How playable are games on Windows 95/98?

[TheMrAwesomeness]

With this ao486 breakthrough from a couple months ago, I’m curious how playable games are on Windows 95 or 98. It seems like DOS stability still has a long way to go, as many games still won’t even boot, although most of the popular games seem to work great. Also, for anyone who has installed those OS’s on the core, which OS or which versions of the OS’s seem to be the most stable? If neither are that stable currently, does Windows 3.1 work better? There are a few games I want to check out for years that I haven’t been able to because my PC doesn’t support 16-bit programs.

[throAU]

I think you'll find a lot of them aren't.

The 486 was pretty much out of date when windows 95 came about, so a lot of windows games are pentium and up only. Either due to needing the Pentium FPU (an ao486 doesn't even emulate an FPU from memory - never mind the much faster pipelined unit in the pentium) or the raw speed.

IMHO, ao486 is best for the DOS games prior to say 1993-1994. For later games for Windows you're better off trying to get them on another platform like the Amiga, ST, the consoles, etc. if they're available on those platforms.

Windows 3.1 isn't really useful for gaming, its just a shell on top of DOS. Ideally, you'd be looking for something like MS-DOS 6.22 to give you the most flexibility with DOS compatibility.

[dylan]

Related to this question: when I tried to install Win98SE on AO486, it complained that an FPU was required. Are folks running Windows 98 on this core? If so, how?

[Caldor]

Related to this question: when I tried to install Win98SE on AO486, it complained that an FPU was required. Are folks running Windows 98 on this core? If so, how?

It can still be installed. There is an option for ignoring FPU requirement. I have been using Windows 95 instead though.

This link has a list of switches / options for Windows 95 and 98:
http://www.dewassoc.com/support/useful/setup_switch.htm

The switch you need is the -nm switch. Another thread about this here:
viewtopic.php?t=1050

I made a video where I am playing Diablo, Starcraft and Curse of Monkey Island. These games are not running great, but it was a much older version of the core. They should have some problems running on this core though, but I would still argue that Windows is running pretty well on the core. I think I managed to run Warcraft II in Windows and that it ran at full speed. It has a Windows version after all, and the map editor for Warcraft II is also a Windows app.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7T1UmpFHbM&t=554s

[Caldor]

Overall, its limited what games that will run at full speed in Windows, but it is really nice to be able to use Total Commander in Windows 95 I think. Its like Norton Commander, but its much better for editting the boot files as you can copy paste between files much easier. Several games can also run through Windows 95.

In the case of Warcraft II as I already mentioned, it actually helped making the game playable, but that was before I had begun using DOS32A, a DOS extender that can replace DOS4GW.