Man, I really love how you just dive right in on these instructional videos. No silly intro, no runtime padding, just right into the good stuff. 👍

Using 86box to get MW2 Mercs Titanium working after years of failing was kind of a revelation. So glad you're covering it here.

Instead of mounting the vhd (which takes a lot of clicks and time), you can simply put all those drivers folders inside a folder to mount the folder as a CD driver. By the way, this is the best solution for those who, for whatever reason, chose to make an HDD image other than .vhd format. Edit: by using this method, the only thing that one must be aware of is that the sb16 installation file MUST BE copied from the CD to a folder in the win98 hd (cuz it will decompress itself, and it wont work while it is on the "CD", because CD medium is read-only, and 86box treat the mounted CD as that.

Thank you so much This is the first guide I've found that hasn't led me to a driver issue when trying to install Windows

Great work showing this emulator! One other option for transferring files into the emulated machine, is to mount a directory as a CD-ROM. It works really well too.

nice detailed video, thanks Phil! I watched somewhere, to make one "empty" emulated system and use it as a template for individual games: you copy the VM, install and configure single game and put EXE in autostart, so as machine boots game starts its like a ROM for consoles, and windows installation adds about 500 mb itself to the game file, which is not a big issue and you have console like experience :) did not find detailed instructions for it, would love to do it though

Awesome overview of 86Box! Exactly the machine I'd want to emulate, I own two Slot 1 systems but rarely have the room to set them up. Hoping the performance improves in the future! I love how true to the hardware this emulator is, this will be how most retro enthusiasts in future generations experience it.

Thanks so much for this! Finally got a good copy of of Win98 running on my M1 Mac.

Nice video covering this gem of a program, I use it for all kinds of old emulating stuff as well as benchmarking it vs. some other programs like DOSBox. I've found 86Box's results being quite close vs. real world benchmark results as well. Some notes from me: The CPU emulation speed is highly dependant on your host CPU's speed. With my Ryzen 5800x3D, which has 8 cores and 16 threads, I cannot reliably go over 200MHZ with a Pentium II without games and even the OS itself stuttering constantly. This can be alleviated a bit by being content in running a original Pentium and Windows 95, but I'd forget using this emulator past the 486 era without a beefy host CPU. I also don't think this emulator is multitreaded, so you'll get better performance the better your single core speed is. Another way to move files to the emulated OS is by mounting a host OS folder as a CD-ROM drive in the emulator's settings. Not as fast as copying them inside the host OS, but requires less hassle and is maybe a bit more "authentic". I also recommend constricting the emulated HDD speed to the 1995 - 1998 speed settings since this reduces throughput and thus increases performance of the emulator. The CD drive rarely needs to be higher than 8x either.

This is SO COOL! I mean, I'm all for retro hardware or retro rockets, but sometimes I just wanna play Sim Theme Park without booting up that rig. Good stuff Phil!

I’ve been waiting for this video for a very long time Thank you Phil. Now I can play madden 2000. Thank you

I need this for Streaming a Classic Windows Games, very helpful.

G'day Phil, You did it again, I love these full instruction videos as they are so helpful for understanding each step of the process.

Thank you Sir. I installed it at work. Everything was fine. Installed awe64 gold and tried wave table GS midi files. Surprisingly it works. Not great but works. Very cool post. I always wanted to try a awe 64 gold. Got the software off of your site. Then I tried doom with AW32. it works. wow. I noticed that setting the ram at 128 really helped vs 256. Now it runs at 400 mhz. What is amazing is this is all emulated by software. By people that must have too much time on their hands. Very cool.

Was literally looking for this video a day or two ago. Perfect timing. Thank you. 😊

thanks a lot for your description !!!

thanks for drivers man helped a lot

thanks a lot Phil. Always fun to fiddle with emulators.

Man,Love this !

Since I still have some time off from college, guess it's time I actually setup my 86box, this guide is mega helpful

Awsome Video, realy good instructional , im try this method later and sends feedback from Portugal.

Hey, you did it! I'm glad you were finally able to tackle 86Box. It is a really interesting option out there for deeper-level DOS emulation.

I'm Playing Unreal Gold on my Nintendo Switch, it's like a dream come true experience, really good performance, the onlt caveat being no real time lights which disables the flashlight and flares, and volumetrics which is just for the visual flair, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. From someone who finished Unreal in 1998 with a Pentium 233MMX without any 3d accelarator, having this game fully portable that is not the Steam Deck and other PC Handhelds is a dream for sure.

Thanks for putting this together! I hadn't heard of 86Box until your video. Seems a million times better than using Vmware!

Love this channel. All the other tech youtubers I watch have just uploaded videos about the RTX 4070 Super as the NDA has expired, and here we are on a Pentium II and Voodoo 3 😁

Impressive the number of systems in the configuration. Good for testing of software and hardware combos and if you have limited space. I don't think I'll be getting rid of my original hardware and not as fun as dealing with real world hardware compatibility and repairs, but as a supplement and quick usage cases it's very good..

This looks like a great way to go as soon as the optimizations catch up! It reminds me of WInUAE, The Amiga emulator. It allows you to to do alot of the same type of picking and choosing for optimal support per game. I really hope these devs keep on it. It looks like the way to go.

very nice，thank you for making the video.

Awww Yeah! Breakfast w/Phil's Computer Lab!

Thank you so much! I'm trying to play MTG Battlemage and didn't want to go through all the trouble of buying legacy hardware just for that

TWO THUMBS UP! This is better emulation than DosBox and as close as possible to DOS-era hardware without the money, time and space limitations.

Nice review

Yeah, agree. Unreal and UT99 with extreme texture pack + modern hardware looks very nice and runs silky smooth.

great video followed it and got it working perfectly thanks at 9.03 if you right click on the start button you can choose disk management 7th option under network connections without typing anything.

As always, awesome video. I will have to benchmark this 86Box machine vs my DOSBox Windows 95 one, with the latter one being mainly for older Win9x and Win3x games that don't need 3D acceleration. I'm installing 86Box on my work PC right now and the i3-8100 is struggling a bit. Even the cursor is struggling while installing Win98SE. Btw, next to me I have a Pentium II 400 laptop with Ati Rage LT Pro AGP which I found in one of the offices and where I installed Win98SE already. Lets see which one will get better benchmark scores. xD PS: Well, game 1 benchmark in 3D Mark 99 got 37.7 fps vs 11.2 on the laptop but the games had graphical glitches. It might have problems with Trilinear Filtering as the Bilinear tests very fine but the Trilinear one also had lots of graphical glitches. Have to test later on at home, if it's a problem with the integrated graphics of the i3-8100. PPS: At home with a R7 5800X and RTX4070 the graphics glitches remain. For example the UI in Incoming is totally messed up. The different renderers under "View" don't help, with Direct3D 9 causing a black screen. On the bright sight, Tomb Raider 2 run in 1920x1080 but going full screen, Tomb Raider 2 (installed from my backup ISO without any patches) is stretched instead of properly scaled to 16:9. One odd thing, setting the Win98 desktop resolution to 1080, having activated integer scaling and no matter if HiDPI scaling is on or off, switching to full screen, it doesn't fill my 4K screen, even though 2x 1080p should be 4K. PPPS: Alternative to mounting the virtual hard drive under the host Windows to copy files is mounting the folder of the files you want to copy as a CD-Rom withing 86Box.

This is a very helpful intro to setting up 86Box, and even though I've done it a number of times, I learned at least one new thing (using the Disk Management utility to mount your device's disk image) which will be a huge help. Personally, I've never really been able to bump the speed on my VMs past about 200MHz on my system (using a Ryzen 7950X) without starting to suffer from pretty bad audio stuttering. It doesn't bug me too much in my case; I use it for retro development more than gaming.

VooDoo is back baby! Thank you! I can't wait to fire up MechWarrior 2 Titanium Edition.

You're insane Phil :D Thanks a bunch! I love it!

Great video, i always used Unreal in the late 90s to test computer speed and graphics capability!

Nice, I tried a while ago on my Ryzen 5 2600 and wasn't too happy about the performance, will try again with my 5600G and 5800X to see how they stand. Thanks for all the resources!

Im not so much into emulators.I prefer the real hardware but your videos are always a delight

its great this very first i tryed it runs great

86box is pretty awesome to troubleshoot certain hardware setups very quickly. I use it to test compatibility before I go out an buy the real hardware. Of course it doesn't show every detail as you go, but it answers the majority of setup questions before you dive in. Thanks Phil for your coverage of this great tool!

This is fantastic, thanks Phil!

First! Thanks for the files.!!

EDIT: Using the motherboard you picked in the video instead of the one I had been using fixed my issue. THANKS! Great video. Quick question, do you have any issues with rebooting your slot 1 machines on Win 98 SE with 86box? For some reason mine always hangs at the full screen logo upon trying to reboot through Windows, forcing me to do a hard reset. Shutdowns work correctly though, for whatever reason.

Great video! I use iso images to transfer data to virtual machine fast. Mounting vhd is useful if you want to get files from the machine. Well, it depends on you environment, I guess. For me it is literally three clicks to create an iso so I use this, and iso mounts without VM shutdown, so when fiddling with some game, to make it work, it may be a more convenient way, than to reboot each time to mount and unmount vhd.

Another amazing video, as always, but did i missed the part where you need to change a certain value in the "regedit" so that "98cd in the hard drive thing" can really work? Not for me, but for those who can't find that info.. One more time, a huge huge thank you!! Please don't take offense in this comment, not that intended!

Great video Phil. I seem to be stuck with what feels like a 30hz refresh rate on the monitor? I go in to the advanced display settings and have the option up to 60-120hz but they all feel the same.. Am i missing something?

Last time I ran 86Box my way to transfer files was a CD burning software (K3b on Linux). Used to add/remove files in an ISO to be mounted as a CD rom by the emulated win98. Works with the emulated machine turned on, and quite easy to use, albeit a somewhat inelegant method 😁

First PC tower i bought as a a student in engineering school : - asus k7m - athlon slot A 500mhz - geforce 1 sdr - iiyama 17" monitor pro 410 Good old times 🎉

Lekker, bra

Thanks as always, Phil! I'm curious, is there a benefit to this over PCem? I've been messing with that since your last video on it.

Shame the PCem dev quit the project because online trolls. We wouldn’t have 86box without her hard work. I hope the devs continue to improve their awesome emulator. Thanks for the tutorial, Phil!

Really nice guide! But you left out the details how to identify if your system is too slow - so i will clarify that ;-) Both 86Box and PCem shows the emulation speed in the window title or status bar. If the emulation system stays within 99-100% you are totally fine. If the speed drops a bit randomly to max. 80% for a short period of time and gets back to 100%, its fine either - even if you get sound or frame laggs. But if your system is constantly below 100%, please downgrade your emulated CPU frequency or choose a lower CPU generation. Also you may try a AMD K6-II or K6-III based machine, but note that such CPU class is much higher demanding than any intel pentium series CPU's, due to its RISC implementation.

A quick way to the windows partition manager is: right click on start icon -> Disk management.

I think an interesting idea for a video would be to do a comparison between 86Box, PCem and DOSBox Staging, see how the performance is between them and what kind of hardware you can emulate, and features etc.

To everyone making dumb comments about performance, this is cycle exact EMULATION and not VIRTUALIZATION. And in PCEm/86Box, it's even worse than usual because they're doing it across a whole range of hardware, not just the cpu and a few chips. VirtuaBox/VMWare will do a lot better because they "offload" a ton of crap using custom drivers and don't even emulate the CPU. But it comes with it's own set of problems. QEMU will "offload" some with custom drivers, but... it's own set of problems. As before, use PCEm/86Box for the really old stuff that has a lot of problem on anything but old hardware, DosBox for most DOS stuff and find some 2nd/3rd gen Core i3 office pc in the dumpster for W98/WXP stuff. Hard part will be finding a (good) old graphics card that supports W98.

I made a Windows 98 machine following this, except I used Ensoniq AudioPCI for the sound card. I had problems with the audio lagging/stuttering with this setup. However, when I switched the CPU type to Intel Pentium Pro, and set the memory to 128 MB, the audio seems to work just fine... Using 86box, I was able to get the Ensoniq AudioPCI to work in DOS, which I couldn't get it to work in DOS in VMware! I rather like how different the games sound with it compared to the original Sound Blaster that DOSBOX emulates.

Wahooo very intersting...

Before I built my retro PCs I played around with different virtualisation tools and emulators. It was a great learning experience and meant the set up went a lot quicker when I built the real thing. But as you say, performance really isn’t that great yet (doesn’t help my only modern computer is a Mac) so for me, it has to be the real thing for now…

Really great video. I guess this is more of a comment about x86 box or PCem but as a casual retro gamer I find it really difficult and confusing to understand the difference between all the configurations, particularly which motherboard to choose as there are so many. It's quite laborious to Google each component. Would be really nice to have some more info or even a photo alongside each selection when you're browsing through.

Hi Phil, thanks for the super detailed video, is it possible to use real MT-32 or SC-55 in conjunction with 86Box?

I just find out about 86Box what a great video, can you please do Windows ME with all drivers updated and Windows 2000 I would live to see how they work

Thanks for the walkthrough. Where or when did you use Amigamerlin 2.9 and overclock.exe?

Great video, very clear and everything works. Except 3dmark 99; which has all the textures inverted for some reasons. Tried to change settings but keep rendering everything with flickering textures in black and white for some reasons. 3Dmark 2000 instead works just fine (score a meager 1819 if you are curious)

Hey Phil, Is there a way I can mount from the host Nikon MC-33 cable that is attached to my PC via a USB to Serial and access it in Windows 98?

it's nice to see that 13th gen i9 can emulate Pentium II 450MHz well

Okay, but this to me is like drinking expensive wine from a plastic cup.

I love this! Unfortunately I hate how much the fps drops on the emulator when playing games like need for speed II :(

Cool fact: For the display you can change rendering to Vulkan in 86Box.

Has this eclipsed pcem for retro pc emulation?

You can get big problems with some included MB if you do not auto detect HDD from the bios i always do it if possible.

yo, the thumbnail seemed familiar, and i realised you made a similar video about pcem! so, between these two, which one would you recommend?

What is modern machine spec you are running emulator on? It's cool to see comments to views ratio on your channel whitout comments being like first, second, tenth, press f, something unrelated, etc

Just wondering how others feel about Emulation & how you compare playing Retro Games on a Modern Emulating Time Machine like this to a Period Correct Build emotionally? For me while I do have just as much fun playing many of my old games like C&C from Origin & other Retro Games from my GOG Collection on my Athlon 200GE PC I don't get the Fizzy/Tingly Excitement of my Core 2 XP PC so it just doesn't feel the same emotionally.

If an i9 13900 struggles to emulate a 450 MHz Pentium II system I can't imagine how long it will be until we have computers that can emulate Pentium 4-era systems with no issues! 86Box sounds pretty amazing, though. I've only ever tried VirtualBox and I didn't like it at all. There was no emulation of specific hardware like with 86Box.

hit F2 to rename 😅 great video btw. 😊

Windowed display is better in PCem, you can set aspect ratio to 4:3, integer scale, square pixels, filtering either linear or nearest. Its nice because i can just match the resolution of the game to either integer scale with nearest filter (looks amazing) if it is a good fit for my lcd monitor or i can fall back to 4:3 with linear filtering where the above yields a too small image. Only pitfall i encountered is if you size the window too small and integer scale is enabled it displays nothing (integer scale 0 i guess)

I'm really enjoying 86Box. While I would play Unreal on my modern machine, as GOG has ported it. There are plenty of games that have not been re-released and really work best on older sytems.

Phil, I'm curious if you think there would be any benefit to running Win95 rather then 98 on a setup like this?

Just set up my own 86box with this configuration, and no notice about how important the DirectX 7a runtime is. I tried it with 6.1 included in a lot of games, and almost all of them throw an error for not seeing the GPU

Oh, nice... I have been meaning to set up some Win 98 machines but all this time I thought I might have had to burn CDs. But with this I may not even have to. I will check this out for sure. Thanks!

Although now I do have an issue... I shut down windows and now I can't boot back into it without getting into a boot loop where it says "boot from atapi CD rom:/Bootable CD Does not exist" over and over before going to a blank prompt. If I eject the disc I can't even get that far?

I always Fdisk before installing Win9x; then copying the install files to a directory I created on the C drive, then run setup from there; time consuming but always worked out better for me.

Does bleem work well on it or run on win 11 natively

Interesting. One question, could the data in the vhd be copied to a similar real system (with same board and chipset)? Could be a nice way of fastracking building a retro machine without dealing with the hw side, specially when using an SDtoIDE hdd solution.

I wonder if that can read .nrg files. Good old Nero burning-rom imaging. But in this case a self made custom bootable cd, with a win98 floppy bootup disk integrated. Deamon tools can read them luckily, if no other options available.

Phil… what problems might we encounter if we use a higher version of directx than 7a?

This emulator is so GREAT... been using it for quite some time, the only missing thing is Sound Blaster Live with EAX emulation, once it has that, it can very well replace a true retro computer for late-DOS & Win98 gaming. But people have to keep the expectations under control, this an emulator focused on accuracy, it's not the typical console emulator, and emulating a true PC computer with 200 Mhz or more require a beast of a CPU with an immense single core performance and there's no benefit on multicore CPUs. a PII 450Mhz is out of reach for any existing consumer CPU rght now.

Ok, i´ve just dicovered this 86BOX and I am looking a way to play W98 games on my Steam Deck (I have a Windows partition). Do 86BOX work better than PCem in terms of input lag? I´ve read that PCem add a hugh input lag. Thanks for your work!

I was positively surprised that 86Box seems to be capable of emulating fast PII machines on Ryzen 9 7945HX. Authors should consider adding support for PIII 450. My old Intel Core i7-920XM could only emulate max 486DX4 100Mhz.

I fight hard to build, keep, maintain, and use retro machines, like my 486DX2, a couple of Gateway P3s (Voodoo5 in one, Voodoo3 in the other, and an Athlon XP system.) However, it gets more difficult as time goes on. Parts fail. Capacitors die. CRTs are almost not worth hunting down, especially considering that they will die, and they are difficult to get rid of. Sometimes an ebay seller will lie and say that a retro part has been "tested" and "working," but the part is DOA (I had this happen with a Voodoo5 once, seller decided not to fight me on the return after listing no returns but item "tested and working," and I took pics and video of it not working and attached them to my return request.) It is inevitable that 86box and DOSbox will be the only ways to enjoy this hobby. I hope that 86box can someday use the DOSbox staging CRT shaders you showed us in another video (or maybe shaderglass someday supporting them.) Then it will be difficult NOT to use 86box, hehehe..

Hi, i have created the vm exactly as you but if i launch fifa 2000, it runs very bad, slow. Any ideas ?

Hello Phil, do I need a fast PC for this or is the i7 3770 with 32gb ddr3 enough for this? Kind regards.

Good whatever earth time Phil, i have a little question about the rivatuner 2.2.4 you offer to download. I cant figure out, how to display the overlay while gameing, like the vram usage. Any suggestions?

What about the PC configuration on which you ran 86box? I have low performance emulation, about 60-70 %. My PC is Ryzen 5600x, 32gb 3600mhz ram, ssd sata and m2 1tb, rtx 3070ti, win 10pro 22h2 latest updates and latest drivers.

X86 box doesn't have an option for a SB Live. Oh well. I had one when I had a Pentium 2 333 mhz, but I didn't have a Voodoo 3.

Do GOG's Glide games come pre-configured with a wrapper by default?

13:00 DX9.0c is the latest for win 98se.