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I have a windows 7 laptop and I need to run windows 98, unsuccesfully on VMWare workstation 8, VirtualBox 4.2, Microsoft Virtual PC and Parallels Workstation.. all of them do not have any GPU support for windows 98, I'm always stuck with 16 colors and a resolution of 640x480. I can boot windows 98 on my laptop, physycaly.. but I don't have the drivers for my card so I am also stuck with 16 colors and 640x480.

Is there any virtualization software which can enable 32bit colors and higher resolutions (with full DirectX support)?

Thanks in advance!

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3 Answers 3

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I have VMs (in Virtual Box) with windows 95 and windows 98, and they works in 800x600x16bit... just have to play a little with drivers...

There's a tutorial in the Virtual Box Forum. I don't know if it's valid (I knew how to do it) but, give it a try.

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    worht a +1 but still no direct3D/Full DX9 support :(
    – user144773
    Oct 12, 2012 at 11:19
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Windows Virtual PC officially supports only XP+ as a guest OS. However, you can install Win98 just fine (remember to set the available RAM to 64 MB for Setup to succeed). In order to get:

  • Better graphics
  • Integrated mouse functionality
  • Desktop resizing

you need to install the virtual machine additions, but of course these are no longer available for an unsupported guest OS. A simple workaround is to extract the VMAdditions.iso from something like Virtual Server 2005 SP1 or better still VirtualPC 2007 SP1. While I don't know about DirectX 9 and Direct3D support, the graphics situation should definitely improve over the current base VGA config you're stuck in.

More details can be found in the article Installing Windows 98 on Windows Virtual PC by Microsoft's Ben Armstrong, who was apparently in charge of VPC and now is the Hyper-V Program Manager (be sure to read the comments as well).

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I have no idea why you had trouble running Windows 98 under VMware Workstation 8. It is listed as supported. You do need to install VMware Tools in the guest, though. Don't count on getting 3D graphics, though you can at least get a full-color desktop.