On Mon, Oct 23, 2023, Francois Gouget wrote:

[...]

> I don't think I've ever tried to run win9x with QEmu and I doubt it's tested much these days.

I personally tried running Windows 98 (SE) with virt-manager (which is kind of a QEMU frontend) on a modern Ryzen (Zen 2) laptop and I managed to run it but with some issues:

- Notably there's an issue on recent AMD/Intel CPUs that causes weird application crashes (the solutions for this are: disabling KVM (which slows down VM performance) or patching[1] some of the operating system files (which could be annoying with some of the updates))

- Virtualized video acceleration is non-existent (which is already a problem on Windows XP) so you either need a software driver, try to pass-through a very old graphics card (I think some people managed to do that on XP) or try using 86Box (which does do low-level emulation of graphics cards like the Voodoo line; it does have heavy performance overhead though)

[1] https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x#patch-for-windows-98me-to-fix-tlb-invalidation-bug