With the power of my PC, I can emulate almost any platform that’s ever existed.
I can run Amiga software. I can play arcade cabinets. I can set up virtual machines and trap endless programs in my own personal Matrix, if I want. But you know what I can’t do? I can’t make Windows 95 games work properly.
For the last few years, I’ve been living in the warm fantasy that this wouldn’t be a problem – that if I ever needed to go back to an old game or application, all the tools were there and would make it easy. In short: No.
For the last few months, I’ve been writing a column on obscure old games for our sister publication PC Gamer. Generally, they’re DOS based games, and 90 per cent of DOS games are no problem, thanks to an amazing little application called DOSBox that handles the technical wizardry. Surely installing a Windows 95 game, with all its plug-and-play, DirectX bonuses and other modern niceties wouldn’t be that much more effort? Big mistake. Big, pointless, entire-weekend-eating mistake.
My obvious first step was to try just running it in Windows 7. I didn’t expect this would work, due to the dark presence of technologies like QuickTime, and I was right. Fine. No problem. VirtualBox, VMWare and other virtual machines to the rescue! A fake copy of Windows 95 would solve all my problems.
But nothing’s ever that easy, is it? Just installing Windows 95 was a crash-heavy pain in the neck on most of them, and when running, it was only in its most stripped down ‘you don’t really want graphics drivers with that’ form. The Guest Extensions provided by each service simply shrugged. DirectX was a no-go. Finding extra drivers online was impossible, thanks to there not being an actual graphics card or soundcard in the virtual machine to target. Looking around for advice, the official answer was ‘forget it’. So I did.
Next stop, WINE – the Linux-based Windows not-emulator, running in Ubuntu. This did better, but not well enough. For starters, Ubuntu wouldn’t actually let me run any files from my game CD without flicking an executable bit, and last time I checked, CD-ROMs are read-only. Once I got around that, I set up WINE, pointed it to the game and it spat out errors. Hitting the forums, I found that while some games of this era will work, this one wouldn’t. Sigh. Uninstall. Move on!
You know you’re getting desperate when you actually try to install Windows 95 into something like DOSBox. Still, I was running out of options, and I’d heard that it was technically possible. It is. It ran slower than a slug glued to a board, but I got it running. With that speed though, there seemed no point continuing. So I didn’t. But kudos to DOSBox for doing so well.
This left me with only one option: the old fashioned way. Not wanting to be beaten, I fired up eBay to see if anyone was flogging an old PC for a reasonable price. No dice. There were chips and motherboards, there were laptops in good condition apart from broken screens and wasps’ nests in the floppy disk drives, but nothing I could simply slap down on my desk for the purposes of firing up a game. In every way, game over.
It’s always disappointing to be let down by your technology, especially when it leads to having to admit failure. It always feels like there’s something else to try – some other avenue to explore. Worse, it always feels like you’re giving up right on the edge of victory – that just one more Google would have revealed some guru somewhere offering a comprehensive guide that patiently (or, more likely for the internet, impatiently) explained every last step and made it seem obvious.
I never did get the game running in Windows 95. Luckily, my reading around the problems that virtual machines and emulators have with that software generation gave me an idea. I called a few people and tracked down a copy of Windows 2000 – the closest version I could find that seemed to be properly supported. Against the odds, it worked. True, it meant fixing other problems first, which is the last thing you really want to be doing at 3AM on a Sunday, but I was damned if I was going to give up at this point. I put in the game CD. I ran the setup program. Joy! It actually
worked! It installed! The icon sat on my desktop!
I ran the game. It was rubbish. I went to bed, disheartened. As I curled up in my duvet, I had to wonder – were those VMs and other nostalgia-blockers trying to protect me from disappointment? Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, as I drifted off for my hour’s remaining sleep, I swear I heard them chuckle.