One that I want to give thumbs up in particular is Age of Wonders (https://www.gog.com/game/age_of_wonders). It's a 2D turn-based strategy that was released in late 1999. Even back then it was unusual in explicitly supporting Windows NT, and perhaps that's why it continued to work just fine with 2K, XP etc.
But what's even more interesting is that they made the UI to resize according to the resolution, and resize it does - it supports literally any resolution (I tried it on 4K!), and it will properly resize everything. Of course, the widgets and the fonts are still bitmap, so everything's tiny - but even so, still impressive.
All in all, I'd say it's a good example of Win32 API stability. Windows upheld its part of the bargain, and a game like AoW that used all those APIs (DirectDraw etc) strictly as documented still works. The ones that don't work are generally the ones that made assumptions that were valid then, but no longer are.
I still occasionally play Malkari, a 1999 4X space game written for DirectX 5. It doesn't work on anything but Win9x, so I have a VM for it. On Win2K/XP it will just draw a half purple screen, even in compatibility mode.
Even then... Windows 98 doesn't work under VirtualBox, unless you run the VM with the Legacy paravirtualisation interface, and with the ICH AC97 audio card, which Windows 98 doesn't have drivers for ... nor does it have drivers for VirtualBox' VGA adapter.
Those problems are easily worked around, of course, but one day, either VirtualBox will drop its Legacy emulation code, or SciTech Display Doctor will stop working with VirtualBox' VGA adapter, or the sound won't work anymore, ...
I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...
If you're into 1990s-era games, which would generally be the ones that require Win98, take a look at PCem. It meticulously emulates PC hardware, to the point where it's running the original PC BIOS and video BIOS code against it (which means you have to find and download the corresponding images - but they're easily found online). Needless to say, when it comes to software compatibility, it's superb - you can run the original Win98 just fine under it. Or the original MS-DOS, if you want to dial even further back.
Because of that low-level emulation approach, it's not exactly fast. But modern high-end PCs can just about handle something on the order of Pentium 300 + 3dfx Voodoo, which is adequate for pretty much any game from the 90s.
It's not particularly complicated, just extremely fragile.
Only the Legacy VirtualBox paravirtualisation interface provides all of the BIOS interrupts and glue code that the Windows 98 installer requires. The Sound Blaster 16 audio card will work out of the box in Windows 98, but VirtualBox itself has trouble copying the virtual audio out onto the host, playing only 3 seconds of the audio at a time and skipping a little; eventually it crashes. So, use the ICH AC97 audio card instead, but then you need to find drivers for it.
As for the VGA adapter, that used to work out of the box (once you installed the VirtualBox Guest Additions), but the additions' support for Windows 98 was dropped a long time ago, so that's no longer an option either.
Put simply, you need the Legacy interface to run the installer, SciTech Display Doctor for the VGA card (which is now free), and Realtek AC97 Win9x audio drivers (which you can find very easily).
>>I'm one glitch away from being unable to play a game I really like, and bought as a teenager...
Tbf, also about $30 ebay purchase away from buying an early 2000 era laptop that will just run win98 and the game natively - so not all hope is lost :-)
I wonder how well dosbox would fare. It might not do well at all, given the specifics that seem to be required, but it often ends up being an optimal solution for items old enough (which is generally a few years older than this).
Have you investigated what was missing to get the game running in Wine? In the case of one of my favorite games (Worms Armageddon), I was able to fix the remaining issues in Wine with a few simple patches (though, to be fair, I was fortunate to have access to the game's source code...)
I don't have access to the source, I have no idea why it doesn't work on (EDIT: Modern) Windows, and I don't remember what happened when I last tried it on Wine; when that didn't work, I settled for the VM approach I described, which does.
Wine and ReactOS are probably our best bet for archiving programs and making them usable in the indefinite future. With Wine, you have the advantage of having access to the source code, both to peruse and modify. Being able to edit Wine's source code and use its debugging facilities does help a lot in figuring out compatibility issues.
Or indeed more problems. I remember trying to get the original Doom working online with a group of friends at a LAN a few years ago. It was much easier to get it working on Linux via Wine than it was under Windows 7+ due to some old networking layer.
Yeah, I have a lot of classic game discs from the Windows 98 era, which often require Windows 98 with DirectX support, and sadly, nobody supports DirectX on VMs that old AFAIK. (VMware supports DirectX on XP and up, I believe.)
It's often a much better prospect to see if it's available on GOG with any given fixes or notes on how to make it work.
Yep, bought Populous 3: The Beginning from GoG the other day, would not work (except in software rendering which was so slow as to be unplayable). It was €0.79 so whatever, but it was a bit of a disappointment. What about Windows legendary backward compatibility ?
