Setting Up Shop

First, you’ll want to setup VMWare and find yourself a Windows 98 VM, these seem to be freely floating around the internet, however, I’m not entirely certain on the legality of this so I will omit from directly providing a link to such an image. If you happen to have the installation media for Windows 98 lying around, or an old machine with Windows 98 on it you can create a VM from either of those as well!

Once you have your Windows 98 VM all spiffy and set up, I highly recommend installing SciTech Display Doctor. This allows for improved resolutions and color depth when using Windows 98 in a virtual machine! You can download Display Doctor here, and as display doctor appears to now be abandonware, we can use the following registration information to get the full product for free:

Name: CSCKnight

Serial: 0B5E-12B4-A8A4–0B

(This is provided courtesy of this website)

Once you have Display Doctor installed I also recommend visiting this website and downloading some utilities like 7zip, 98SE2ME, and NUSB v3.3e. Respectively, these allow you to deal with archived files, provide some general stability improvements, and some drivers for USB thumb drives and such. Overall, just improves the functionality of your machine. I picked up DirectX 9 from here as well, however, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary depending on what you’re installing.

I also recommend getting CPUkiller 2.05 from here, this utility has come in handy for me for running games such as Daggerfall and the Sonic & Knuckles Collection.

Playstation Emulation

If you’re really into mid 90’s gaming, the only way you can improve on your Windows 98 virtual machine’s library is by installing emulators. In particular, ePSXe, seems to work great on Windows 98 and allows you to play Playstation 1 games freely. It amazes me every single time I setup a Playstation game in Windows 98.

I am using ePSXe version 1.2.0, slightly newer versions might even work, but as this version is working fine for me I really do recommend using it. You can find the download at the ePSXe site here.

Now, the first few times I ran ePSXe on Windows 98 I seemed to have some graphical problems, however, using Pete’s OpenGL video plug-in and specifically using the SciTech Display Doctor graphics driver things seemed to start working just fine. You can find the download for Pete’s video plug-ins here. If you find yourself having troubles, you can take a look at my configuration in the screenshot here and with any luck get things working.