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.
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
Anybody got a qcow image laying around with Windows 98 working in virt-manager? I've managed to get a 98lite install "working", but it's got some issues. The sound with AC97 is hit or miss and sb16 doesn't seem to be an option in virt-manager.
Tips for installing Windows 98 in QEMU/UTM
(sporks.space)129 points by Bogdanp 12 September 2025 | 32 comments
Comments
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.
https://archive.org/details/windows-95-for-utm