playing Windows 95 games from CD-ROM on modern computers?

[gbpxl]

oh yeah I have a Windows 98 desktop now. Best $50 I ever spent.

[Edmond Dantes]

oh yeah I have a Windows 98 desktop now. Best $50 I ever spent.

You've joined a mighty happy family, son!

That said even on actual Windows 98, I often rip ISOs (I usually just use old versions of Nero) and mount the discs with, say, an old version of Daemontools (you might prefer something else though--do research, as ONE, only older DTools will work on Win98 anyway and TWO, at some point the program started incorporating adware... though I think that was around the WinXP era).

For a long time one of my personal headaches was if the game had audio music tracks, how do I rip a disc of that AND play it from a digital image AND still have the CD-ROM music? But recently I cracked even that nut.

The only nut I haven't cracked is I have two specific games--Need for Speed: High Stakes and Risk II--that seem to always know if there's not an actual CD in the drive. I've never found a way around this, nor have I found a no-CD crack for either game (and honestly, googling Risk II is a pain in the ass as I usually get the actual board game or tons of just unrelated junk).

[Mad-Mike]

For Windows 95 and later stuff I do one of two things......

- rip to ISO on my LInux box and install via something like Lutris or straight through Wine
- rip to ISO on my vintage 486 DX4 machines or one Pentium laptop (Versa P/75) and run it from there

I find there not a lot post 1995 that I' m that into so I mostly stick to older DOS titles that run on 486 and older, and the newer stuff still feels roughly the same on a modern setup with some compatibility layers under Linux so I use that.

[Rickstilwell1]

For a long time one of my personal headaches was if the game had audio music tracks, how do I rip a disc of that AND play it from a digital image AND still have the CD-ROM music? But recently I cracked even that nut.

How did you do that? I'd like to do that with Sonic 3D Blast.

[Gametrek]

Sonic Cd has a fix. It is a file you have to find and download to apply the patch.


Sonic-R ( which has a graphics update ) also has a fix


...........

If you want to play games from earlier windows release you could


1. DOSbox with special fixes and commands.
2. Winbox for X86box ( an emulator like .... 3 or 4 ) however much lower resources because this goes way back .
3. Oracle VM VIrtual Box
4. VMware workstation Pro series

2, 3, 4, you literally have to install the OS, but again they even have Tiny releases and fixes for those so it should not take up much space at all.

That being said you could mount your physical drive to those options, or the ISO drives.