cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/46615955

I saw a post about someone in my neighborhood looking for a windows 98 machine to play some old games and DOS games.

I messaged them (because I’m always up for helping people enjoy old games) and said I have a spare PC, that can run emulation and will likely be better for them to play their old games on (and a lot cheaper than the scalper prices on old machines now).

I planned to use either Mint/PopOS, and set it up so the computer will start DOSbox-x right away, to make it easy as possible for this person (I think they are not super computer literate but probably know how to navigate DOS and basic point and click instructions)

My question is, should I set it up with dosbox, or a virtual machine running Win98?

Any other tips welcome :)

Also, most of the games they want to play are FPS, like Doom, Duke Nukem, Redneck rampage, blood, and also some games like NFL challenge (DOS)

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Ideally if you’re going to run Win9x, that’s better off being ran on period hardware because running Windows that old in a VM is troublesome to say the least, and even with 86Box or PCem, it’s slow as hell.

    If you just need straight DOS, then DOSBox will handle that just fine, although if a given DOS game isn’t set up in Lutris, ie. if it’s a GOG game, for example, as Lutris has its own DOSBox runner for that, you’ll ideally want DOSBox-X.

    As an addendum to the first point, XP and even 7 for that matter also kinda suck to virtualize especially when vfio-pci GPU passthrough enters the picture; the oldest Windows version I’d recommend virtualizing, because it has native EFI support and thus it’s easier to pass a GPU through to it, is 8.1.

    Guest drivers for 8.1 can be handled by spice-guest-tools while virtio-win works with 10 and 11.