Getting Win98 up and going in VirtualBox
I have recently got a request to help with two separate Win98 installs. Funny that Win98 is still being used. The first was on an old laptop and the second was to help get software that only works on Win98 up and running. I decided to embark on (what I thought was an easy) mission to get Win98 in a VirtualBox VM.
Turns out VirtualBox does not support Win98 VMs nicely and takes a good while to setup to work smoothly. There are a few issues, you need to use the SoundBlaster 16 audio to get sound working, and also you need to get 32 bit true color going or else you will have the slowest Win98 machine in the world. Installing the cpu idleing program Rain 2.0 in the end is a bonus so that Win98 doesn’t use up 100% of your CPU by replacing an idle loop with an HLT (imagine they wrote an idle loop, feels like a game from the 80s).
Here is a link to what needs to be done:
The Video setup in the link above is not complete, and I couldn’t get SciTech Display Doctor working not even after 10 reboots and tweaks. I found the first post here to be more thorough:
Essentially what is missing is you must download and install Intel Inf Update Utility for 400 series. I have also attached the Universal video drivers mentioned in the links above as a backup since it seems it was originally hosted on geocities.
I have recently got a request to help with two separate Win98 installs. Funny that Win98 is still being used. The first was on an old laptop and the second was to help get software that only works on Win98 up and running. I decided to embark on (w…