Let's Get Old Sega PC Games to Work Again

I've been tempted in the past to go down the route of a Windows 95/98 virtual machine for exactly this purpose (although not tempted enough to actually do it). It was mainly for the demo versions of games Sega offered on their website, and maybe the Flash and Shockwave content too.

If you don't want to fight VirtualBox or whatever, I hear DOSBox can run Windows 95. In fact, there's even an online version (though you can't copy your own files to it yet).


It also gets complicated when you start taking into account different graphics cards. Genuinely don't know how to handle that without a physical Windows 95 build.

 

In case of Emperor of Fading Suns - it was quite recently released on GOG.com (digital version) and has no issues with working on modern systems. I've tested it personally on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 (both 64 bit) and it's working fine.

(By the way - it's the Hollistic Design's game, same company which made Warhammer 40k: Final Liberation and Machiavelli the Prince games - both available on GOG, I would recommend to try them )

Other titles - I highly recommend DgVoodoo. It is the thing which helped me with multiple older games which were never re-released in digital version (with adjustments to work on modern systems). And it's extremely simple to use, just unpack it, launch once to configure the files, save the config and close, and then just copy 3 files into game's folder.

You can find it here:
http://dege.freeweb.hu/

Glory to the PC Imperium.

 

I'm able to get Sonic's Schoolhouse working on Windows 10 x64 using these steps:

* Copy the contents of the SONIC directory from the CD to your hard drive
* Inside the SONIC directory is a SONICSH.INI file - this needs to be moved to your C:\Windows folder
* Finally, copy the WING32.DLL file from the DRIVERS\WING directory on the CD to your C:\Windows\SysWOW64 folder
* The game can now be started by running SONIC.EXE

I've also gotten Bug!, Panzer Dragoon, and Virtua Fighter PC running fine under Windows 10 as well. I can post instructions for those as well if there's interest

 

Just had a look at the sonic schoolhouse article. Is it true the game was only released in the US? I got a copy of the 'Sonic & Garfield' pack as a kid for christmas in Australia, and it has an 'also available: sonic's schoolhouse' on the back of the manual. So i guess for sure Sonic & Garfield collection was in australia in 1999, but i can't completely confirm schoolhouse was.

 

How is sound under those circumstances? Outside a VM I've been able to get the game running but if I don't run it in 98 compatibility mode the sound screws up, and if I do it runs very slowly.

 

I'm gonna investigate this with some sysinternals tools. It's gotta be looking other places before SysWOW64...

 

Could you possibly put it into any folder that's been added to the PATH? Though in that case it'd be weird if you can't just add it to the same folder as the executable.

 

You're right, I'm seeing the same behavior you're describing. Never owned the game back when it came out so I don't have a sense of how it runs on era-appropriate hardware. It does play some sound effects without compatibility mode applied, but not all.

If you try to run the game with the WING32.DLL file inside of the game directory, the game will refuse to start and will instead throw up a dialog box asking you to move the DLL into C:\Windows\System32. For 32-bit apps, that path actually translates to the SysWOW64 folder.

 

This sidesteps the actual problem of getting these games to run on modern hardware but: One thing I discovered a few weeks ago is that you probably do not want to use a Virtual Machine for running old versions of Windows.

Background: A random discord conversation made me realize there weren't a lot of materials regarding actually using the Sonic R network patch to play the game online. I did this back around 2001 on a Windows 98 PC and it worked fine, but the network patch stopped working with Windows XP and game input (both controller and keyboard) no longer worked on XP if you had it installed. I decided to install Windows 98 in a VM to get some video of the network patch working, and discovered the game would not run. This is probably common knowledge to some people, but for those who it's not - the unpatched game (and network patch) will not run on a computer that is too fast. The game will just crash at launch and not start. Some posts mention using a CPU hogging app to slow down the computer will allow the game to launch, but there is a patched EXE available. There are also Hex Edit instructions for manually fixing original version, but the byte sequence you change for the patch does not exist in the network patch and even if you try to patch the most similar one it doesn't work. (Have not done the analysis to figure out exactly what the patch is doing to try and replicate it. Might look into this at some point, but since I can't fix the input problem it's probably not worth it)

Considering some games do not run properly / crash on computers that are too fast, I started looking for ways to slow down the VM. That's not really a thing (aside from CPU hogging tools) because it's a virtual machine thus running on your native CPU and can't be slowed down.

Summary:
If someone is looking to run Windows 98 for old games, you might be better off NOT using a Virtual Machine due to problems caused by your computer being too fast. The recommended alternative that I found was a fork of DOSBox called DOSBox X. It supports Windows 95 and 98, which vanilla DOSBox does not work correctly with. It also has emulation for 3DFX Voodoo graphics cards, and you can set what kind of CPU you're running (eg. Pentium 4) as well as the CPU speed. This seems to be the best option for running old games IF you can't get them to run on Windows 10.

Although I never actually got Sonic R to run. I couldn't get DOSBox to work correctly with my actual physical disc drive. I never finished troubleshooting the problem, the files are still sitting in my downloads folder. I'll probably pick it back up again over the holidays.

 

Likely the best solution here is to use PCem:

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

This is an incredibly comprehensive PC emulator that allows you to select the components (CPU, video card, etc.) to emulate, and Windows 95/98 run great on it. There are a ton of CPUs and video cards supported, including Pentium, Pentium II, etc, as well as the 3DFX Voodoo cards, S3 ViRGE, some ATI cards, and more. It's not as well known as DosBox, and it requires a beefy CPU to emulate some of the higher end components, but it's probably the most accurate way of doing what you want to do (which I think is key here).

This video is good at showing what PCem's capabilities:

 

Just came across this old Sega PC site which might have some different demos than Sega.com.

Edit: Yep, seems like only these were archived on the main site.

Edit2: Unfortunately they all seem truncated at 1mb.

 

Found most of them and a few more archived on Sega.net;

Bug!
Daytona USA
Last Bronx
Manx TT
NBA 98
Sega Rally
Sega Touring Car
Sonic & Knuckles
Sonic CD
Virtua Fighter 2
Virtua Squad
Virtua Squad 2
VMUAnim.exe

Shockwave mini games;
Ecco
Crazy Taxi
Space Channel 5

Edit: found WWS demo here. HotD "demo" seems to be the same file as the patch, so maybe that's an error. If so then just missing Daytona USA Deluxe demo (ddx_demo.exe).

 

https://github.com/otya128/winevdm

This may or may not be of any help (I hope it is, however), apparently this lets you run 16-bit binaries on 64-bit Windows. More based around Wine than anything, but still, potentially useful for this purpose.

 

Sorry for the bump. I had someone reach out to me asking for instructions on how to get Bug! working on Windows 10. Here's what I personally do in order to get the game to work. Note that I can only get the game to work without the FMVs as they cause the game to crash.

1. Copy all files from the CD to a folder on your hard drive.
2. Rename (or delete) the VBFMV and VBFMVLO folders.
3. Rip the game's music to MP3 format and rename them as "Track02.mp3", "Track03.mp3", etc.
4. Place the MP3 files inside a folder called "Music" inside the WIN95 folder.
5. Download _inmm from here and extract the files into your WIN95 folder.
6. Patch the "BUG!.EXE" executable with _inmm by dragging the exe on top of the _inmmcnf.exe program in Windows Explorer.
7. Copy the contents of this paste and save it as "_inmm.ini" inside of the WIN95 folder.
8. Set compatibility mode on BUG!.EXE to run in 640x480 and 256 colors.
9. Finally, create an ISO image of all the extracted CD files. Easiest way to do this is with Folder2iso.

After you've done all that you should be able to just mount the ISO in Windows Explorer, then run BUG!.EXE inside the WIN95 folder on your hard drive. I personally like to automate steps 8 and 9 when running the game by using a batch file (requires WinCDEmu in order to run).

 

Okay so this is highly unusual. This is in the Sega Mobile website but apparently this is a dev tool that was sitting on the Sega Mobile website that lets you create animations for the VMU. Apparently this was straight up taken from http://www.booyaka.com/ as the help menu lists it. Said website is still up as a ancient artifact. Not sure what the link between them and Sega are but it also asks you for company info when you download it.

 

I thought this topic was going to be about the old, OLD sega PC games, like Space Harrier, Outrun, Afterburner, Alien Syndrome, etc. The ones that came in boxes like this:



That said, it has been my experience that the games in the OP run way, way better in Linux these days than modern windows, especially with a modern Glorious Eggroll WINE prefix. They basically install and play just like normal, as though it was old windows 95/98. Simply install steam, and you'll have everything you need out of the box to run these games in modern linux.

In a funny case of circular logic, you can actually install WINE on modern windows with WINE DVM. This will run 16-bit windows applications on modern windows without VM or dosbox. But still, it's way, way easier to just use linux, even a live distro like holoISO will do it better.

This tool was highly publicized in Offical Dreamcast Magazine. People could even submit their own VMU animations and they'd include them on the demo discs. It was pretty widely known about back in the day.

 

There's actually a little funny story about those PC p- um, Amiga ports.
In the music files for Space Harrier II (the Amiga version), there's this curious note left by Matt Furniss.

Who is Uncle Art? Well, Uncle Art was a arranger for home computers in the UK (you name it, he's probably done work on it). Outside of gaming, he's also a really good musician: the two came hand in hand where he had bonus audio cassettes on the games he worked on and if the computer supported it, he'd often load the intro to the game with samples of a studio-recorded song.

So why does Matt sound ambivalent and use Uncle Art as a pejorative? Well, here comes the ugly part: while he was a good musician and knew how to translate his sound drivers across platforms, he did not have a scooby on how to use the Amiga's Paula chip. Outside of some games where he had a ton of sample space, a lot of his arrangements consisted of poorly mixed samples of varying fidelity (which often clashed with each other), transcription errors, and frequent interrupts by sound effects in-game.
He was a musician first and a chiptuner... fourth. Judging from notes given by a magazine covering the Power Drift port, it appears half of the time he didn't actually have the PCM samples or any proper reference to the games he was covering outside of the songs themselves. It's likely he did a lot of his music covers by ear (this was when video game music CDs and cassettes loaded the ever living fuck out of their music with reverb, making it hard to discern melodies). Richard Aplin briefly mentions him in the notes inside Line of Fire.

Uncle Art would later work on various other projects up to the mid 90's, before silently retiring. He also has a documentary of his stint as home computer arranger.

 

chop chop wiki editors



So turns out this isn't really a shockwave ecco port it's just a minigame
Was a bitch running this though. If you have Shockwave you won't be surprised that this thing's so old it begs you to pretty please use a version from 1997. Ain't nobody got time to install the Kriz virus, so you have to get a hold of Flashpoint. That actually has a repository full of Shockwave projectors stuffed inside FPSoftware (the emulator to the roms if you will).
Once that hog's singing you have to download Python as a zip and put it in the folder where you can see python.exe. Download this and go to command prompt, drop ecco.exe in the python folder and feed the script to the ecco exe
After that though YOU'RE STILL NOT FUCKING DONE. This game runs too fast on current PCs so you have to download this and using the GUI you set the speed to 200 mhz. Specifically open the projector in the simulator and now you can open the Ecco DCRs. Now feel free to bask in an Ecco game that's two steps divorced from the McDonalds Sonic car dodge game.

Congratulations, you've just gave yourself a niche internet rig. Now someone can curate this on the Flashpoint project because afaik this thing doesn't have any video. I think the russians who found out about this exe had no clue what was in it bc the tech didn't exist but it does now