/vr/ — Updated Windows 98 Pack

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>Aside from games, what else is in the pack?
Lots of stuff. I've installed Encarta 98 Deluxe, which is set up so it doesn't require the original CDs at all to access any of its content, as well as 3D Movie Maker and all the expansion packs I could find for it. I've also installed the Plus! packs for Windows 95 and 98, which add a couple of features to Windows together with lots of themes. And just because I could, I threw in every system sound and MIDI track officially included in every retail version of Windows from Windows 3.0 MME to Windows XP, as well as every wallpaper up to Windows ME (I didn't get around to adding XP's, unfortunately). There's a few more neat things in there, but I'll leave it to you to discover them.

>What about DOS games?
The main focus of the pack is, of course, retro Windows games, but it wouldn't be a complete pack if I didn't also address DOS. I've set up a shortcut to MS-DOS Mode that automatically launches a startup menu (courtesy of Phil, though I modified it a bit) that gives you options for EMS, XMS, and Conventional memory boot, along with adding CD and/or mouse support for each of them, with fully working Adlib, Sound Blaster, and General MIDI sound and music. To maximize conventional memory usage, I make use of HIMEMX, which has a lower memory footprint than regular HIMEM.SYS, as well as a couple of drivers from FreeDOS such as ctmouse. Per my testing, the majority of DOS games will work with the default option. There's a second shortcut called DOS Expansion Pack, which will also launch MS-DOS mode, but it is meant to work with an upcoming DOS pack, which, when installed, launches a menu from which to easily load and configure DOS games. However, that pack is still being worked on, so for now, ignore that shortcut.

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>Why does the interface look like Windows 95?
I opted to install Windows 98 through the quickinstall project, which alongside installing every official update and DirectX 8.1 (downgraded to 7.0a here because we don't need anything more) gives you the option to install a version called 98lite, which replaces the Windows 98 shell with the much lighter and simpler one from 95 and removes a bunch of extraneous stuff, including Internet Explorer (which is otherwise useless here and was in fact an oft-cited cause of instability due to its shoddy integration into the shell). I went with the lite version, which makes the system more performant, but it also looks plainer and admittedly lacks some nice UI improvements. Should you wish to have the real Windows 98 shell back, you can run the 98lite installer from the Start Menu, and choose to install a partial or full version of it.

>Why would I download this when I can just play almost all these games on modern Windows through OTVDM, eXoWin9x, GoG or Steam releases, using DgVoodoo2 and other patches and fixes from the PC Gaming Wiki, or through source ports?
Indeed, if you just want to play only a handful of the games in this pack and you don't care for all the other stuff, this pack is not for you. Admittedly, some or even most of these games are more easily or effectively played through other means, without having to emulate a whole-ass PC. Even the DOS pack I'm working on as a companion to this is a bit of a folly, as DOSBox is far less cumbersome to work with. That's not quite why I made this pack, though. More than just a curated games pack, this is also meant to be something of a celebration of the retro Windows experience as a whole, a time capsule that you can lose yourself in for a while, hence all the extras that have nothing to do with games, and why I went through the trouble to make sure MS-DOS mode worked properly. If that appeals to you, then give this a try.

>>12609450 (OP)
>https://gofile.io
very cool. sus fileserver.
and i didn't think the Win 3.1 games had Win98 versions.

>I tried to play X or do X, but it didn't work/it crashed/shit bugged out on me.
I've done my absolute best to test the shit out of everything in this pack, but I am one guy, and so I may have missed something or inadvertently fucked something up. If that's the case, let me know. Do keep in mind, however, despite every effort I've made to keep this installation clean and optimal, this is still Windows 98, and sometimes shit just goes sideways. Believe me, were it not for my desire to have the highest degree of game compatibility possible, I'd have gone with Windows 2000 instead.

>Ok, anything else?
This pack also includes some RetroArch GLSL shaders, if you're into that. I only included some CRT and interpolation shaders, try some of them out if you wish. Probably you'll be just fine using something like sharp-bilinear for fullscreen use. There's also sounds for the floppy and hard drives, but I only set up the floppy sounds, as the hard drive sounds require setting the emulated hard drive to a slow 3600 RPM type, so eh. Try that out for novelty's sake, I suppose.

Anyway, that's all I've got.

>>12609454
>sus fileserver
I've used it for a good while, it's fine as it doesn't require an account to upload, nor does it have a file size or download limit like MEGA or catbox, but it does delete files after a period of inactivity, so that's a negative.
>i didn't think the Win 3.1 games had Win98 versions.
Most of them don't, Win9x is almost fully compatible with Win3.x applications and games, so they work as is.

Amazing work, anon

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>>12609492
This anon here. I'm playing Slay until I pass out tonight! Might even get a bit wild as the hours go by and play Amazon Trail II

>Encarta 98
holy based

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I hereby give my approval to this pack.
BUMP

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I did it, I settled and led to the creation of Portland and all the junkies therein
What a ride

>>12609596
I always seem to get stuck around mountains for some reason and end up losing all my shit and dying shortly thereafter.

I've spent like 5 hours dicking around on this, thanks OP.
I'm a dumbass though, and I have a question, how would I go about installing games on here? There's a few I want to try out. It's probably obvious but my brain has been rotted from modern spoon-fed systems.

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>>12609450 (OP)
zased

>>12610330
There's a few ways. You can find install disc/disk images from places like archive, load them through the floppy or CD menu on the emulator, and go through the installation process just like on a real PC. For games that are already installed in a folder that you just download (common in abandonware sites, for instance), you can make use of 86Box's feature to mount folders as disc images. Simply mount the folder with the game you downloaded, and Windows 98 will see it as if it's a CD, and you can then easily copy the files over.

>>12609450 (OP)
Thanks man

>>12609454
>retarded tripfag is a retard
many such cases.

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>>12609450 (OP)
There is some good stuff in here, but it is still really heavy on tiny little "toy" games that just do one thing, like most of the Microsoft games (e.g., ten versions of solitaire that should really just be selectable modes of a single game, minesweeper, reversi, etc.), and yet feels a bit devoid of the kinds of games that you could really sink hours into back then. I see you've got StarCraft, AoE, Diablo... good start, but how about Myst, Dungeon Keeper, Command and Conquer, or Heroes of Might and Magic 3? Let's get some big games that people would have actually paid for in here, not just 30-games-in-1 combo pack stuff (which was certainly very common! But people prized their "real" games too).

>>12609451
If you're adding non-game stuff like Encarta and a movie maker for the full "personal computing at the end of history" experience, you've gotta have Kid Pix Studio Deluxe. It was my first movie maker; I used it to draw graphics for my first website. "Computer lab" class in school was just Kid Pix time for a few years around the turn of the century.
And for something completely different, that nobody would have had on their home computer at the time, you could throw in the free-form adventure game-like multimedia educational software "Cosmology of Kyoto."

I might have to fire up some of my old PCs and see what else I'm forgetting.

>>12610624
Very fair criticism, once again. As you can see, I began to feel the same, and have indeed tried to rectify. Now, I did try to add Myst, but I could not find a version that didn't run without the CD, so I scrapped it for the moment. I may go back on that for the next time, now that I am also distributing disc images alongside the main pack. I'll check out the others as well, though now that you mention it, I do have the HoMM compendium on hand. Anyway, something for the next version.
>Kid Pix
I considered it as well. I loved that program as a kid myself. Not sure why I didn't add it, honestly.

Also, forgot to say, but many more meaty games will appear in the DOS pack when that comes out. It's mostly done, just need to deal with some stragglers and add them to the launch menu I'm using.

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>>12610710
You should be able to mount as many virtual drives as you want inside the virtual machine. Just include the disc images and let them all stay mounted as if the computer had a dozen CD drives. Change the drive letter that the games are looking for on startup and most of them should just work. Organizations used to use stuff like pic related, with multiple users sharing CDs as network drives.

>>12610714
Ok yeah, that makes sense. A lot of the more "immersive" games around that time were still DOS games and if you want to cover that separately, fine. Stuff like System Shock...

>>12609450 (OP)
Not vidya but any chance you can add Adobe Dreamweaver?

>>12610793
Admittedly I haven't looked into such a solution, not sure how I'd go about it on 86Box other than installing DaemonTools, as this isn't any old VM software or DOSBox. I'll have to experiment.

how easy is it to set this up on real hardware?

Bumping for great justice

>>12611217
Yeah thank you for saving this thread from Page 1, I thought we were about to get bumped off the catalog and rushed to bump it. Luckily you were valiant enough to beat me to it.

>>12611213
Not very. It's set up for a very specific hardware configuration, so just dropping the contents onto any old machine will most likely cause all kinds of problems. My suggestion is to grab the Windows 98 quickinstall ISO, burn that onto a CD, install it on whatever machine you have, then grab whatever suits your fancy from the hard drive image and transfer it over. Even then, a lot of games probably need to be installed outright for them to work, though most of the ones in the C:\Windows games\ folder are portable and can be dragged and dropped.

God I wish when windows was this simple. Everything just makes sense and works. What the fuck have we become

>>12611341
It sucked in many ways, but they were the commonly sensible limitations of a practical tool. Like how it sucks to hit your thumb with a hammer. Not like how it sucks to be caught in a diabolically designed digital catch-22, which is how almost all software feels now.

>>12609450 (OP)
It triggers my autism to have more than 3 rows of shortcuts

>>12611341
It was objectively less simple back then from the user experience because they weren't designed around use by someone who doesn't recreationally use computers. The reason we have shit like a touch screen start menu now is specifically because of people who can't even be trusted to use a mouse.

>>12611380
Right. People forget that one of the main reasons for the existence of the Windows Entertainment Pack was specifically to encourage people to experiment with the mouse peripheral and so learn how to use it to navigate. It's hard to fathom nowadays, but the mouse isn't actually intuitive to a whole lot of people.

Aw shit yeah, son, I had a lot of fun with the last one you made.

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>>12610793
>>12610821
Well, I thought about it, and then I remembered 86Box has support for SCSI adapters, and after some dicking around, I actually got one working, giving me access to a bunch more CD drives. Only issue is, for whatever reason 86Box caps you at eight drives, when SCSI supports more channels than that, but whatevs, this could definitely work to make at least a few games with mandatory CD checks work ootb. Maybe DaemonTools might be a better option, though, so I'll have to test that out next.

>>12609450 (OP)
>Box World
holy based, haven't seen that thing in 25 years

>>12611380
Sure, it's not as simple from a new user experience, but it quickly becomes so after some initial hurdles. Shit these days is counter-intuitive to learning, zoomers don't know how to use a fucking computer for their lives for example. My 20 year old cousin is a programmer and I have to help him with tech support because he doesn't understand how the OS works at all.
It was archaic, but it made you learn to use it. It was mostly straight-forward with its design and didn't try to trick you. Everything is a nightmare now. At least to me, specifically as I've been actual tech support before and modern technology makes me want to put a stake through my temple.

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>shareware demo version of Slay
Somethings never change...

>>12611427
Old version of Daemon Tools would work much better, the only "spyware" on them was a toolbar you could opt out of during install.

of course the major issue here is that the average /vr/ poster is too retarded to figure out disc mounting.

>>12611550
Well, I ran into a bit of an issue with this. I managed to install the last version of Daemon Tools that supports Windows 98, but it only allows up to four virtual drives, so unless I'm missing something, it's actually not better in this regard.

Nice. Keep at it

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Great work OP, I'll give it a shot.
A readme download would really help though.

>>12611506
Apparently the dude still sells the game today, good for him.

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very cool of you to share this OP!

>>12612712
For sure, I thought about it but I guess I figured whatever I wrote would end up in the OP and subsequent posts anyway, but you're right, there's so much more going on with the pack now than before that it's almost a no-brainer.

Hmmm what games to put on this bad boy..

I'd like to address some things I thought about mentioning in the OP that I didn't get around to, as well as share some tips for getting the most out of the pack:

>Performance
There's two aspects to this: guest performance (meaning how well the OS, games, and applications within the emulated machine run) and emulation performance (how well your host can run the machine without slowdown). The default configuration was chosen as a reasonable compromise between both these aspects. Both PCem and 86Box are largely single-threaded low level emulators, and as such they grow increasingly demanding the more complex the configuration is. Even the best PC you can put together may struggle emulating a high end Pentium II at full speed. That is why I chose such a low-end CPU, so that even older PCs can handle the emulation for the most part. That said, if you're still struggling with speed, there's a couple of things you can do at a pinch (though only on 86Box, as PCem is already pretty much as fast as it can be).

One thing to try is to disable the SB16's OPL emulation, which will render it useless for DOS but will free up a bit of CPU time. The Nuked SC-55 plugin may also be a bit heavy, so you can try setting it to System MIDI instead. Lastly, you may set the hard drive speed down from RAM Disk to a generic 5400 or even a 3600 RPM drive, which will increase load, seek, and boot times, but will also reduce or eliminate performance drops while the drive is at work. Same with the CD drive: set it to a lower speed to avoid occasional slowdown during drive access.

>>12613220
Conversely, if you have CPU horsepower to spare, there's a couple of things you can do to make the OS look, feel, and perform better. Switching to a higher-clocked emulated CPU is, of course, a no-brainer, but another thing you can do is in the machine settings, go to the last tab and under CPU frames, switch from larger to smaller frame size. This will improve frame pacing and reduce input delay, making everything feel smoother. And one more thing: if you have a high refresh rate monitor, within Windows under Display settings, set the refresh rate to 120 Hz. All of this together will make the system feel damn near as smooth as on your host OS. And as mentioned in the OP, you can also switch back to the regular Windows 98 shell, which is overall more pleasant to navigate.

I must reiterate, however: these WILL have an impact on performance, so don't be surprised if you get additional slowdown as a result. You may have to tweak things around until you get a satisfactory balance. If unsure, leave things as is.

>>12609450 (OP)
>monster truck madness
>jazz 2
>croc
this is peak pc gaming

I can't even remember what I played on the PC in 98
I was 8 :(
Oregon Trail and maybe Chip's Challenge

>>12613220
>Both PCem and 86Box are largely single-threaded low level emulators
But why did you choose such idiosyncratic low-level emulators for this?

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kek

>>12609452
I'm retarded how do I get past this screen?

>>12613569
Because the alternatives, despite being more performant, leave a lot to be desired in several respects. Windows 98 on DOSBox, even in forks that claim to support it, is quite janky and some things don't work with it. VirtualBox and VMWare don't do hardware acceleration with Windows 98 unless you pair them with SoftGPU, and they still have compatibility issues then. Then there's QEMU, which has a fork that claims to be compatible with nearly everything while having near-native performance, but it's a bitch to set up and use, and it's VERY user unfriendly even when you do get it working.

>>12613663
Type exit. It'll take you back to regular Windows.

>>12613670
thanks fren

>>12613668
Thanks, this largely makes sense, although I am still kind of shocked by how inconvenient these emulators seem to be about loading configurations with many disc images and so on. If I were spending weeks iterating on this anyway, I would at least try out the 3dfx branch of QEMU. But my point of comparison for "success" on this project would be something like infinitemac.org. And I believe they just offer a menu to pick one CD image at a time to load, along with as much software as they can put on the HDD image itself. Although that's an emulator running in a browser, so maybe it isn't even a fair comparison and I should expect a lot more out of a downloadable pack.
I guess 8 virtual CD ROM drives could be enough anyway. Some games will accept being pointed to a folder on the hard disk with a copy of the CD contents, to save a drive letter. And even some Win 98 games will have no-CD cracks available that you could easily drop in as needed. I think the fact that we have basically infinite storage available compared to the size of most Windows 98 programs means that an all-in-one sort of pack might as well include as much as possible out of the box.

>>12609450 (OP)
Can i run mechwarriors games on this?

>>12613718
Right, that has been my goal since the beginning, to have as many games playable right from the get-go, and that has indeed involved doing all kinds of things to get games that normally require a CD to play without it. Unfortunately some games either don't have a crack available or seem to inherently rely on CD technology for things like audio or for data streaming (seems like Myst is one of these), so there's not much that can be done there. And for Redbook audio in particular, many games only want to work with the D: or E: drive, so no matter what, some disc switching will be involved. It's just how things were back then.
>>12613729
MW2 should work no problem with software rendering. However, despite my best efforts and a lot of googling, I couldn't get the 3DFX version to work, as it was made squarely with the original Voodoo in mind. Perhaps the D3D version from the Titanium Edition may work, but I didn't try that one.

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I'm completely clueless about emulating old PCs so thank you for this it's very cool and I probably wouldn't have messed with it otherwise.
>Those menu sounds
hnnnnnnnng

Question: Am I able to add games to this? How would I roughly have an idea of what will run and what wont? Mainly would want to add 1997 Battleship, Warcraft 1+2, AOE2+Conq, old edutainment games of my youth like Disney and Math Blasters stuff, etc

>>12614226
>Am I able to add games to this?
Yes, you can. See >>12610409
>How would I roughly have an idea of what will run and what wont?
Same way you might've back in the day: check the game's system requirements (as found in sites like the PC Gaming Wiki or MobyGames). The GPU will carry you through most 3D-accelerated games up to 1998 or so. Likewise with the CPU for most games in general. Stuff from 2000 and above, however, will likely require that you switch to a beefier CPU.