there are thousands of games even entire genres that can only be played
on an old Windows 98 PC like this one but it sucks it's big it's loud it's
heavy unless I spend extra money the most reliable way to transfer files to
it is to burn a Flippin CDR but it's my
only hope if I want to share my favorite childhood games with my kids
wait what is this Windows 98 running on a modern computer
the hardware even all works what sorcery
is this the kind that gives me confidence you are not going to be able
to navigate away while I tell you about our sponsor pulseway pulseway is a
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completely rid of our friend scale here anytime soon PC emulators that is to say
software that emulates the hardware of a retro PC rather than emulating a retro
game console have gotten extremely good
in the last couple of years now there were already solutions to running older
software dosbox and Windows compatibility mode come to mind but this
is different PCM is an honest to goodness we're even
emulating the CPU and firmware solution that drastically improve software
compatibility can your dosbox do this
I'm impressed that sound is working and check this out
it's a whole working PC BIOS there's not
much we can do in here I mean even things we take for granted
now like overclocking we're not done in firmware in those days it would have
been like conductive pencil mods uh replacing oscillators there were jumpers
jumpers you had moving jumpers around on the motherboard now we're in Windows I
don't remember process Explorer this was an add-on or something right uh yeah so
this is assist internals app we actually have a video on that basically this
gives us a much better task manager experience there's something that I
would always do oh yeah yeah you have to go in here and you have to uncheck this
you got to be like oh do you have a proxy yeah it would make things really
slow every single time you launched Internet Explorer speaking of which
obviously Internet Explorer is not going to work but we are on the network are we
go to entire network all right here we go no what no we do not have an IP how
is it that Windows networking tools have actually gotten worse I know right the
fact that this just has a release and renew button right there
hey look at that here we go and check it
out all those all those familiar faces no way wait can I just
okay well it makes sense that Yvonne's um workstation would not just let people
browse it do I have no I don't have any shared anything okay what about a Nas
though well the thing about wow
I was going to say the thing about Windows 98 is that it will use the login
that you chose at the beginning for all of your logins for Network places so it
probably wouldn't have worked but this enables Anonymous access so it totally
works can I just no not enough free disk space it's only
an 8 gig disk there you go okay
I wasn't expecting that Windows 98's file sharing is ancient most things
don't support it I remember it being terrible now this is with the unofficial
Service Pack three yeah so it has like up-to-date stuff
but it's still a pain to get set up and it doesn't work with like Windows 10
Windows 11. yeah that's a Linux server that I was pulling files off of yeah
because that was a Plex server or whatever it was on my RAID yeah as I
mentioned obviously Internet Explorer is completely unsupported on the modern web
but we can fire up Opera which is still
available for Windows 98 or like this is a version of Opera that only really runs
as a consequence of installing a package
called kernel X which kind of emulates Windows 2000 so we're kind of multiple
levels deep here I see that being said not everything will work
https generally doesn't like to work there are other browsers you can try but
you can also use the old web the oldnet.com okay
1998
how have I never seen this before this is amazing
there it is
pc97.com baby netlink computer Inc your
One-Stop computer and internet Store the store that I used to work at ncix.com
this was their original domain click here for more options
PC filter that was my job much later the software that enables all
of this PCM was originally written by Sarah Walker as an open source project
that as we saw when we were booting it up uses the original BIOS ROMs for old
motherboards and gpus to emulate the
hardware in its entirety and there is a shocking amount of Hardware supported
everything from the original IBM PC and
plasma display luggables all the way up to the Pentium 2 with pretty much
everything in between and with support for a wide variety of both sound and
video devices some of which are really obscure I think what's most impressive
though is how easy it is to set up the user interface is so intuitive that with
no guidance whatsoever I managed to stumble my way through it in about 15
minutes after which I had my kids playing The Magic School Bus explores
the solar system like it was 1994. I mean it helps a little bit that I used
Windows 98 back in the day and I wrote down explicit instructions for how to
use it on my underwear which by the way
is now available on ltdstore.com with new patterns now because it emulates the
original hardware and not just the environment like dosbox does you can run
basically any software from the time period including Windows and even
alternative operating systems like os2 and BOS which has been not impossible to
do up until now unless you used very old virtual machine software that provided
virtual devices that were compatible with these old os's and even then you're
not running that old software on a brand new machine which clearly isn't a
problem here on a 12900k Anthony has set
up a period accurate Windows 98 SE virtual machine complete with Pentium 2
CPU 3dfx Voodoo 3 GPU and a sound card
that can do eax for the full win 98
experience that's a really big deal because a lot of games in the Windows 98
era not only used 3D video acceleration
but also used audio acceleration to
enhance the overall immersiveness something that Windows Vista dropped
support for entirely it's time to play some games Anthony you
didn't tell me we were going to go off script because I have to play Road Rash
I had to install all these games to test them and make sure that they all work
you know and as a little surprise I guess I left them installed I'm so
excited I love road rash excited
let's go oh what you guys are looking at
right now is how you put a disc into the drive it just uses a virtual CD-ROM so
as long as you have those isos on your host computer
you can pop them in and race DirectX 3.0 a oh man even just
this intro screen is so good the arcade
version no character selection no bike shop no unnecessary gossip just pick a
race and go man remember when you could actually just play a racing game yep
okay could you change the camera angle I forget no this is it are you sure this
is how the game looks I'm pretty sure oh yeah because this is me this is me right
yeah yeah I think maybe the uh The Knockout side to side it's either side
that was the old gamer stance it wasn't was it was the arrow keys you had
everything clustered around the arrow keys I'm gonna kick this cop
they'll never catch me copper
get out of here oh no no
no yeah you don't want to be on the sidewalk the sidewalks have real bad
time oh yeah there you go oh not good not good you got Road Rash oh
you have to hike back to your bike yeah you do old games unforgiving oh no the
cop got me yep
I love these segments so much no like
a thing guys playing old games might not
impress you much so what right you're running a PC game
on a PC want a cookie and I can see why
a lot of people would take this sort of thing for granted odds are that a lot of
old Windows software you try to run will work on newer versions of Windows but
it's not a given it's thanks to an incredible amount of software
engineering that goes into making Windows backwards compatible one of my
favorite stories comes from the 90s when Microsoft discovered a bug in Sim City
that caused it to crash on Windows 95. their solution was to actually build a
mechanism to detect if SimCity was running and then temporarily alter
Windows memory management to work around it isn't that incredible uh let's try
Mech Warrior three sure that's hardware accelerated hold on yeah you need the CD
these are images from my own CD collection by the way I don't have them
all here but I own all these games now I never played this game back in the day
do you want to take the wheel uh sure I don't remember much about this game so
that's cool I do know the mouse works holy crap I didn't have a good computer
back then and I did not know that games looked this good back then what's
impressive about this is that this is 3D accelerated how do I help people wrap
their heads around how cool it is that we were able to play a game on a voodoo
3. well it no longer exists and like Voodoo Hardware only existed for a short
period of time anyway so like a lot of games that supported Voodoo Hardware
also supported like opengl or direct 3D
so oh he took out my leg immediately whoa dudes with the snipe he just got
wrecked holy crap Voodoo 3D accelerators were the best back in the day NVIDIA had
only just kind of started off the ground and they weren't doing super great with
their original nv1 ATI was still kind of trying to find
their footing but Voodoo only existed for a short period of time yeah and so
the fact that you can run a voodoo card and it's it's fully accelerated
with all the food all the features like bilinear filtering which was a big thing
back in the day otherwise you had the chunky pixels that kind of warped around
yeah that was huge and the fact that you can do this
is massive this is being emulated on the CPU there's no GPU in this system now I
want to make this clear some older games will work without jumping through PCM
Hoops you can use Community patches or Community projects like DG Voodoo to
convert old apis like Glide to modern ones but that can be its own entire
Rabbit Hole unless a studio like night dive has taken the time to restore it I
wouldn't expect night dive to do anything with this but it's worth showing you guys just because this is an
entire genre of games that I remember very fondly that simply doesn't exist
anymore these Interactive Learning experiences and multimedia storybooks
were pretty much how a couple of my younger siblings learned to read there's
just no profit in it anymore speaking of things that became
unprofitable to the point of Extinction encyclopedias I mean it sounds like a
wild idea now but what if I didn't want my kids on the internet there is no
reason you couldn't using Carter 98 also mind maze is lit unlike Wikipedia which
you're definitely not encouraged to use these days at school we were encouraged
and in fact expected to use incarna or like Compton's or whatever usually in
Carta just look stuff up and you know do our book reports or reports on selectomy
tonsillectomies sure what should we learn about find
um foxes smallest member of the dog family let's
go here's some pictures it's so cool like to call PCM a success would be
selling it well short but it's worth
noting that there are other ways to do pretty much everything I've shown you so
far and I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention them probably the least
painful way to play older games is in a browser many abandonware MS-DOS games
are a five second Google search away and require no configuration whatsoever to
get running mixed up Mother Goose was another of my childhood favorites and
runs perfectly on play classic.games which aside from its obnoxious ads seems
to work pretty well and those of you who were paying close attention probably
noticed that this site and the others like it is simply using dosbox a free
and open source dot simulator that you can also set up and run for yourself
without any ads dosbox runs on just
about any modern operating system and can be used to run pretty much anything
that ran on dos or Windows 3.1 as as
long as you have the patience to set it up and troubleshoot it and it's this
troubleshooting that leads many retro enthusiasts to Simply acquire older
Hardware hence scale old software even if it's running
correctly is full of idiosyncrasies that
made sense at the time but seem pretty bass awkwards today for example many
older games have their physics and animations tied to the CPU clock speed
therefore when you would upgrade your computer they would become completely
unplayable fun fact by the way that was the true purpose of the turbo button on
pre-pentium era Intel PCS it was not to
make the computer faster it was actually to slow it down for compatibility with
last gen software so unfortunately even older Hardware isn't the Silver Bullet
that you might think it would be I mean believe it or not the progressions from
dos to Windows 3.x to 95 and Windows 98
took place over many years and Lolly
might think of them all as kind of part of the Dos based era there's no one
Hardware configuration that will cover you across the board so after a Time
you're going to end up like Brian the electrician hoarding dozens of unique
configurations and the spare parts to go with them out of fear that your old
Hardware will eventually fail and that there will be no way to replace it
now Windows xp's compatibility mode is going to get you a lot of the way there
but anyone who ever tried to use it at the time can tell you that it was less
of an apple Rosetta and more of a oh wow
it worked what a pleasant surprise kind of experience I mean even PCM can't
account for software that's just straight up incompatible with the
hardware speaking of which the Need for Speed SC
DirectX is installed but that that's a
weird hybrid of like a Windows and a Dos program like you saw that it said it's
all DirectX 2 and DirectX 3 too I saw that both of those it actually runs in
Daws and its installer is dos and it uses dos like sound configuration what
we're seeing here is whatever incompatibility we have either be a be
it Hardware with our eax compatible sound card or maybe our Voodoo graphics
card and Windows 98 at all Windows 98 at
all it just will not run absolutely not
however this apparent weakness is
actually one of pcm's greatest strengths watch this through the magic of Simply
creating a separate VM that emulates completely different Hardware we can
either select our eax compatible sound card for immersive audio or we can do
this and handle games that came out during the transition from dos to
Windows 95. let me tell you as someone who lived through it that was a
painfully long period and compatibility was a huge problem did you know that
they still made dos games as late as 1998 because of the limitations of the
early versions of DirectX let's try it again this time in Windows 95.
hey hey there we go
shoot and stuff yeah yeah uh you should have an automatic
shift but a you need to shift out of neutral oh hi there sorry Hi Mr speed
limit inside this was a very immersive game back in the day this is
unfortunately the special edition or SE which doesn't have any of the fun
cutscenes or colorful characters you just had the racing experience but while
this game from that period works fine Jane's ATF from 1996 will not run in any
version of Windows it has to be dos and
good luck getting everything working Anthony juggled having sound a mouse and
networking support back in the day due to the need for a massive amount of
conventional memory of which only 640 kilobytes of it is available in DOS
with that in mind the farther back we go we can go all the way back to the
original IBM PC the more dosbox kind of
just makes sense for people who only want to play games that is unless you
really want to relive the experience of manual memory management like Anthony
and so many others PCM will give you
that experience and it will be faithful which I guess leads us pretty well into
some of pcm's other weaknesses for
starters while serial ports and parallel ports are emulated you cannot pass
physical devices to them Anthony learned this the hard way when he tried to
transfer saves from his Dreamcast massive memory card plus so what that
means is that if say an app had a dongle
for copy protection it's to the high seas for you matey and if you had
designs on replacing Old Point of Sale Hardware while keeping the software
tough luck at least for now 86 bucks a
fork of PCM that's looking to improve accuracy actually has us on the road map
but as of right now you would need to use something like dosbos X for
pass-through and then hope that the software is compatible
it's also a lot more difficult to access files on your host PC with PCM and with
its derivatives compared to dosbox where dosbox can just Mount any folder you
want as a drive letter PCM is For Better
or For Worse much more like the original Hardware requiring either a network
connection or a disk and unfortunately
while the network interface is emulated just fine and we were actually you saw
able to transfer files it couldn't see
our host machine on the network because they have the same Mac Address like
we're not 100 sure what was going on and
the reality of it is that networking in Windows 98 wasn't great so what some
people end up doing is setting up an FTP server on a separate VM or something but
what we did was to use folder to ISO or
any to ISO to quickly turn folders into
disk images that then can be mounted inside the vm's virtual CD-ROM drive
it's clunky but at least it's something finally there's the configuration I did
say that PCM was easy to use but the problem is that there isn't as much
granularity as you'd get in dosbox things like setting the irqs and dmas
for your sound devices might cause problems for you and unless you're a fan
of black Borders or uneven pixels or Vaseline blur you're probably going to
need to use the opengl 3.0 renderer with the sharp bilinear 2x prescale Shader
from retroarch if you want to get proper scaling it also doesn't come with the
ROM files that you need to emulate the old Hardware because they're probably
still legally protected the good news is that an archive exists on GitHub because
at this point nobody actually cares but you never know when some company will
reach the verge of bankruptcy and decide that it wants to enforce its copyright
from 1997 on its BIOS firmware
that would be a dick move maybe instead they should try getting money from
someone like our sponsor Micro Center thanks to Microcenter for sponsoring
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out microcenter's build your own month-long deals if you're looking for
something else to watch why don't you go check out the time that we had some of
our younger staff try out Windows 98 that was the actual original reason that
we acquired scale over here and it was a
total blast