
This is SO COOL! I mean, I'm all for retro hardware or retro rockets, but sometimes I just wanna play Sim Theme Park without booting up that rig. Good stuff Phil!
This looks like a great way to go as soon as the optimizations catch up! It reminds me of WInUAE, The Amiga emulator. It allows you to to do alot of the same type of picking and choosing for optimal support per game. I really hope these devs keep on it. It looks like the way to go.
I'm using VMware Workstation Player and Oracles VirtualBox on a 12700k and I get stuttering when the VM utilizes Efficiency Cores, I don't know if this emulator has the same issues.
Small Addition, QuickCPU should allow parking E-Cores on every System but for some reason the VM performance didn't improve. Graphics performance issues with Workstation Player, Audio issues with VirtualBox with DirectX Titles or no Sound at all when game uses ogg audio files. Sound with VLC or WMP no problem, could someone please write a capable XP VM.
Thank you Sir. I installed it at work. Everything was fine. Installed awe64 gold and tried wave table GS midi files. Surprisingly it works. Not great but works. Very cool post. I always wanted to try a awe 64 gold. Got the software off of your site. Then I tried doom with AW32. it works. wow. I noticed that setting the ram at 128 really helped vs 256. Now it runs at 400 mhz. What is amazing is this is all emulated by software. By people that must have too much time on their hands. Very cool.
First PC tower i bought as a a student in engineering school : - asus k7m - athlon slot A 500mhz - geforce 1 sdr - iiyama 17" monitor pro 410 Good old times 🎉
86Box is bad for do never get any pure smooth motion. I recommend you run lastest version of Dosbox X with very high CPU cycles-FIXED (not "max" nor "auto"), OpenGL mode and vsync enabled + 60Hz monitor for get pure smooth motion. 😍👌😁 But you use recommendly any CRT monitor or modern LCD monitor with excellent single-strobe for work 60Hz and for almost eliminate any motion blur - eg: Viewsonic XG2431 24" or XG270 27". 🙂😊😉
Shame the PCem dev quit the project because online trolls. We wouldn’t have 86box without her hard work. I hope the devs continue to improve their awesome emulator. Thanks for the tutorial, Phil!
I fight hard to build, keep, maintain, and use retro machines, like my 486DX2, a couple of Gateway P3s (Voodoo5 in one, Voodoo3 in the other, and an Athlon XP system.) However, it gets more difficult as time goes on. Parts fail. Capacitors die. CRTs are almost not worth hunting down, especially considering that they will die, and they are difficult to get rid of. Sometimes an ebay seller will lie and say that a retro part has been "tested" and "working," but the part is DOA (I had this happen with a Voodoo5 once, seller decided not to fight me on the return after listing no returns but item "tested and working," and I took pics and video of it not working and attached them to my return request.) It is inevitable that 86box and DOSbox will be the only ways to enjoy this hobby. I hope that 86box can someday use the DOSbox staging CRT shaders you showed us in another video (or maybe shaderglass someday supporting them.) Then it will be difficult NOT to use 86box, hehehe..
Nice program, i find it nerdier to run this with my MacOS and ARM M1 CPU, cause its not even close the same architecture. I mainly have 95'ish era configs, some pure MS-DOS and also MS-DOS + Win95/98 stuff configured, 486dx2/66Mhz and some earlier Pentiums. Also Gravis ultrasound is nice to have for the demoscene stuff. Good times 🤓
Amount of selected RAM affects the emulation speed - instead of 256MB select as low as 128MB or even 64MB which greatly improves emulation speed and eliminate voice issues. 64MB or 128MB is still enough for most of the games anyway. The same issue is with PCem.
Can anybody point me in the right direction? I need a 9X emu/VM with bare minimum 700Mhz CPU (preferrably at least 1.0Ghz) but also hardware accelerated graphics. 86Box's Voodoo emulation should be sufficient in theory, but the fastest CPU I can emulate full speed is a 100Mhz Pentium. I've successfully installed 9X in Linux KVM/Qemu via virt-manager, and it should be plenty fast enough CPU-wise. But even if I had a real 9X-compatible GPU around to passthrough, I doubt it would be physically compatible with my machine. Is there anyway to pass an emulated GPU to virtualized PC?
I made a Windows 98 machine following this, except I used Ensoniq AudioPCI for the sound card. I had problems with the audio lagging/stuttering with this setup. However, when I switched the CPU type to Intel Pentium Pro, and set the memory to 128 MB, the audio seems to work just fine... Using 86box, I was able to get the Ensoniq AudioPCI to work in DOS, which I couldn't get it to work in DOS in VMware! I rather like how different the games sound with it compared to the original Sound Blaster that DOSBOX emulates.
Nice, I tried a while ago on my Ryzen 5 2600 and wasn't too happy about the performance, will try again with my 5600G and 5800X to see how they stand. Thanks for all the resources!
Nite that PCem runs quite a bit faster but it is said it is less accurate. In the games I tested I didn't see a difference so I would use PCem because if the better speed.
Just wondering how others feel about Emulation & how you compare playing Retro Games on a Modern Emulating Time Machine like this to a Period Correct Build emotionally? For me while I do have just as much fun playing many of my old games like C&C from Origin & other Retro Games from my GOG Collection on my Athlon 200GE PC I don't get the Fizzy/Tingly Excitement of my Core 2 XP PC so it just doesn't feel the same emotionally.
Anyone using Win98 on 86Box for retro software development? My old Win98 dev box is starting to have issues, and outside of trying to rebuild a new one, I'd really prefer to emulate on my Linux machine. The usual suspects: VC6, Delphi7, MASM 6.15, etc. DosBox-X is doing fine for my DOS 6.22/Win4WG development, but at least with my efforts doesn't handle a Win98 box very well. Would 86Box do better for Win98 developer tools?
When did cutting your performance to 10% become so performance hungry? At this point it seems more viable to pick up old junk and underclock the heck out of it
Trying to add the extra files to to the .vhd, but get the error - "a virtual disk support provider for the specified file was not found" I tried both disk management and diskpart as admin. Using windows 7 pro 64 bit. Status of "Virtual Disk" in services is Started / Manual. Is anyone else having this issue? Update / Fix .. I edited the registry and changed the key - [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\FsDepends] Changed - "Start"=dword:00000003 from 3 to 0. That got rid of the error and got virtual disk manager working. When I try to open the .vhd created by 86box, I get the error message: "the file or directory is corrupted and unusable" ... ???
I was positively surprised that 86Box seems to be capable of emulating fast PII machines on Ryzen 9 7945HX. Authors should consider adding support for PIII 450. My old Intel Core i7-920XM could only emulate max 486DX4 100Mhz.
Ok, i´ve just dicovered this 86BOX and I am looking a way to play W98 games on my Steam Deck (I have a Windows partition). Do 86BOX work better than PCem in terms of input lag? I´ve read that PCem add a hugh input lag. Thanks for your work!
As always, awesome video. I will have to benchmark this 86Box machine vs my DOSBox Windows 95 one, with the latter one being mainly for older Win9x and Win3x games that don't need 3D acceleration. I'm installing 86Box on my work PC right now and the i3-8100 is struggling a bit. Even the cursor is struggling while installing Win98SE. Btw, next to me I have a Pentium II 400 laptop with Ati Rage LT Pro AGP which I found in one of the offices and where I installed Win98SE already. Lets see which one will get better benchmark scores. xD PS: Well, game 1 benchmark in 3D Mark 99 got 37.7 fps vs 11.2 on the laptop but the games had graphical glitches. It might have problems with Trilinear Filtering as the Bilinear tests very fine but the Trilinear one also had lots of graphical glitches. Have to test later on at home, if it's a problem with the integrated graphics of the i3-8100. PPS: At home with a R7 5800X and RTX4070 the graphics glitches remain. For example the UI in Incoming is totally messed up. The different renderers under "View" don't help, with Direct3D 9 causing a black screen. On the bright sight, Tomb Raider 2 run in 1920x1080 but going full screen, Tomb Raider 2 (installed from my backup ISO without any patches) is stretched instead of properly scaled to 16:9. One odd thing, setting the Win98 desktop resolution to 1080, having activated integer scaling and no matter if HiDPI scaling is on or off, switching to full screen, it doesn't fill my 4K screen, even though 2x 1080p should be 4K. PPPS: Alternative to mounting the virtual hard drive under the host Windows to copy files is mounting the folder of the files you want to copy as a CD-Rom withing 86Box.
Great video Phil. I seem to be stuck with what feels like a 30hz refresh rate on the monitor? I go in to the advanced display settings and have the option up to 60-120hz but they all feel the same.. Am i missing something?
the only advice I can say: You need a very strong cpu, for example, a i7-7700k can emulate max 200mhz 233mhz ish, and a ryzen 7 5700g can emulate between 233-350mhz ish everything above 300 mhz can be very stressfull for your computer, and therefore, the emulation can be slow
Just set up my own 86box with this configuration, and no notice about how important the DirectX 7a runtime is. I tried it with 6.1 included in a lot of games, and almost all of them throw an error for not seeing the GPU
i prfer to use sordums simple vhd manager to mount/unmount virtual drives. works a treat, keeps track, you can toggle as you like and be done with it. infinitely less annoying than the windows disk manager.
86box seems to do a better job emulating a Voodoo 3 graphics than PCem, unfortunately I can go as high as a Pentium MMX 150 with a Voodoo 3, the emulation is not perfect though there are games that won't run.
For playing DOS Games? DOSBox Staging hands down. But if you want to interact with the BIOS, partition drive, and test stuff outside of games, then PCem and 86Box are better. But really, the advantage is Windows 9x for those.
I find PCem is a little lighter and runs smoother (probably because its not been updated in quite some time) 86Box is more accurate to the hardware in my experience and for that a little harder on you hardware to run.
86Box is a fork of PCem with some quality of life improvements. I'd expect the performance and system requirements between them to be pretty close to the same.
Another amazing video, as always, but did i missed the part where you need to change a certain value in the "regedit" so that "98cd in the hard drive thing" can really work? Not for me, but for those who can't find that info.. One more time, a huge huge thank you!! Please don't take offense in this comment, not that intended!
If an i9 13900 struggles to emulate a 450 MHz Pentium II system I can't imagine how long it will be until we have computers that can emulate Pentium 4-era systems with no issues! 86Box sounds pretty amazing, though. I've only ever tried VirtualBox and I didn't like it at all. There was no emulation of specific hardware like with 86Box.
I wonder if it will actually be needed by the time we get to it. Backwards compatibility is rather strong from the year 2000 on. I am rather sure a 450 PII is going play anything that you can't just play natively on a modern PC.
@@AxiomofDiscord There are few games that can be very tricky to run on modern systems. One example is the original release of The Sims. If you want to play the disc version there’s no way. The only way to play the game is to have the complete edition and then there’s a patch for it. Also Tony Hawk 3 is difficult to get running. There’s a patch for it but it’s hard to find it online.
@@2Plus2isChicken2013 Seems pretty reaching when you say oh these games have trouble running unless you patch them. I Believe I have the Sims I will give that a try, maybe I can trip by Tony Hawk 3 and see how it goes.
@@AxiomofDiscord It's just more annoyance than it should be to have to find patches to run games. Tony Hawk 3 requires a 500 MHz Pentium III at minimum, so running it in 86Box is out of the question. I'd prefer not to have to go looking around sketchy websites to find patches to my games. Unfortunately if we're not able to emulate beyond a 450 MHz Pentium II there will always be a few games that require that in order to be played, mainly stuff that came out in the early 2000s. Not every PC game from that period is available digitally.
My computer can run some apps on a PII up to 300mhz but a lot more consistent around 233mhz and that is enough to run everything I got that struggles running natively. I have a Ryzen 7700x this emulator seems to favor Intel but not massively from what I have heard. I know some console emulators favor Ryzen, which is the thing that made me go that route more than anything else.
Version 4.2 seems to run at 300mhz better, I have yet to try any higher clocks. If anyone thinks the mouse really lags bad hook up a 98se computer to the same monitor as your modern computer and see if it is about as bad. I find I forgot how bad the precision of old OS pointers were. Modern life has spoiled me. Oh and the old FPS games really lack some motion smoothing and I can see why many people would get motion sick.
Before I built my retro PCs I played around with different virtualisation tools and emulators. It was a great learning experience and meant the set up went a lot quicker when I built the real thing. But as you say, performance really isn’t that great yet (doesn’t help my only modern computer is a Mac) so for me, it has to be the real thing for now…
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My personal tip: before installing any games, shut down the emulated PC and compress the whole thing into a backup file. That way you have a base state you can revert to anytime you want to start from a clean slate, without having to do the whole setup once again.
After spending couple do days figuring staff out, I can say that this video needs a caveat about voodoo3 drivers. One the games I use for testing is a WH Dark Omen, which is notoriously hard to launch on modern hardware and OS. Turns out it also kind of flaky on voodoo3. It works on driver v1.01.02, but fails to launch on 1.03.00 and ANY later drivers, including recommended here amigamerlin one. Another hard case is SW Rogue Squadron, which i managed to make work correctly only on 1.03.00, later and earlier drivers have multitude of visual issues. Probably Voodoo3 emulation should be only recommended for DX7 games, where newest community drivers work well. It seems like for DirectX5-6-6.1 using S3 Trio64 + Voodoo Graphics emulation set to Voodoo2 works best in term of compatibility where both games worked on 3.01.01 driver.
I had this setup about 2 months back and stopped playing with it when i got some new hardware in. that said i remember the windows 98 sound skipping now. speed emulation issues humm? I did not see what are the specs of your machine? I think i was running it on a ryzen 5 5600g with 16gb of ram
Really nice guide! But you left out the details how to identify if your system is too slow - so i will clarify that ;-) Both 86Box and PCem shows the emulation speed in the window title or status bar. If the emulation system stays within 99-100% you are totally fine. If the speed drops a bit randomly to max. 80% for a short period of time and gets back to 100%, its fine either - even if you get sound or frame laggs. But if your system is constantly below 100%, please downgrade your emulated CPU frequency or choose a lower CPU generation. Also you may try a AMD K6-II or K6-III based machine, but note that such CPU class is much higher demanding than any intel pentium series CPU's, due to its RISC implementation.
Tried in a AMD Athlon X2 64 4000 but it runs extremely sluggish. You need a very fast proxessor to run this. Using Oracle Vm runs 98 really neat but without video acceleration.
Interesting. One question, could the data in the vhd be copied to a similar real system (with same board and chipset)? Could be a nice way of fastracking building a retro machine without dealing with the hw side, specially when using an SDtoIDE hdd solution.
Yes! Many people are doing exactly this in situations when the Retro PC doesn't have an option to boot from Floppy or CD. But be aware, Windows 98 and old machines can be a bit finicky when it comes to storage...
Try PS2Rate utility to up the polling rate of the PS/2 mouse. I remember using it on real hardware and funnily enough it works on 86Box too. 200hz makes the mouse feel a fair bit smoother and nicer. Hopefully the devs will implement seamless mouse feature, or at least something that will make the mouse feel as smooth as on the host machine. I've been using DOSBox Staging for this very reason and it's a massive game changer (as well as their dos_rate parameter, try setting it to 1000). It works fine with a lot of games and it makes the mouse ultra smooth and responsive (for example, I always found Master of Orion 2's mouse to feel laggy and odd on older DOSBox, but on Staging it's silky smooth).
I completed Grim Fandango on PCem a couple of years ago. I was emulating Pentium 200MMX with a 3DFX Voodoo 1 (which was the exact config I had in the late 90's, when I played Grim Fandango first) and what I really really liked about this was that PCem has a special Voodoo shader filter which emulates the looks of the real Voodoo render - and quite faithfully too, I think. 😂 And I know, this may sound strange, but I prefered playing Grim Fandango like this instead of the remastered version in all it's high resolution glory. Something about that soft and smeared low rez Voodoo look just kinda made me happy specifically in Grim Fandango (and also Unreal).
Last time I ran 86Box my way to transfer files was a CD burning software (K3b on Linux). Used to add/remove files in an ISO to be mounted as a CD rom by the emulated win98. Works with the emulated machine turned on, and quite easy to use, albeit a somewhat inelegant method 😁
I use K3b to write Linux ISO to a DVD. I tried to write to a USB stick once but during boot, the BIOS was not seeing the USB stick. I will have to try again someday.
This is a very helpful intro to setting up 86Box, and even though I've done it a number of times, I learned at least one new thing (using the Disk Management utility to mount your device's disk image) which will be a huge help. Personally, I've never really been able to bump the speed on my VMs past about 200MHz on my system (using a Ryzen 7950X) without starting to suffer from pretty bad audio stuttering. It doesn't bug me too much in my case; I use it for retro development more than gaming.
Is this with less than 256mb of ram and softfloat fpu off? You should be able to use 266 easy enough and likely a little faster without audio stutters. I get some stutters here and there at startup but that is it and that does not always happen. I am only using a 7700x.
I just downloaded both the 86box and the roms files from your links, and placed the roms file in the 86box folder, but it still says the roms are missing.
My silly brain was asking the question that "Haven't we got through this before?" After I realized it was for PCem... Oops, very sorry for having such thoughts 😅 I'm like so-so on Emulators, I mean - I would love to emulate even better CPUs than Pentium II/K6-2, like a Athlon XP and such, but at same time - Like you said, seems funny that PS3 Emulators are already a thing, and this runs games like for example Grand Theft Auto V (The 2013 release, ofc), Gran Turismo 6 or something more old, like let's say Call of Duty 3... Meanwhile Pentium II emulation on PCem/86Box struggles with Keeping the audio without much stuttering, when something is loading or some of the games' performance. Kinda weird if you ask me. It's fun to mess around with the specs and whatnot, but for some serious gaming it's still a LOOOOONG way to go.
Well I used the same thumbnail, so I knew it would trick a few people. The PCem video did well so I kept the same thumbnail style and most people watching are as a result of a search.
The mouse lag is a deal breaker for me. It's inherent to 86box no matter how early you go in CPUs. I couldn't find a way to get it running smooth, and it's just way too distracting when you're trying to capture the original feel of those games. There's a keyboard lag too.
great video followed it and got it working perfectly thanks at 9.03 if you right click on the start button you can choose disk management 7th option under network connections without typing anything.
Great video! I use iso images to transfer data to virtual machine fast. Mounting vhd is useful if you want to get files from the machine. Well, it depends on you environment, I guess. For me it is literally three clicks to create an iso so I use this, and iso mounts without VM shutdown, so when fiddling with some game, to make it work, it may be a more convenient way, than to reboot each time to mount and unmount vhd.
Man, I really love how you just dive right in on these instructional videos. No silly intro, no runtime padding, just right into the good stuff. 👍
Yes!
Yeah, thats the spirit of a real babo!;D
Its True, awsome instructional 🙂
Austrians are known for their no-nonsense approach.
@@philscomputerlab By the way, Where is HDD.vhd?
Instead of mounting the vhd (which takes a lot of clicks and time), you can simply put all those drivers folders inside a folder to mount the folder as a CD driver. By the way, this is the best solution for those who, for whatever reason, chose to make an HDD image other than .vhd format.
Edit: by using this method, the only thing that one must be aware of is that the sb16 installation file MUST BE copied from the CD to a folder in the win98 hd (cuz it will decompress itself, and it wont work while it is on the "CD", because CD medium is read-only, and 86box treat the mounted CD as that.
Using 86box to get MW2 Mercs Titanium working after years of failing was kind of a revelation. So glad you're covering it here.
why not a Pentium 3 with the 256k of cache version for the win✊
Nice video covering this gem of a program, I use it for all kinds of old emulating stuff as well as benchmarking it vs. some other programs like DOSBox. I've found 86Box's results being quite close vs. real world benchmark results as well.
Some notes from me:
The CPU emulation speed is highly dependant on your host CPU's speed. With my Ryzen 5800x3D, which has 8 cores and 16 threads, I cannot reliably go over 200MHZ with a Pentium II without games and even the OS itself stuttering constantly. This can be alleviated a bit by being content in running a original Pentium and Windows 95, but I'd forget using this emulator past the 486 era without a beefy host CPU. I also don't think this emulator is multitreaded, so you'll get better performance the better your single core speed is.
Another way to move files to the emulated OS is by mounting a host OS folder as a CD-ROM drive in the emulator's settings. Not as fast as copying them inside the host OS, but requires less hassle and is maybe a bit more "authentic".
I also recommend constricting the emulated HDD speed to the 1995 - 1998 speed settings since this reduces throughput and thus increases performance of the emulator. The CD drive rarely needs to be higher than 8x either.
Great work showing this emulator! One other option for transferring files into the emulated machine, is to mount a directory as a CD-ROM. It works really well too.
nice detailed video, thanks Phil!
I watched somewhere, to make one "empty" emulated system and use it as a template for individual games: you copy the VM, install and configure single game and put EXE in autostart, so as machine boots game starts its like a ROM for consoles, and windows installation adds about 500 mb itself to the game file, which is not a big issue and you have console like experience :) did not find detailed instructions for it, would love to do it though
I'm Playing Unreal Gold on my Nintendo Switch, it's like a dream come true experience, really good performance, the onlt caveat being no real time lights which disables the flashlight and flares, and volumetrics which is just for the visual flair, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. From someone who finished Unreal in 1998 with a Pentium 233MMX without any 3d accelarator, having this game fully portable that is not the Steam Deck and other PC Handhelds is a dream for sure.
I have a i3 10100f and it struggles to emulate accurately anything above Pentium 166mmx... even though it's like -5% performance from a stock i7 7700 the IPC is not good enough. Luckly I run win98se natively on the same i3 system :)))) just by using the PCI slots I managed to get everything recognised: gpu, sound, usb 2.0.
How? I want to know how this is possible, please share your experience.
Awesome!
My 7900x overclocked, just about accurately does a 233mmx, the p2-300 nope. That's just how poor the emulation performance is. I have athlon system with AGP and ISA slot that works well
PS3 emulator enter the chat...@@jondonnelly3
Impressive the number of systems in the configuration. Good for testing of software and hardware combos and if you have limited space. I don't think I'll be getting rid of my original hardware and not as fun as dealing with real world hardware compatibility and repairs, but as a supplement and quick usage cases it's very good..
that signal pitch spike noise at 20:10 is horrible.
why people bother providing links to stuff instead of just providing a direct link, preferably a pre-made vhd, is beyond me . Like hey we don't do piracy here, but we provide everything you need to replicate it just too scared to use my own storage... - just a general gripe nothing at this channel personally.
The guide is pretty useful becuase 86box has terrible documentation just like all emulators.
Virtual PC 2007 still beats any of these emulators, would be much better for people to get that working than having 64 thousand dosbox builds, 86box, qemu and the endles list of worse alternatives.
Win 10 32Bit still has NVTDM support and if people stopped focussing on borked replicants of emulators and instead focussed on the github projects related to directx , nvtdm and the like then we could have everything working in a 64bit OS within a month
Love this channel. All the other tech youtubers I watch have just uploaded videos about the RTX 4070 Super as the NDA has expired, and here we are on a Pentium II and Voodoo 3 😁
😊😁
Man, it is a good video, but what a machine you choose to emulate on 86Box:
Step 1 to emulate a Pentium II on 86Box: Break in into NASA and steal at least four supercomputers you can run in parallel!
Seriously: A high end last gen Ryzen 7 would struggle with anything over a Pentium MMX 133, it is super unoptimised! (But still, so accurate and with so many options that it might be the only viable option alongside PCem, which is less feature rich, better performant, but still not great in speed, and has not seen development for years.)
This emulator is so GREAT... been using it for quite some time, the only missing thing is Sound Blaster Live with EAX emulation, once it has that, it can very well replace a true retro computer for late-DOS & Win98 gaming. But people have to keep the expectations under control, this an emulator focused on accuracy, it's not the typical console emulator, and emulating a true PC computer with 200 Mhz or more require a beast of a CPU with an immense single core performance and there's no benefit on multicore CPUs. a PII 450Mhz is out of reach for any existing consumer CPU rght now.
My Ryzen 9 7945HX can emulate PII 450Mhz without any issues in DOS. I have only tested Screamer Rally in SVGA 65k colors. Many popular games like quake are not free unfortunately. Hwinfo reports performance closer to PIII 800. Screamer rally is a smooth experience with no sound glitches. I believe modern CPUs fare much better than those 10 years ago and we are able to emulate much more than Pentium 200.
To everyone making dumb comments about performance, this is cycle exact EMULATION and not VIRTUALIZATION. And in PCEm/86Box, it's even worse than usual because they're doing it across a whole range of hardware, not just the cpu and a few chips. VirtuaBox/VMWare will do a lot better because they "offload" a ton of crap using custom drivers and don't even emulate the CPU. But it comes with it's own set of problems. QEMU will "offload" some with custom drivers, but... it's own set of problems.
As before, use PCEm/86Box for the really old stuff that has a lot of problem on anything but old hardware, DosBox for most DOS stuff and find some 2nd/3rd gen Core i3 office pc in the dumpster for W98/WXP stuff. Hard part will be finding a (good) old graphics card that supports W98.
If your CPU is on the weak side, forget about emulating Windows 9x on a PII, it's going to throttle pretty bad. The best you can get is a Pentium MMX. And even that is going to require something somewhat beefy. You can get some extra performance by running Windows 2000 instead but that might not be a very good system for games.
Awesome overview of 86Box! Exactly the machine I'd want to emulate, I own two Slot 1 systems but rarely have the room to set them up. Hoping the performance improves in the future! I love how true to the hardware this emulator is, this will be how most retro enthusiasts in future generations experience it.
Out of curiosity, can you review DosBox Enhanced Community Edition? I think it has 3Dfx acceleration!
A comparison with 86Box & PCEM might also be a good idea,
Resource usage (RAM, CPU, harddisk footprint)
Stuttering, Glitches
Sound emulation
Ease of integrating into a launcher (You already showed eXoDos using launchBox & the manager)
especially try to run them on oldest supported hardware (maybe from XP ERA Core 2 Duo built in graphics , 4GB RAM) but using newer Operating system that support .NET Framework 4.6?
Imagine how many e-waste can be used as a DOS machines
BTW I noticed Unreal Tournament Gold GOG on intel965 graphics, windows8.1 runs average 120+ fps using openGl backend while it slowsdown using directX
Did you know Terminal Velocity had a sequel released in same year? its called Fury3 1995
DosBOX ECE is dead, and even when it was alive it was easily eclipsed by DOSBox Staging.
PCEM is also way behind in development compared to 86Box.
Therefore it's easy to recommend 86Box and DOSBox Staging over these.
Isn't 86box a fork of pcem? I mean like speed between them will be same...
@@LordTuskis Got it 👍🏻
I wonder why GOG doesn't include Staging with their releases tho~
This is SO COOL! I mean, I'm all for retro hardware or retro rockets, but sometimes I just wanna play Sim Theme Park without booting up that rig. Good stuff Phil!
Oh yeah. My retro toybox is satisfying as heck, but just running stuff on my primary system has a convenience value that can't be understated.
TWO THUMBS UP! This is better emulation than DosBox and as close as possible to DOS-era hardware without the money, time and space limitations.
IF THE MACHINE IS VERY SLOW LOW THE CPU SPEED AT 100
This looks like a great way to go as soon as the optimizations catch up! It reminds me of WInUAE, The Amiga emulator. It allows you to to do alot of the same type of picking and choosing for optimal support per game. I really hope these devs keep on it. It looks like the way to go.
X86 box doesn't have an option for a SB Live. Oh well. I had one when I had a Pentium 2 333 mhz, but I didn't have a Voodoo 3.
Thank you so much! I'm trying to play MTG Battlemage and didn't want to go through all the trouble of buying legacy hardware just for that
I'm using VMware Workstation Player and Oracles VirtualBox on a 12700k and I get stuttering when the VM utilizes Efficiency Cores, I don't know if this emulator has the same issues.
Small Addition, QuickCPU should allow parking E-Cores on every System but for some reason the VM performance didn't improve. Graphics performance issues with Workstation Player, Audio issues with VirtualBox with DirectX Titles or no Sound at all when game uses ogg audio files. Sound with VLC or WMP no problem, could someone please write a capable XP VM.
Thank you Sir. I installed it at work. Everything was fine. Installed awe64 gold and tried wave table GS midi files. Surprisingly it works. Not great but works. Very cool post. I always wanted to try a awe 64 gold. Got the software off of your site. Then I tried doom with AW32. it works. wow. I noticed that setting the ram at 128 really helped vs 256. Now it runs at 400 mhz. What is amazing is this is all emulated by software. By people that must have too much time on their hands. Very cool.
You can get big problems with some included MB if you do not auto detect HDD from the bios i always do it if possible.
First PC tower i bought as a a student in engineering school :
- asus k7m
- athlon slot A 500mhz
- geforce 1 sdr
- iiyama 17" monitor pro 410
Good old times 🎉
i remember these Thermaltake Gold heatsink were better at cuting fingers compared to cooling CPU !
I need this for Streaming a Classic Windows Games, very helpful.
Since I still have some time off from college, guess it's time I actually setup my 86box, this guide is mega helpful
86Box is bad for do never get any pure smooth motion. I recommend you run lastest version of Dosbox X with very high CPU cycles-FIXED (not "max" nor "auto"), OpenGL mode and vsync enabled + 60Hz monitor for get pure smooth motion. 😍👌😁 But you use recommendly any CRT monitor or modern LCD monitor with excellent single-strobe for work 60Hz and for almost eliminate any motion blur - eg: Viewsonic XG2431 24" or XG270 27". 🙂😊😉
To summarise:
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
REBOOT
Shame the PCem dev quit the project because online trolls. We wouldn’t have 86box without her hard work. I hope the devs continue to improve their awesome emulator.
Thanks for the tutorial, Phil!
I fight hard to build, keep, maintain, and use retro machines, like my 486DX2, a couple of Gateway P3s (Voodoo5 in one, Voodoo3 in the other, and an Athlon XP system.) However, it gets more difficult as time goes on. Parts fail. Capacitors die. CRTs are almost not worth hunting down, especially considering that they will die, and they are difficult to get rid of. Sometimes an ebay seller will lie and say that a retro part has been "tested" and "working," but the part is DOA (I had this happen with a Voodoo5 once, seller decided not to fight me on the return after listing no returns but item "tested and working," and I took pics and video of it not working and attached them to my return request.) It is inevitable that 86box and DOSbox will be the only ways to enjoy this hobby. I hope that 86box can someday use the DOSbox staging CRT shaders you showed us in another video (or maybe shaderglass someday supporting them.) Then it will be difficult NOT to use 86box, hehehe..
Nice program, i find it nerdier to run this with my MacOS and ARM M1 CPU, cause its not even close the same architecture. I mainly have 95'ish era configs, some pure MS-DOS and also MS-DOS + Win95/98 stuff configured, 486dx2/66Mhz and some earlier Pentiums. Also Gravis ultrasound is nice to have for the demoscene stuff. Good times 🤓
you are the best thaanks
Windows 11 looks like windows vista back in the day
Yup, looks good but still a million bugs. Still have a W11 bug that don't let me start ELDEN RING and give me WSOD.
why wait, get Linux now@@gundstaff
Amount of selected RAM affects the emulation speed - instead of 256MB select as low as 128MB or even 64MB which greatly improves emulation speed and eliminate voice issues. 64MB or 128MB is still enough for most of the games anyway. The same issue is with PCem.
Can anybody point me in the right direction? I need a 9X emu/VM with bare minimum 700Mhz CPU (preferrably at least 1.0Ghz) but also hardware accelerated graphics. 86Box's Voodoo emulation should be sufficient in theory, but the fastest CPU I can emulate full speed is a 100Mhz Pentium. I've successfully installed 9X in Linux KVM/Qemu via virt-manager, and it should be plenty fast enough CPU-wise. But even if I had a real 9X-compatible GPU around to passthrough, I doubt it would be physically compatible with my machine. Is there anyway to pass an emulated GPU to virtualized PC?
I made a Windows 98 machine following this, except I used Ensoniq AudioPCI for the sound card. I had problems with the audio lagging/stuttering with this setup. However, when I switched the CPU type to Intel Pentium Pro, and set the memory to 128 MB, the audio seems to work just fine... Using 86box, I was able to get the Ensoniq AudioPCI to work in DOS, which I couldn't get it to work in DOS in VMware! I rather like how different the games sound with it compared to the original Sound Blaster that DOSBOX emulates.
Nice, I tried a while ago on my Ryzen 5 2600 and wasn't too happy about the performance, will try again with my 5600G and 5800X to see how they stand.
Thanks for all the resources!
Nite that PCem runs quite a bit faster but it is said it is less accurate. In the games I tested I didn't see a difference so I would use PCem because if the better speed.
Just wondering how others feel about Emulation & how you compare playing Retro Games on a Modern Emulating Time Machine like this to a Period Correct Build emotionally?
For me while I do have just as much fun playing many of my old games like C&C from Origin & other Retro Games from my GOG Collection on my Athlon 200GE PC I don't get the Fizzy/Tingly Excitement of my Core 2 XP PC so it just doesn't feel the same emotionally.
I always copied the win98 folder to the harddisk before installing via comman line and installed win98 HDD to HDD. It was much faster that way.
Has this eclipsed pcem for retro pc emulation?
Anyone using Win98 on 86Box for retro software development? My old Win98 dev box is starting to have issues, and outside of trying to rebuild a new one, I'd really prefer to emulate on my Linux machine. The usual suspects: VC6, Delphi7, MASM 6.15, etc. DosBox-X is doing fine for my DOS 6.22/Win4WG development, but at least with my efforts doesn't handle a Win98 box very well. Would 86Box do better for Win98 developer tools?
When did cutting your performance to 10% become so performance hungry? At this point it seems more viable to pick up old junk and underclock the heck out of it
Trying to add the extra files to to the .vhd, but get the error - "a virtual disk support provider for the specified file was not found" I tried both disk management and diskpart as admin. Using windows 7 pro 64 bit. Status of "Virtual Disk" in services is Started / Manual. Is anyone else having this issue? Update / Fix .. I edited the registry and changed the key - [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\FsDepends] Changed - "Start"=dword:00000003 from 3 to 0. That got rid of the error and got virtual disk manager working. When I try to open the .vhd created by 86box, I get the error message: "the file or directory is corrupted and unusable" ... ???
I was positively surprised that 86Box seems to be capable of emulating fast PII machines on Ryzen 9 7945HX. Authors should consider adding support for PIII 450. My old Intel Core i7-920XM could only emulate max 486DX4 100Mhz.
Ok, i´ve just dicovered this 86BOX and I am looking a way to play W98 games on my Steam Deck (I have a Windows partition). Do 86BOX work better than PCem in terms of input lag? I´ve read that PCem add a hugh input lag. Thanks for your work!
what I know for sure 86Box has fixed PS/2 Mouse bugs
@@pankoza Thank you for your answer!
Hi so I’m having some problems, when I try to install 98 SE and it says atapi cd rom failure. How can I fix this?
As always, awesome video. I will have to benchmark this 86Box machine vs my DOSBox Windows 95 one, with the latter one being mainly for older Win9x and Win3x games that don't need 3D acceleration.
I'm installing 86Box on my work PC right now and the i3-8100 is struggling a bit. Even the cursor is struggling while installing Win98SE. Btw, next to me I have a Pentium II 400 laptop with Ati Rage LT Pro AGP which I found in one of the offices and where I installed Win98SE already. Lets see which one will get better benchmark scores. xD
PS: Well, game 1 benchmark in 3D Mark 99 got 37.7 fps vs 11.2 on the laptop but the games had graphical glitches. It might have problems with Trilinear Filtering as the Bilinear tests very fine but the Trilinear one also had lots of graphical glitches. Have to test later on at home, if it's a problem with the integrated graphics of the i3-8100.
PPS: At home with a R7 5800X and RTX4070 the graphics glitches remain. For example the UI in Incoming is totally messed up. The different renderers under "View" don't help, with Direct3D 9 causing a black screen.
On the bright sight, Tomb Raider 2 run in 1920x1080 but going full screen, Tomb Raider 2 (installed from my backup ISO without any patches) is stretched instead of properly scaled to 16:9.
One odd thing, setting the Win98 desktop resolution to 1080, having activated integer scaling and no matter if HiDPI scaling is on or off, switching to full screen, it doesn't fill my 4K screen, even though 2x 1080p should be 4K.
PPPS: Alternative to mounting the virtual hard drive under the host Windows to copy files is mounting the folder of the files you want to copy as a CD-Rom withing 86Box.
Great video Phil. I seem to be stuck with what feels like a 30hz refresh rate on the monitor? I go in to the advanced display settings and have the option up to 60-120hz but they all feel the same.. Am i missing something?
the only advice I can say:
You need a very strong cpu, for example, a i7-7700k can emulate max 200mhz 233mhz ish, and a ryzen 7 5700g can emulate between 233-350mhz ish
everything above 300 mhz can be very stressfull for your computer, and therefore, the emulation can be slow
Just set up my own 86box with this configuration, and no notice about how important the DirectX 7a runtime is. I tried it with 6.1 included in a lot of games, and almost all of them throw an error for not seeing the GPU
For AMD CPU's you need to patch the ISO with "patcher 9x"
Not the case for 86Box, unless you mean a emulated AMD K6 CPU
i prfer to use sordums simple vhd manager to mount/unmount virtual drives. works a treat, keeps track, you can toggle as you like and be done with it. infinitely less annoying than the windows disk manager.
Sounds neat.
Phil… what problems might we encounter if we use a higher version of directx than 7a?
Very few but it feels wrong 🙂
86box seems to do a better job emulating a Voodoo 3 graphics than PCem, unfortunately I can go as high as a Pentium MMX 150 with a Voodoo 3, the emulation is not perfect though there are games that won't run.
What's your experience with PCem vs 86Box vs just plain dosbox?
For playing DOS Games? DOSBox Staging hands down. But if you want to interact with the BIOS, partition drive, and test stuff outside of games, then PCem and 86Box are better. But really, the advantage is Windows 9x for those.
I find PCem is a little lighter and runs smoother (probably because its not been updated in quite some time) 86Box is more accurate to the hardware in my experience and for that a little harder on you hardware to run.
Was there any speed differences between pcem and 86box please? Looks quite same
86Box is a fork of PCem with some quality of life improvements. I'd expect the performance and system requirements between them to be pretty close to the same.
@@T3hBeowulf thx, I was thinking this, after I did little googling, and found, that pcem goes for some people little bit faster also...
Another amazing video, as always, but did i missed the part where you need to change a certain value in the "regedit" so that "98cd in the hard drive thing" can really work? Not for me, but for those who can't find that info.. One more time, a huge huge thank you!! Please don't take offense in this comment, not that intended!
I love this! Unfortunately I hate how much the fps drops on the emulator when playing games like need for speed II :(
If an i9 13900 struggles to emulate a 450 MHz Pentium II system I can't imagine how long it will be until we have computers that can emulate Pentium 4-era systems with no issues! 86Box sounds pretty amazing, though. I've only ever tried VirtualBox and I didn't like it at all. There was no emulation of specific hardware like with 86Box.
Yes this is the reality unfortunately....
I wonder if it will actually be needed by the time we get to it. Backwards compatibility is rather strong from the year 2000 on. I am rather sure a 450 PII is going play anything that you can't just play natively on a modern PC.
@@AxiomofDiscord There are few games that can be very tricky to run on modern systems. One example is the original release of The Sims. If you want to play the disc version there’s no way. The only way to play the game is to have the complete edition and then there’s a patch for it. Also Tony Hawk 3 is difficult to get running. There’s a patch for it but it’s hard to find it online.
@@2Plus2isChicken2013 Seems pretty reaching when you say oh these games have trouble running unless you patch them. I Believe I have the Sims I will give that a try, maybe I can trip by Tony Hawk 3 and see how it goes.
@@AxiomofDiscord It's just more annoyance than it should be to have to find patches to run games. Tony Hawk 3 requires a 500 MHz Pentium III at minimum, so running it in 86Box is out of the question. I'd prefer not to have to go looking around sketchy websites to find patches to my games. Unfortunately if we're not able to emulate beyond a 450 MHz Pentium II there will always be a few games that require that in order to be played, mainly stuff that came out in the early 2000s. Not every PC game from that period is available digitally.
My computer can run some apps on a PII up to 300mhz but a lot more consistent around 233mhz and that is enough to run everything I got that struggles running natively.
I have a Ryzen 7700x this emulator seems to favor Intel but not massively from what I have heard. I know some console emulators favor Ryzen, which is the thing that made me go that route more than anything else.
Version 4.2 seems to run at 300mhz better, I have yet to try any higher clocks. If anyone thinks the mouse really lags bad hook up a 98se computer to the same monitor as your modern computer and see if it is about as bad. I find I forgot how bad the precision of old OS pointers were. Modern life has spoiled me. Oh and the old FPS games really lack some motion smoothing and I can see why many people would get motion sick.
Before I built my retro PCs I played around with different virtualisation tools and emulators. It was a great learning experience and meant the set up went a lot quicker when I built the real thing. But as you say, performance really isn’t that great yet (doesn’t help my only modern computer is a Mac) so for me, it has to be the real thing for now…
My personal tip: before installing any games, shut down the emulated PC and compress the whole thing into a backup file. That way you have a base state you can revert to anytime you want to start from a clean slate, without having to do the whole setup once again.
Cool fact: For the display you can change rendering to Vulkan in 86Box.
Thanks for putting this together! I hadn't heard of 86Box until your video. Seems a million times better than using Vmware!
VooDoo is back baby! Thank you! I can't wait to fire up MechWarrior 2 Titanium Edition.
Awsome Video, realy good instructional , im try this method later and sends feedback from Portugal.
The sb9xup file seems to downgrade the sb driver to a 1997 dated version.
I couldn't get Glide to work natively on the virtual system, I had to resort to using Direct3D instead.
it's nice to see that 13th gen i9 can emulate Pentium II 450MHz well
After spending couple do days figuring staff out, I can say that this video needs a caveat about voodoo3 drivers.
One the games I use for testing is a WH Dark Omen, which is notoriously hard to launch on modern hardware and OS. Turns out it also kind of flaky on voodoo3. It works on driver v1.01.02, but fails to launch on 1.03.00 and ANY later drivers, including recommended here amigamerlin one.
Another hard case is SW Rogue Squadron, which i managed to make work correctly only on 1.03.00, later and earlier drivers have multitude of visual issues.
Probably Voodoo3 emulation should be only recommended for DX7 games, where newest community drivers work well.
It seems like for DirectX5-6-6.1 using S3 Trio64 + Voodoo Graphics emulation set to Voodoo2 works best in term of compatibility where both games worked on 3.01.01 driver.
@@L1vv4n Great information, thank you 😊
A quick way to the windows partition manager is: right click on start icon -> Disk management.
I had this setup about 2 months back and stopped playing with it when i got some new hardware in. that said i remember the windows 98 sound skipping now.
speed emulation issues humm? I did not see what are the specs of your machine?
I think i was running it on a ryzen 5 5600g with 16gb of ram
i9-13900H.
definitely beating the pants of mine lol!
im guessing the software will need some more love before we get full speed.. @@philscomputerlab
Thanks so much for this! Finally got a good copy of of Win98 running on my M1 Mac.
Awww Yeah! Breakfast w/Phil's Computer Lab!
Really nice guide! But you left out the details how to identify if your system is too slow - so i will clarify that ;-)
Both 86Box and PCem shows the emulation speed in the window title or status bar. If the emulation system stays within 99-100% you are totally fine.
If the speed drops a bit randomly to max. 80% for a short period of time and gets back to 100%, its fine either - even if you get sound or frame laggs.
But if your system is constantly below 100%, please downgrade your emulated CPU frequency or choose a lower CPU generation. Also you may try a AMD K6-II or K6-III based machine, but note that such CPU class is much higher demanding than any intel pentium series CPU's, due to its RISC implementation.
Thank you!
It is worth noting that Intel adopted the "RISC core under an interpreter layer" architecture with the Pentium 2.
Amazing tutorial! Thanks for the flood of memories
Im not so much into emulators.I prefer the real hardware but your videos are always a delight
Tried in a AMD Athlon X2 64 4000 but it runs extremely sluggish. You need a very fast proxessor to run this. Using Oracle Vm runs 98 really neat but without video acceleration.
@@cferrarini Yea that machine is way too old. Try DOSBox or running DOS and Windows 98 natively.
Interesting.
One question, could the data in the vhd be copied to a similar real system (with same board and chipset)?
Could be a nice way of fastracking building a retro machine without dealing with the hw side, specially when using an SDtoIDE hdd solution.
Yes! Many people are doing exactly this in situations when the Retro PC doesn't have an option to boot from Floppy or CD. But be aware, Windows 98 and old machines can be a bit finicky when it comes to storage...
I had a Ryzen 7 4800HS and can´t up than 166 Mhz the processor or the emulation gets laggy and drop the emulation speed :(
Yes, that's the sad reality, I'm afraid...
Phil, I'm curious if you think there would be any benefit to running Win95 rather then 98 on a setup like this?
Nope.
Try PS2Rate utility to up the polling rate of the PS/2 mouse. I remember using it on real hardware and funnily enough it works on 86Box too. 200hz makes the mouse feel a fair bit smoother and nicer.
Hopefully the devs will implement seamless mouse feature, or at least something that will make the mouse feel as smooth as on the host machine. I've been using DOSBox Staging for this very reason and it's a massive game changer (as well as their dos_rate parameter, try setting it to 1000). It works fine with a lot of games and it makes the mouse ultra smooth and responsive (for example, I always found Master of Orion 2's mouse to feel laggy and odd on older DOSBox, but on Staging it's silky smooth).
@@animaegray Staging is awesome, a heap of developments that really make a difference.
15 min This game looks better than Big Rigs.
Since you mention p'n'c adventures, how about original Grim Fandango? About as period correct as Unreal.
I completed Grim Fandango on PCem a couple of years ago. I was emulating Pentium 200MMX with a 3DFX Voodoo 1 (which was the exact config I had in the late 90's, when I played Grim Fandango first) and what I really really liked about this was that PCem has a special Voodoo shader filter which emulates the looks of the real Voodoo render - and quite faithfully too, I think. 😂 And I know, this may sound strange, but I prefered playing Grim Fandango like this instead of the remastered version in all it's high resolution glory. Something about that soft and smeared low rez Voodoo look just kinda made me happy specifically in Grim Fandango (and also Unreal).
Yeah, I'm One Of Your "Scribes". So, This Is The Best VM For 98? Thank You.
It depends. PCem runs faster so might be better.
Last time I ran 86Box my way to transfer files was a CD burning software (K3b on Linux).
Used to add/remove files in an ISO to be mounted as a CD rom by the emulated win98.
Works with the emulated machine turned on, and quite easy to use, albeit a somewhat inelegant method 😁
I use K3b to write Linux ISO to a DVD.
I tried to write to a USB stick once but during boot, the BIOS was not seeing the USB stick. I will have to try again someday.
This is a very helpful intro to setting up 86Box, and even though I've done it a number of times, I learned at least one new thing (using the Disk Management utility to mount your device's disk image) which will be a huge help.
Personally, I've never really been able to bump the speed on my VMs past about 200MHz on my system (using a Ryzen 7950X) without starting to suffer from pretty bad audio stuttering. It doesn't bug me too much in my case; I use it for retro development more than gaming.
Is this with less than 256mb of ram and softfloat fpu off? You should be able to use 266 easy enough and likely a little faster without audio stutters. I get some stutters here and there at startup but that is it and that does not always happen. I am only using a 7700x.
Great video what specs do you have for your hardware in your setup?
Why emulate x86 on a x86 system though? Wouldn't virtualization be easier and better?
@@nikoladdNot that I know. Correct me if I'm wrong though...
thanks a lot Phil. Always fun to fiddle with emulators.
I just downloaded both the 86box and the roms files from your links, and placed the roms file in the 86box folder, but it still says the roms are missing.
are you on Mac? if yea then try moving box86 and rom files to desktop
My silly brain was asking the question that "Haven't we got through this before?" After I realized it was for PCem... Oops, very sorry for having such thoughts 😅
I'm like so-so on Emulators, I mean - I would love to emulate even better CPUs than Pentium II/K6-2, like a Athlon XP and such, but at same time - Like you said, seems funny that PS3 Emulators are already a thing, and this runs games like for example Grand Theft Auto V (The 2013 release, ofc), Gran Turismo 6 or something more old, like let's say Call of Duty 3... Meanwhile Pentium II emulation on PCem/86Box struggles with Keeping the audio without much stuttering, when something is loading or some of the games' performance. Kinda weird if you ask me.
It's fun to mess around with the specs and whatnot, but for some serious gaming it's still a LOOOOONG way to go.
Well I used the same thumbnail, so I knew it would trick a few people. The PCem video did well so I kept the same thumbnail style and most people watching are as a result of a search.
@@philscomputerlab If anything, that is clever, but also a good observation.
The mouse lag is a deal breaker for me. It's inherent to 86box no matter how early you go in CPUs. I couldn't find a way to get it running smooth, and it's just way too distracting when you're trying to capture the original feel of those games. There's a keyboard lag too.
Fair comment!
great video followed it and got it working perfectly thanks at 9.03 if you right click on the start button you can choose disk management 7th option under network connections without typing anything.
Thanks for the info!
Great video! I use iso images to transfer data to virtual machine fast. Mounting vhd is useful if you want to get files from the machine. Well, it depends on you environment, I guess. For me it is literally three clicks to create an iso so I use this, and iso mounts without VM shutdown, so when fiddling with some game, to make it work, it may be a more convenient way, than to reboot each time to mount and unmount vhd.
Thanks for sharing!
But but but. No HDD sounds!
If you need more than PC speaker stop commenting on these videos. (Psssst. Yeah hd audio rules)
Put the image on an old hard drive connected via USB ;)
@@LuisScharf i was saying HDD. Hard disc drive sounds
@@LuisScharf Okay zoomer 😉
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz lulz
G'day Phil,
You did it again, I love these full instruction videos as they are so helpful for understanding each step of the process.
Many thanks!
How do you make multiple partitions in a dynamic-size VHD?
@@caesarzx fdisk