Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Tim's posts Post Back to profile
Tim 🎮

Have you ever tried emulating #Windows98 on a #Ryzen system and had it crash spectacularly? Just within the last year or so, someone's written a patch for 95/98/98SE to fix it!

There's a floppy image you can boot your VM from, which will patch and fix your Win9x install even if it's partially installed and you hit the Explorer crash, so it doesn't even matter hugely where/when in the installation process you apply it. github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9

Boosts for visibility welcome!

#retrocomputing
25 Oct 2023 at 23:03 | Open on digipres.club
8 comments
Nazo

@timixretroplays I'm curious to know more about this. I have run 9x in a VM before (though I mostly do DOSBox-X/86Box these days) and have been on Ryzen CPUs for a long time (best balance of a lot of things for me.) But I haven't had a crash.

25 Oct 2023 at 23:59 | Open on mastodon.social
Tim 🎮

@nazokiyoubinbou long story short, it's to do with emulating it in hardware (VMWare etc) and a bug in #Windows98 that's only really become exposed due to some behaviour on AMD Zen 2 CPUs (so Ryzen 3000 and above): blog.stuffedcow.net/2015/08/wi

Software emulation, at least the way DOSBox-X goes about it, doesn't run into this issue - that's actually been one of the easiest ways to run 9x for a while, in fact it's the best way I've found to play Fire Fight today!
26 Oct 2023 at 0:28 | Open on digipres.club
win9x
LisPi

@timixretroplays Is Win9X relying on a bug that got fixed, or is the emulator buggy on Ryzen systems?

26 Oct 2023 at 7:03 | Open on mastodon.top
Peter Bindels

@lispi314 @timixretroplays The basic rule is "when you change a page table mapping you have to INVLPG that page". This is so your CPU reloads the page table mapping. Win9x didn't in this case, and so far it got lucky. Zen2+ and Intel 11+ break its assumption and its lucky streak. Windows programmers in the wrong here.

26 Oct 2023 at 7:22 | Open on mastodon.social
Siph

@timixretroplays oh I have to check this out! I had just written this off as a VMware problem. For OSes this old I switched to PCEm, which feels more "authentic" (slower)

26 Oct 2023 at 7:19 | Open on rage.love
Lunar 🛸 ♾

@timixretroplays This sounds remarkably similar to the issue I had installing 98 onto an SD card. Interesting!

26 Oct 2023 at 8:14 | Open on dosgame.club
Go Up