Can I run Windows 95 on XP hardware?

[yankii]

I was looking for a PC to play games on and every 95 laptop I can find is $400+, whereas XP laptops are as cheap as $10. My question is, can I run Windows 95 on XP-era hardware? The oldest one I was able to find was a mobile Celeron from 2005/6 with 128MB RAM.

 

[Latiodile]

you might be able to run windows 98 on a very very early one, pre-2002, most windows 95 games should be able to run on 98 except for very finicky or speed limited ones
drivers will be your main issue

 

[codezer0]

Gonna need more detail to really answer that, first of all.

With only what you've provided, the amount of memory should be fine. Finding drivers for the chipset and components for Win9x in general might get tricky, especially with regard to notebooks since, especially then, the responsibility of providing drivers was left up to the OEM's, who were just trying to push to selling whatever the latest Operating system there was at the time of manufacturing the thing. Not impossible, just going to not be as clean of an environment.

What did you need a Win95 system for? If for games, what are the must-runs? do you know what API the games used? I'd hope you do, since Win95 in particular needed more intimate knowledge for it. DirectX wasn't quite standardized and running competently until IMO DirectX 7. If you need something that runs Glide, might be better off on something more modern, like XP, and using dgVoodoo or nGlide's wrapper to enable it to run on a newer platform.

To put it into perspective, while there's a dude on YouTube called Omores running Win98 on a 14th gen intel board (something low end enough that it had a working PCI slot for instance), guy was clearly patient enough to do a lot of digging and finding a lot of things to patch along the way so the OS wouldn't have a stroke on such new hardware.

For my own use cases, I focused on the desktops since sourcing drivers was just easier.

 

[yankii]

you might be able to run windows 98 on a very very early one, pre-2002, most windows 95 games should be able to run on 98 except for very finicky or speed limited ones
drivers will be your main issue

I can't find a single 98/2000 one for some reason.

What did you need a Win95 system for? If for games, what are the must-runs? do you know what API the games used? I'd hope you do, since Win95 in particular needed more intimate knowledge for it. DirectX wasn't quite standardized and running competently until IMO DirectX 7. If you need something that runs Glide, might be better off on something more modern, like XP, and using dgVoodoo or nGlide's wrapper to enable it to run on a newer platform.

I need a Windows 95 device because that's the lowest version of Windows my games target, though XP is supported via compatibility layers, I assume. The need DirectX 8.0a.

For my own use cases, I focused on the desktops since sourcing drivers was just easier.

I can't find a CRT monitor so those are not an option, unfortunately.

 

[codezer0]

Well, for 98se my primary desktop is using my Core 2 Quad and a 6800GT.

My present XP machine is an i7 3770, and thanks to Phil's modified geforce drivers, a 980ti.

With enough overkill, the strain of resolution shouldn't be a problem.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

you might be able to run windows 98 on a very very early one, pre-2002, most windows 95 games should be able to run on 98 except for very finicky or speed limited ones
drivers will be your main issue

Win 98SE with KernelEx will allow for so much more than 95. It should support old games and newer ones not working on 95.



Many desktop motherboards from the XP era have 9x drivers available. It is harder for laptops but not impossible. An official patch is needed to use more than 512MB RAM. Win 9x crashes otherwise.

 

[codezer0]

To be fair, my primary 98se machine had 1gb of ram installed from the start; in part because, it's what was compatible and available to install in the board.

Windows Me, can support 2gb installed without issues; the 512mb cap is more to do if booting into DOS mode.

For DirectX 8.0a, XP shouldn't have a problem running it. Unless it's like you're needing an alternative API for some components. If you had something, like a sound card that supports A3D, I'd understand completely. While the Vortex 2 did get XP drivers, the A3D functionality was only fully supported on up to 9x in their drivers. Or like, if you did somehow have a working 3dfx Voodoo card and wanted to use that natively. If so, good luck and more power to you.

 

[Taleweaver]

I'm surprised you manage to find these laptops in the first place. Where are you looking... In a museum?

"playing games on'also sounds... Wrong. XP will be a whole lot easier to get games to run than on 95. And this isn't like it's 'crt looks better' either: the laptop will be bulky, slow and loud, presuming the fan hasn't given in years ago. I'm not even sure to what degree 95 ported usb, but it was in no way universal yet.

 

[KleinesSinchen]

I'm surprised you manage to find these laptops in the first place. Where are you looking... In a museum?

Are they supposed to be hard to find? I usually take old PCs from the room next to my bedroom.

"playing games on'also sounds... Wrong. XP will be a whole lot easier to get games to run than on 95. And this isn't like it's 'crt looks better' either: the laptop will be bulky, slow and loud, presuming the fan hasn't given in years ago. I'm not even sure to what degree 95 ported usb, but it was in no way universal yet.

Windows 95 would not be my first choice for gaming and certainly not on a laptop from that era. This requires a desktop PC. Most laptops were hardly suitable for anything more than winmine.exe and sol.exe back then.
USB functions in Win 95c are buggy at best.




========
Some older Windows, and especially DOS, games spectacularly fail on NT based systems. For the real experience, not some modern emulation, a DOS based Windows system is needed. Windows 98SE with unofficial service pack, KernelEx and universal mass storage driver is a convenient setup capable of playing old games while maintaining easy data transfer options from newer devices.

I get it, most people nowadays are way above this and look down on running old PCs in condescending manner. But it is really a fun thing to do.

 

[SonyUSA]

Go for Windows 98se with the USB Mass Storage update/patch, that will make file transferring a bit easier. Any Win95 game should run in Win98 since it's real DOS. You'll also want to pull your RAM out so you have 512MB, that's more than enough and a LOT of stuff will go bonkers if you have more than that installed, even with the EX MEM patches. You'll likely need to use SBEMU in DOS mode because you don't have a DOS compatible sound card. If all this sounds too complicated, you need to look into just using a DOSBOX flavor or maybe your game is emulator compatible with like SCUMMVM-- what game is it?

Your other real hardware option is WinXP with the Soundblaster emu software VDMSound that works really well to get older DOS/Windows stuff working with SB/general midi support

 

[bonkmaykr]

The short answer is yes, 99% of the time. But why would you?

The long answer is that it depends on the driver support (likely supported, but still important to check) and the CPU clock speed - some old versions of Windows prior to NT 5.0 had various fatal timing bugs that require workarounds or patches to make these systems work on hardware past their discontinuation date.

I can't imagine it's worth keeping 9x though because XP 32-bit is compatible with all legacy 32-bit and 16-bit Windows programs via NTVDM (you won't have NTVDM on Windows for x86-64 so maybe avoid that one if 16-bit support is important to you) and is the newest version of Windows before UAC. It's the sweet spot for running anything from the 90s to early 2010s and if you need full DOS emulation there are solutions for that. Having a proper NT kernel makes life a lot easier.

 

[codezer0]

The short answer is yes, 99% of the time. But why would you?

The long answer is that it depends on the driver support (likely supported, but still important to check) and the CPU clock speed - some old versions of Windows prior to NT 5.0 had various fatal timing bugs that require workarounds or patches to make these systems work on hardware past their discontinuation date.

I can't imagine it's worth keeping 9x though because XP 32-bit is compatible with all legacy 32-bit and 16-bit Windows programs via NTVDM (you won't have NTVDM on Windows for x86-64 so maybe avoid that one if 16-bit support is important to you) and is the newest version of Windows before UAC. It's the sweet spot for running anything from the 90s to early 2010s and if you need full DOS emulation there are solutions for that. Having a proper NT kernel makes life a lot easier.

There's a couple of use cases I can provide. Again though, how much it matters to you hinges on, if you expect to be running a game that supports it.

Windows 95 was still very early, so there wasn't a ready made API to standardize how games run and perform on the operating system. If you're running games that are old enough to need a vendor specific API, such as the (now) non standard 3d graphics supported by the Nvidia NV1, you are better off running in 95 to minimize overhead. Same goes for audio; I started my journey because wife had an Aureal Vortex 2 in the hardware pile not being used; yes, it has Windows XP drivers, but the support for the API was incomplete past 9x and Me. Unfortunately, that sound card suffered a catastrophic failure I couldn't fix; though at least Audigy sound cards are/were pretty dang cheap on eBay. It's also helpful to build an overkill rig for 9x/Me for running glide wrappers like dgVoodoo or nGlide.

It's also pretty looney to see just how new a game or peripheral can still be supported on windows 9x. Case in point, once the final supported DirectX runtime is installed, I can plug in a wired Nintendo Switch controller and it's picked up and detected right away. Incidentally, the PC port of Outrun 2006 even works there.

The use case is as personal as the end user wanting to build it. It's not our place to judge; but to offer counsel and provide feedback.

 

[zonk47]

Win95 will crash on systems faster than 450mhz. There's a patch for that tho, check Win World PC for it. Get the C version, previous versions don't have USB support. Really, 98 is a better choice. There were some games that would not run on 95, but all ran on 98 iirc.