Nostalgia Realm

A lot of old games won't work properly on new computers and operating systems. People often ask me what I use to play old games, and the answer unfortunately differs per game. Because of this I have recently started showing in the video itself what I use to emulate/play the game.

For games from the 90s made for Windows 3.1 and 9x, your best bet is to set up a Windows 98 SE installation using PCem, see the download link for PCem and a ready to use Windows 98 SE and Windows 98 virtual machine. Note that when using PCem for the first time, you will need to manually set the location of the hard drive, otherwise the system will not boot!

​

If the game is from the Windows XP / Vista / 7 era and won't run now, your best bet is to use VMWare Workstation or Virtualbox and installing a copy of the aforementioned operating systems.

​

A lot of Windows 9x game content on my YouTube channel was recorded using a virtual machine in VMWare Workstation (not free) with Windows Me. This emulation is far from perfect and lacks 3D acceleration. It used to work good enough. But on more recent systems, VMWare and Windows 9x are very unstable and basically unusable. That's why I switched to PCem for emulating most of the older games. It tries to emulate an actual old computer.

Some 3D games from the late 90s through early 2000s can work fine on Windows 10 by using either dgVoodoo or nGlide. But even then your mileage may vary. (example Alex Builds His Farm)

TL;DR There's no clear-cut answer for running all old games. At the time of writing I primarily use: PCem (free) to emulate an older PC for most games from pre-1999. For newer games that don't work on my 2020 era PC, I use VMWare Workstation (paid) with a virtual machine running Windows XP, 7, or 10 (whichever runs the game better). Note that Virtualbox is a free alternative to VMWare and works fine for the same purposes.

​If the game still won't work then unfortunately in some cases using real hardware or the original disc is the only way.

​If the game is for an old console, then you must first search for an emulator to play the game.

Windows versions pre-Windows 2000 can unofficially work in VMWare and Virtualbox, but they're very unstable. It seems that they're the least stable when using an AMD CPU. I found that in recent versions of VMWare it's practically impossible to have a well functioning Windows 9x machine because a high possibility of instability. A shame, because the virtualization can work pretty well with just minor issues like no proper 3D acceleration and choppy MIDI playback.

​At the time of writing, Windows 9x on Virtualbox also doesn't work properly anymore at all in newer versions of Virtualbox. One of the last versions oof Virtualbox to somewhat support Windows 9x s: VirtualBox-6.0.24-139119-Win. This versions still has the ability to turn off VT/x - AMD-V. A virtualization feature on modern PCs. It also still supports limited 3D acceleration (using VMSVGA). The virtualization options however needs to be manually turned off however anytime you make changes to the virtual machine. The commands that I use to keep my Windows 98 SE virtual machine running properly after changing settings are:

​

​

cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
VBoxManage.exe modifyvm "Win98 SE" --cpu-profile "Intel Core i7-6700K"
VBoxManage modifyvm "Win98 SE" --hwvirtex off

​

These commands can be filled in at the command prompt. In Windows 10, right click the start button and choose Windows Powershell (Admin). From there, type in CMD and then paste the commands like above.

​

These commands make it so that Virtualbox uses the featureset of a different CPU, and turns off hardware assisted virtualization.

​

After issuing those commands, the VM at least turns on. But there's no graphics accelaration and that's why the screen resolution and colors cannot be changed, and many 3D games will not run. For that there are multiple options, like "Universal VESAVBE Video Display Driver" and "SciTech Display Doctor". Both of those options are not perfect, the latter in my experience is more stable. But both don't work properly to run most 3D games.

​

After doing all this, the VM works though still not perfectly. The sound playback is far from perfect, MIDI playback sounds distorted on my end, this version of Virtualbox is not supported anymore, the VM is pretty slow in general, and many 3D games don't work like they should. Hence I always recommend PCem for emulating Windows 9x since the installation is less painful, despite the sound issues and needing a beefy PC. There's a PCem ready to use from the download link above. It includes both a Windows 95 and Windows 98 installation. Note that when using PCem for the first time, you will need to manually set the location of the hard drive, otherwise the system will not boot.