Windows 95!

tyreal90

Hey guys. I got windows 95 working nicely in the pi thanks to your tutorial. Installing all additional addons in daum also successfully transferred to windows 95 in dosbox thru retropie including dx8. Increasing resolution to 800x600 allowed me to operate in true color settings. Using trio 32/64 pci drivers and dx8 installed via daum I have been able to emulate starcraft at somewhat laggy but acceptable speed with no graphical abnormalities or crashes.

That is awesome!!! What is the location of the trio drivers you are using? There are several versions out there. I have never gotten starcraft to work on PI so you have taken it one step further in my view.

edmaul69

@hokagekurei what version of starcraft are you using? I have two versions on disc but not sure if i had tried getting them to work or not.

Semper 5

So I was able to create a beautiful and fully stable Win95 environment - and now I'm wondering how do I get my ISOs of all my games mounted?
I have Virtual Clone Drive installed on my Win95. I just need to be able to access my ISOs sitting in my RPi.

Also, ANY games I have installed on the Win95 image, run perfect when the image is on the PC, but fail miserably on the Pi. I copied the conf mentioned in previous posts. What am I doing wrong?

So far I see this Win95 as nice to look at but completely useless.

tyreal90

@semper-5

Hello sir.

If you created .vhd files for the windows 95 partition, those can be mounted and files changed in windows 10. You right click the drive file and select mount. Then you can move iso files in and out. I could never get direct x to work with my display driver so what display driver are you using? Hope this helps!

edmaul69

@tyreal90 i use a second vhd that i had put stuff on then transfer to external drive i use on my pi. I got dxdiag to work but i cant get any iso’s to run because i cant get that program to work.

Semper 5

@tyreal90 hi there and thank you for the reply :)

the mounting vhds was no problem, but with a 2gb image i'd be able to put maybe 2 ISOs max on the win95 image. and when I want to run something else I'd have to remote in take the image off, edit it back in windows and xfer it back....doesnt seem too practical.

also I tried running some games that SHOULD and DO work when the w95 image is on the PC, but in the RPi it freezes up the system, BSODs or completely kicks out of the OS. for reference: these games were XCOM, and Alone in the Dark... i don't see these games requiring massive processing or whatever.

EDIT: I should point out that the aforementioned games work flawlessly when run directly from DOSbox rather than through w95

tyreal90

@edmaul69

Hey Ed,

It's good to talk with you again. I also had trouble with installing the cd-clone drive. I ended up putting basic windows 3.1 programs on because they ran fine but I couldn't get any heavy direct x game to work.

SuperFromND

I had no idea someone else was trying this!

I tried running my own install of Windows 95 a while ago, and it did manage to boot to desktop, but it always crashed as soon as you tried to do anything, so I shelved it in favor of Windows 3.1 with the Calmira shell (which seems to work much smoother).

That 3.1 build was actually capable of running most of the stuff I threw at it, including Osamu Sato-devloped games Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou and it's sequel, Chu Teng (even if they ran slower with the transitions, regardless of my DOSbox configuration). Pretty much the only time it crashed was when I tried to run Internet Explorer 3, but otherwise it held up fairly well!

caver01

I have been loosely following along here wondering, what are the chances that the Ultimarc WinIPAC utility could be installed? This handy utility is strictly for configuring the IPAC boards, setting up the keys used for each switch etc. There is some question about which version of Windows it requires, but assuming it works in 3.1 or 95, it is only worth the effort if it can write to the USB port. Thoughts?

edmaul69

@supercatfooz having installed every microsoft application i could on windows 3.1, i will say this, install office 4.2 and fakshar. Set your config to run fakshar before windows. Then make a backup of your windows folder. Any time you install a non game software, test office programs like word. If it crashes, put your backup windows folder back on (you can just overwrite old folder) the reason why i say this is you will find some programs possibly including internet explorer will cause this and the easiest way to test is with word. You dont want to have programs or games not work and not know why and it is because you installed a program that dosbox doesnt like some time in the past. Fakeshar is also needed for a lot of programs (not games) to run.

Semper 5

@supercatfooz I'd have to agree with the move back to 3.11. Once all the necessary software was installed, it ran my small collection perfectly. I just made custom .conf files for each game - for those that need the disc in the drive I just edited the autoexec to mount the iso I had stored in a directory before executing windows.

Sorry to say, the win95 was a cool idea and surprising to see boot up after MUCH labor, but too buggy and very sparse compatibility.

SuperFromND

@semper-5 Yeah, bit of a shame with 95.

My only gripes with this 3.1 setup so far is that you can't control the mouse using a controller, (at least not in DOSbox standalone without some hacky software method; I've heard that the lr core allows it natively at the cost of poor performance & possible compatiability & configuration issues) and that it runs kinda slow, (even if you set cycles to max and increase RAM, and especially with a shell that isn't Program Manager) but otherwise it's pretty good and runs most of the games I've thrown at it.

So far I've tested (and confirmed works):

After Dark
Chu-Teng
Eastern Mind: Lost Souls of Tong-Nou
Full Tilt Pinball
The Best of Entertainment Pack
Win/V Utility

simonwking

Just out of interest did anyone try PCem on the Pi? I am just starting to use that within Emulation Station on the PC for Win95 and Win98

SuperFromND

@simonwking Funny you mention PCem; they just released an update yesterday that includes "Experimental ARM and ARM64 host support" as one of the bullet points.

I might try it out; according to redditor /u/lei-lei it can run a 486SX just fine (albeit with a bottleneck at high resolutions).

I would also like to note that, at least in theory, lr-np2kai should be capable of booting Windows 95, 98, NT 4, and 2000. I have yet to find a way to successfully boot into any of these (and I doubt it would run anywhere near full speed; PC-98 emulation is rather slow on the Pi 3, even with overclocking), but I still think it's worth looking into.

tiagop

@SuperFromND Any instructions on how to compile PCem on the RPi?

SuperFromND

@tiagop The PCem Linux download includes instructions in the Readme-Linux.txt file:

You will need the following libraries :

SDL2
wxWidgets 3.x
OpenAL

and their dependencies.

Open a terminal window, navigate to the PCem directory then enter

./configure --enable-release
make

then ./pcem to run.

(Do note that I have yet to test whether the Pi is even capable of running PCem at the moment; support for ARM hosts is labelled as Experimental, after all)

tiagop

@SuperFromND Thanks, will try tomorrow and post results

edmaul69

@Semper-5 i use real discs in windows 3.11 so i havent had a need to make any win 3.11 conf files yet. I have probably around 100 games and software that run great on the pi in win 3.11. I havent found anything that has given me any troubles yet other than certain ms software that cant run in dosbox and trashes and crashes your windows folder install...