Tips for installing Windows 98 in QEMU/UTM
sporks.space62 points by Bogdanp 7 hours ago
62 points by Bogdanp 7 hours ago
Oh, this was very well timed, thank you. Not because I'm installing Windows 98 (over my dead body) but because I'm trying to get a little operating system I wrote in the early 90's to work in Qemu or VirtualBox. And the article contained a nice hint about the emulation hardware.
It is interesting how what worked flawlessly on the hardware of the time is almost impossible to get to work on these emulators, the fidelity is quite low. But bit by bit I'm making progress in figuring out where the differences are and how to work around them. I've got a basic self-hosted development system working now with all of the data in a ram disk. The floppy, keyboard and VGA screen all work, now I need to figure out why the harddrive controller keeps disappearing.
Oh well, the night is young ;)
Thank you for posting this! It really moved the needle in what already was a super long debug session.
If you want to try Windows 95 in UTM, I've done it for you.
It won't be a great experience, but for MIDI, wouldn't Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth suffice? Doesn't that come with Windows 98? If it's trying to use the nonexistent Ad Lib support, you can probably tell it to use GS Wavetable Synth instead in the MIDI settings?
How does Windows 98 work with the fingertouch interface of the iPad? There were some very expensive touchscreen Windows tablets back in the late 90s but they all used a stylus and generally the responsiveness was very slow
Why would it handle any differently than a trackpad?
Most non-multitouch touchscreen devices emulate a mouse if there is not a more specific driver available. Trackpads were widely available on laptops at the time and you could jump to any point on the screen with those.
You can click but don't expect any gestures to work.
In one video I've seen UTM used mouse emulation without absolute positioning: it treated the screen surface as a giant trackpoint nub and you could move away from the current location with variable speed. A native on-screen keyboard is also available.
For absolute positioning a USB input device is emulated, so this might not work in Windows 98 without a suitable driver: https://docs.getutm.app/preferences/ios/#cursor
If you don’t need to run on iPad, Windows 98 works great on DOSBox, including audio and CD.
One really big advantage of DOSBox is that it has Ad Lib emulation. DOSBox is kinda weird and broken when it comes to trying to run Win9x though. It's good when it works at least.