Saturday, November 2, 2013

Win98 Guest in True Color High Resolution

I'm finding that the Win98 Vbox guest is running intolerably slow. I found this help.

... 3. Video driver integration.
By default Windows 98 will run only in 640x480 resolution, 16-colors.

Performance Note: VirtualBox is not optimized for 16-colors (4-bit) emulation. It works very slow this way.
Having 32-bit True Color driver makes Win98 VMs run on VirtualBox *much* faster.


If you want True color or high resolution, you need to download special drivers.
3.1. bearwindows driver (unstable)
http://bearwindows.boot-land.net/vbe9x.htm

NOTE: You must install "Universal version", as "VirtualBox" version is known to have problems.
WARNING: This driver is buggy, and many Windows fonts do not render correctly with it. Not recommended.
3.2. SciTech Display Doctor (recommended)
The second option is to get the SciTech Display Doctor version 7 beta driver (12 MB) -
(contributed by Richard_S)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/226caou8x0jf8 ... ctor-7.iso
-or-
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BycgkM ... UhnWGRycVE

The driver is a high quality commercial grade video driver (even includes some software emulated Open GL 3D support), and it does include an exe installer program.

Despite having an installer, the SciTech Display Doctor is a little tricky to get going. After the program launches, you have to find the little round radio button link to click to 'enable' the new driver (otherwise you still have VGA). Even then, you can't select any higher resolution modes until you ditch the 'default monitor' and select one of the 'Super VGA' types.

After fiddling around with the above changes and rebooting several times you should be able to select 800x600 or 1024x768 (or higher) resolutions with 32 bit color depth. (setting 32 bit color mode optimizes the interface with Virtualbox and really speeds things up)