These games were unplayable…UNTIL NOW - PCem

there are thousands of games even entire genres that can only be played on an old Windows 98 PC like this one but it sucks it's big it's loud it's heavy unless I spend extra money the most reliable way to transfer files to it is to burn a Flippin CDR but it's my only hope if I want to share my favorite childhood games with my kids wait what is this Windows 98 running on a modern computer the hardware even all works what sorcery is this the kind that gives me confidence you are not going to be able to navigate away while I tell you about our sponsor pulseway pulseway is a mobile first remote monitoring and management tool that's built with msps and it teams in mind to learn more about how you can see and control your network from anywhere check the link in the video description while we won't be completely rid of our friend scale here anytime soon PC emulators that is to say software that emulates the hardware of a retro PC rather than emulating a retro game console have gotten extremely good in the last couple of years now there were already solutions to running older software dosbox and windows compatibility mode come to mind but this is different PCM is an honest to goodness we're even emulating the CPU and firmware solution that drastically improve software compatibility can your dosbox do this [Music] I'm impressed that sound is working and check this out it's a whole working PC bios there's not much we can do in here I mean even things we take for granted now like overclocking we're not done in firmware in those days it would have been like conductive pencil mods uh replacing oscillators there were jumpers jumpers you had moving jumpers around on the motherboard now we're in Windows I don't remember process Explorer this was an add-on or something right uh yeah so this is assist internals app we actually have a video on that basically this gives us a much better task manager experience there's something that I would always do oh yeah yeah you have to go in here and you have to uncheck this you got to be like oh do you have a proxy yeah it would make things really slow every single time you launched Internet Explorer speaking of which obviously Internet Explorer is not going to work but we are on the network are we go to entire network all right here we go no what no we do not have an IP how is it that Windows networking tools have actually gotten worse I know right the fact that this just has a release and renew button right there hey look at that here we go and check it out all those all those familiar faces no way wait can I just okay well it makes sense that Yvonne's um workstation would not just let people browse it do I have no I don't have any shared anything okay what about a Nas though well the thing about wow I was going to say the thing about Windows 98 is that it will use the login that you chose at the beginning for all of your logins for Network places so it probably wouldn't have worked but this enables Anonymous access so it totally works can I just no not enough free disk space it's only an 8 gig disk there you go okay I wasn't expecting that Windows 98's file sharing is ancient most things don't support it I remember it being terrible now this is with the unofficial Service Pack three yeah so it has like up-to-date stuff but it's still a pain to get set up and it doesn't work with like Windows 10 Windows 11. yeah that's a Linux server that I was pulling files off of yeah because that was a Plex server or whatever it was on my RAID yeah as I mentioned obviously Internet Explorer is completely unsupported on the modern web but we can fire up Opera which is still available for Windows 98 or like this is a version of Opera that only really runs as a consequence of installing a package called kernel X which kind of emulates Windows 2000 so we're kind of multiple levels deep here I see that being said not everything will work https generally doesn't like to work there are other browsers you can try but you can also use the old web the oldnet.com okay 1998 how have I never seen this before this is amazing there it is pc97.com baby netlink computer Inc your One-Stop computer and internet Store the store that I used to work at ncix.com this was their original domain click here for more options PC filter that was my job much later the software that enables all of this PCM was originally written by Sarah Walker as an open source project that as we saw when we were booting it up uses the original bios ROMs for old motherboards and gpus to emulate the hardware in its entirety and there is a shocking amount of Hardware supported everything from the original IBM PC and plasma display luggables all the way up to the Pentium 2 with pretty much everything in between and with support for a wide variety of both sound and video devices some of which are really obscure I think what's most impressive though is how easy it is to set up the user interface is so intuitive that with no guidance whatsoever I managed to stumble my way through it in about 15 minutes after which I had my kids playing The Magic School Bus explores the solar system like it was 1994. I mean it helps a little bit that I used Windows 98 back in the day and I wrote down explicit instructions for how to use it on my underwear which by the way is now available on ltdstore.com with new patterns now because it emulates the original hardware and not just the environment like dosbox does you can run basically any software from the time period including windows and even alternative operating systems like os2 and BOS which has been not impossible to do up until now unless you used very old virtual machine software that provided virtual devices that were compatible with these old os's and even then you're not running that old software on a brand new machine which clearly isn't a problem here on a 12900k Anthony has set up a period accurate Windows 98 SE virtual machine complete with Pentium 2 CPU 3dfx Voodoo 3 GPU and a sound card that can do eax for the full win 98 experience that's a really big deal because a lot of games in the Windows 98 era not only used 3D video acceleration but also used audio acceleration to enhance the overall immersiveness something that Windows Vista dropped support for entirely it's time to play some games Anthony you didn't tell me we were going to go off script because I have to play Road Rash I had to install all these games to test them and make sure that they all work you know and as a little surprise I guess I left them installed I'm so excited I love road rash excited let's go oh what you guys are looking at right now is how you put a disc into the drive it just uses a virtual CD-ROM so as long as you have those isos on your host computer you can pop them in and race DirectX 3.0 a oh man even just this intro screen is so good the arcade version no character selection no bike shop no unnecessary gossip just pick a race and go man remember when you could actually just play a racing game yep okay could you change the camera angle I forget no this is it are you sure this is how the game looks I'm pretty sure oh yeah because this is me this is me right yeah yeah I think maybe the uh The Knockout side to side it's either side that was the old gamer stance it wasn't was it was the arrow keys you had everything clustered around the arrow keys I'm gonna kick this cop they'll never catch me copper get out of here oh no no no yeah you don't want to be on the sidewalk the sidewalks have real bad time oh yeah there you go oh not good not good you got Road Rash oh you have to hike back to your bike yeah you do old games unforgiving oh no the cop got me yep I love these segments so much no like a thing guys playing old games might not impress you much so what right you're running a PC game on a PC want a cookie and I can see why a lot of people would take this sort of thing for granted odds are that a lot of old windows software you try to run will work on newer versions of windows but it's not a given it's thanks to an incredible amount of software engineering that goes into making windows backwards compatible one of my favorite stories comes from the 90s when Microsoft discovered a bug in Sim City that caused it to crash on Windows 95. their solution was to actually build a mechanism to detect if SimCity was running and then temporarily alter Windows memory management to work around it isn't that incredible uh let's try Mech Warrior three sure that's hardware accelerated hold on yeah you need the CD these are images from my own CD collection by the way I don't have them all here but I own all these games now I never played this game back in the day do you want to take the wheel uh sure I don't remember much about this game so that's cool I do know the mouse works holy crap I didn't have a good computer back then and I did not know that games looked this good back then what's impressive about this is that this is 3D accelerated how do I help people wrap their heads around how cool it is that we were able to play a game on a voodoo 3. well it no longer exists and like Voodoo Hardware only existed for a short period of time anyway so like a lot of games that supported Voodoo Hardware also supported like opengl or direct 3D so oh he took out my leg immediately whoa dudes with the snipe he just got wrecked holy crap Voodoo 3D accelerators were the best back in the day Nvidia had only just kind of started off the ground and they weren't doing super great with their original nv1 ATI was still kind of trying to find their footing but Voodoo only existed for a short period of time yeah and so the fact that you can run a voodoo card and it's it's fully accelerated with all the food all the features like bilinear filtering which was a big thing back in the day otherwise you had the chunky pixels that kind of warped around yeah that was huge and the fact that you can do this is massive this is being emulated on the CPU there's no GPU in this system now I want to make this clear some older games will work without jumping through PCM Hoops you can use Community patches or Community projects like DG Voodoo to convert old apis like Glide to modern ones but that can be its own entire Rabbit Hole unless a studio like night dive has taken the time to restore it I wouldn't expect night dive to do anything with this but it's worth showing you guys just because this is an entire genre of games that I remember very fondly that simply doesn't exist anymore these Interactive Learning experiences and multimedia storybooks were pretty much how a couple of my younger siblings learned to read there's just no profit in it anymore speaking of things that became unprofitable to the point of Extinction encyclopedias I mean it sounds like a wild idea now but what if I didn't want my kids on the internet there is no reason you couldn't using Carter 98 also mind maze is lit unlike Wikipedia which you're definitely not encouraged to use these days at school we were encouraged and in fact expected to use incarna or like Compton's or whatever usually in Carta just look stuff up and you know do our book reports or reports on selectomy tonsillectomies sure what should we learn about find um foxes smallest member of the dog family let's go here's some pictures it's so cool like to call PCM a success would be selling it well short but it's worth noting that there are other ways to do pretty much everything I've shown you so far and I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention them probably the least painful way to play older games is in a browser many abandonware MS-DOS games are a five second Google search away and require no configuration whatsoever to get running mixed up Mother Goose was another of my childhood favorites and runs perfectly on play classic.games which aside from its obnoxious ads seems to work pretty well and those of you who were paying close attention probably noticed that this site and the others like it is simply using dosbox a free and open source dot simulator that you can also set up and run for yourself without any ads dosbox runs on just about any modern operating system and can be used to run pretty much anything that ran on dos or Windows 3.1 as as long as you have the patience to set it up and troubleshoot it and it's this troubleshooting that leads many retro enthusiasts to Simply acquire older Hardware hence scale old software even if it's running correctly is full of idiosyncrasies that made sense at the time but seem pretty bass awkwards today for example many older games have their physics and animations tied to the CPU clock speed therefore when you would upgrade your computer they would become completely unplayable fun fact by the way that was the true purpose of the turbo button on pre-pentium era Intel PCS it was not to make the computer faster it was actually to slow it down for compatibility with last gen software so unfortunately even older Hardware isn't the Silver Bullet that you might think it would be I mean believe it or not the progressions from dos to Windows 3.x to 95 and Windows 98 took place over many years and Lolly might think of them all as kind of part of the Dos based era there's no one Hardware configuration that will cover you across the board so after a Time you're going to end up like Brian the electrician hoarding dozens of unique configurations and the spare parts to go with them out of fear that your old Hardware will eventually fail and that there will be no way to replace it now Windows xp's compatibility mode is going to get you a lot of the way there but anyone who ever tried to use it at the time can tell you that it was less of an apple Rosetta and more of a oh wow it worked what a pleasant surprise kind of experience I mean even PCM can't account for software that's just straight up incompatible with the hardware speaking of which the Need for Speed SC DirectX is installed but that that's a weird hybrid of like a Windows and a Dos program like you saw that it said it's all DirectX 2 and DirectX 3 too I saw that both of those it actually runs in Daws and its installer is dos and it uses dos like sound configuration what we're seeing here is whatever incompatibility we have either be a be it Hardware with our eax compatible sound card or maybe our Voodoo graphics card and Windows 98 at all Windows 98 at all it just will not run absolutely not however this apparent weakness is actually one of pcm's greatest strengths watch this through the magic of Simply creating a separate VM that emulates completely different Hardware we can either select our eax compatible sound card for immersive audio or we can do this and handle games that came out during the transition from dos to Windows 95. let me tell you as someone who lived through it that was a painfully long period and compatibility was a huge problem did you know that they still made dos games as late as 1998 because of the limitations of the early versions of DirectX let's try it again this time in Windows 95. hey hey there we go shoot and stuff yeah yeah uh you should have an automatic shift but a you need to shift out of neutral oh hi there sorry Hi Mr speed limit inside this was a very immersive game back in the day this is unfortunately the special edition or SE which doesn't have any of the fun cutscenes or colorful characters you just had the racing experience but while this game from that period works fine Jane's ATF from 1996 will not run in any version of Windows it has to be dos and good luck getting everything working Anthony juggled having sound a mouse and networking support back in the day due to the need for a massive amount of conventional memory of which only 640 kilobytes of it is available in DOS with that in mind the farther back we go we can go all the way back to the original IBM PC the more dosbox kind of just makes sense for people who only want to play games that is unless you really want to relive the experience of manual memory management like Anthony and so many others PCM will give you that experience and it will be faithful which I guess leads us pretty well into some of pcm's other weaknesses for starters while serial ports and parallel ports are emulated you cannot pass physical devices to them Anthony learned this the hard way when he tried to transfer saves from his Dreamcast massive memory card plus so what that means is that if say an app had a dongle for copy protection it's to the high seas for you matey and if you had designs on replacing Old Point of Sale Hardware while keeping the software tough luck at least for now 86 bucks a fork of PCM that's looking to improve accuracy actually has us on the road map but as of right now you would need to use something like dosbos X for pass-through and then hope that the software is compatible it's also a lot more difficult to access files on your host PC with PCM and with its derivatives compared to dosbox where dosbox can just Mount any folder you want as a drive letter PCM is For Better or For Worse much more like the original Hardware requiring either a network connection or a disk and unfortunately while the network interface is emulated just fine and we were actually you saw able to transfer files it couldn't see our host machine on the network because they have the same Mac address like we're not 100 sure what was going on and the reality of it is that networking in Windows 98 wasn't great so what some people end up doing is setting up an FTP server on a separate VM or something but what we did was to use folder to ISO or any to ISO to quickly turn folders into disk images that then can be mounted inside the vm's virtual CD-ROM drive it's clunky but at least it's something finally there's the configuration I did say that PCM was easy to use but the problem is that there isn't as much granularity as you'd get in dosbox things like setting the irqs and dmas for your sound devices might cause problems for you and unless you're a fan of black Borders or uneven pixels or Vaseline blur you're probably going to need to use the opengl 3.0 renderer with the sharp bilinear 2x prescale Shader from retroarch if you want to get proper scaling it also doesn't come with the ROM files that you need to emulate the old Hardware because they're probably still legally protected the good news is that an archive exists on GitHub because at this point nobody actually cares but you never know when some company will reach the verge of bankruptcy and decide that it wants to enforce its copyright from 1997 on its bios firmware that would be a dick move maybe instead they should try getting money from someone like our sponsor Micro Center thanks to Microcenter for sponsoring today's video February is build your own month at Microcenter they have month-long great savings to help you build your newest PC whether you're a seasoned PC Builder or a first-time Shopper Microcenter is there to help you with their knowledgeable Associates and with a great variety of products and even better prices they can be your One-Stop shop for all the tech you need laptops computer components monitors TVs networking equipment you name it and they've got it and if you want the customization of a PC build but don't want the hassle of putting it together for a small fee you can have one of their trained Associates do the work for you you can even submit your build to their build showcase and get 25 off your next in-store purchase and if you're having any technical difficulties they've got your back with their certified technicians at the knowledge bar so what are you waiting for head over to the description box and check out microcenter's build your own month-long deals if you're looking for something else to watch why don't you go check out the time that we had some of our younger staff try out Windows 98 that was the actual original reason that we acquired scale over here and it was a total blast

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,220,605

Keywords: pc, games, gaming, emulator, emulators, emulation, pcem, 86box, dosbox, dosbox-x, internet archive, theoldnet, old, windows 9x, windows 98, windows 95, DOS, MS-DOS, sound, video, configuration, Pentium, Pentium II, Cyrix, AMD, game preservation, modern, networking, win9x, win95, win98, ISO, folder2iso, anytoiso, DubbedWithAloud

Id: mWEE2RJj3YI

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 07 2023