Do you need software and hardware accelerated graphics drivers for Windows 9x running inside a virtual machine? Well, here’s SoftGPU, which will give you just that in Bochs, VirtualBox, Qemu, or VMware, for Windows 95, 98, or ME. The Github page provides detailed instructions on setting up the optimal virtual machines, and information about what, exactly, each virtual machine and diver supports and doesn’t support. On top of that, there’s links to a number of YouTube videos showing the driver in action.
Excellent work, and this will allow you to get the most out of your Windows 9x virtual machines.
I know it sounds strange, but if you have a Windows 9x game that requires something more than a 3DFX Voodoo 2 (aka Direct3D 5.0), you can’t run it on a modern PC. Your best bet is to look for a fan-made patch in PCGamingWiki that will allow you to run it natively on Windows NT.
Sure, you can run Windows 98SE in a hypervisor such as VMWare or VirtualBox, but there is no Windows 98SE driver for the virtual GPU the guest system has. Your best bet is PCem which emulates a Voodoo 1 or 2, but it goes the full hardware emulation route (think bsnes), not the hypervisor route, so you need a pretty strong PC to emulate even a Pentium II with a Voodoo 2 (but once you do, compatibility is perfect).
This project can finally make every Windows 9x game runnable on modern systems. Although currently it looks like a buggy mess.
Note: By “Windows NT” I mean “Windows 2000 and higher”.
Whitch VM has the best support for Windows 95 and 98? For me any of them sucked always but maybe things have changed? I just don`t want it to be sluggish. On Windows and Linux
>>Whitch VM has the best support for Windows 95 and 98?
Connectix VirtualPC. At least it *did* back in the day. They even had drivers that let you get full graphics use and easy interactions between the host and the virtual machine with their additions.iso.
I wish I was experienced enough to do the equivalent of this for MacOS9. That is mostly about having a full/proper virtual macOS experience, but it might be nice to place some old games I own for macOS as well. I used a Voodoo1 and Voodoo3 back then.
For some starting point to learn and build from: 3fdx had open source drivers for MacOS. There were also open source Mesa drivers that provided an accelerated OpenGL interface on macOS. This allowed acceleration on games that only supported OpenGL, and converted it to Glide so it could run on the 3dfx. This Is exactly the opposite of what Mesa does today. which is convert old glide interface to modern OpenGL/Vulcan/Metal.
I see a few angles to accomplishing this:
a)-I imagined using the original open source 3dfx driver as a basis to create a stub that passes the glide to the hypervisor to be accelerated from there. This would be similar to how we use to be able to run win95 games under VirtualPC under Macos9 by passing the win95 glide though to macOS Glide to the Voodoo card in the Mac. In the hypervisor we could then use Mesa’s glide to OpenGL/Vulken/Metal translation.
b)-Or use the 3dfx drivers as a reference to create propper paravirtual drivers that match the equivalent paravirtual drivers under windows, so that they can all plug into a the standard QEMU based hypervisor handler. Or use the MesaGL drivers as another OPENGL implenentation reference for the paravirtual drivers.
c)-Real hardware emulation: MacOS9 did have full drivers for the first few generations of ATI-Radeon and Nvidia-Geforce. So emulation the hardware of one of these earlier generation cards would work for MacOS9, MacOS10PPC, and Windows, as they all used the same physical hardware cards.