That's boring though. What's really nifty about Virtual PC is that it allows you to revive old operating systems. For me, that means being able to run my beloved "Gold Box" AD&D collection with sound. Sure there's a decent emulator called DOSBox that gets the job done, but to get the real retro experience I'm going to need Virtual PC. Plus there are a few Win95 specific games and applications I'd like to fire up for old time's sake.

My final Win2k article is the least useful but by far the most entertaining: How to install & run Windows 95 on Virtual PC 2004. Welcome back to 1995.

Note: Although this article/tutorial was written for Windows 2000 there's no reason to think it won't work on XP and Vista. Virtual PC is Virtual PC regardless of which Windows flavor it's running on.

When you open Virtual PC for the first time New Virtual Machine Wizard will kick-off. If you're already using Virtual PC then click New on the console (but you already knew that).

On the Options screen you'll want to select Create a New Virtual Machine.

Choose the name and location of the new virtual machine, I went with Windows95-VPC.

On the Operating System screen select "Other". Yeah, there's a "Windows 95" option but that defaults to 32mb of RAM.

The "Recommended RAM" for a generic machine is 128mb. However, for Windows 95 you'll want to start with 64mb at the most. Apparently Windows 95 has some installation problems with more than 64mb RAM in a virtual machine (maybe a real one too?). At least I read some usenet postings that made this claim with rather vague explanations behind it. After Windows 95 is installed you can upgrade it to 2gb, I bumped it to 128 and it's running smoothly. I played with the RAM a few times so some screenshots may show different values.

The wizard will now prompt to create a new virtual hard disk or use an existing one. Let's go with new..

Here's something that's a pain. In the New Virtual Machine wizard you can create, but not configure, a virtual hard disk. This is royally dumb. By default it creates an expanding drive. However, we're dealing with FAT16 so we're going to need to go back and create 2gb fixed drives. So when you get to this screen just call the hard drive "TEMP.vhd" or whatever because we're going to delete it shortly.

Wizard's done, guess I didn't really need a screenshot for that.

You should now be on the Virtual PC console. Select the newly created machine and hit the Settings button.

Select Hard Disk 1 and hit the Virtual Disk Wizard button.

Select the option to create a new virtual disk.

Select the option to create a new virtual hard disk.

Choose the name and location of the virtual hard disk.

On the Virtual Hard Disk Options menu you'll want to choose Fixed size.

Set the disk to be 2048mb which is the FAT16 limit.

OK, quick sanity check. Hard Disk 1 & 2 there, check. CD & Floppy Disk setup, check.

So if you're feeling lucky, go back to the console and hit the Start button.

Throw the old DOS 6.2X disk 1 in and start the machine.

The DOS 6.2X installer will ask if you want to configure unallocated disk space. Of course you do.

In a few seconds it will format both of the virtual hard drives. If feels great to see this screen fly-by.

"Now is a great time to fill our your registration card." Now where did I put the damn thing?!

OK, here's something annoying. When you change floppy disks the virtual drive doesn't seem to know. It appears to catalog the disk and then refer to that catalog when the virtual machine tries to access it. As a result, you put in disk 2 but the DOS setup insists you still have disk 1 in the drive. You'll have to click on the little 3.5" disk icon in the lower left corner to release and recapture the drive. Even then you'll have to hit enter a few times for things to work.

When I was a kid, if we wanted to use a fancy CDROM drive we had to edit these stupid text files called autoexec.bat and config.sys. In config.sys you'll need to add the ol' "DEVICE=C:\DOS\EMM386.EXE" and "DEVICE=C:\DRIVERS\OAKCDROM.sys /D:MSCD001" lines. Of course your DOS install path and driver name could be different.

Here you'll need to add a "LOADHIGH=C:\DOS\MSCDEX.EXE /D:MSCD001". You may also want to REM out the "C:\DOS\SMARTDRV.EXE /X" line since the Windows 95 installer will just complain and disable it anyway.

Now you'll want to copy over the Windows 95 install CD. In case you forgot the syntax it's "xcopy e:\*.* c:\WIN95CD /S". It installs faster off the virtual hard drive and there's the whole aforementioned motherboard driver issue. There's also the annoying feature Windows 95 has where it sporadically asks you for the install CD when you try to access something for the first time (even if you swear you installed everything).

All right, it's go time. Go to C:\WIN95CD\WIN95\ and run setup.exe (as opposed to the setup.exe in the root of the CD).

Now you get to deal with mouse integration. This dialog tells you what the deal is.

Here's where things went spiraling downhill for me. The Windows 95 install totally died at the EULA dialog. It wouldn't respond to the mouse or keyboard (not even CTRL+ALT+DEL). Totally dead. I tried various memory, autoexec.bat, and config.sys settings but never got past this screen. I decided to give up for a while until I came to a solution..

(If you got past the previous screen then please ignore this step). Before completely giving up I decided to reach into the ol' OS wallet and try the trusty Windows 98 pre-install disk. Even in 1998 not all PCs had a BIOS that supported booting off a CDROM. Windows 98 installs came with a floppy disk that booted the PC into DOS mode so the install could be run manually. I figured this would be easier (and faster) than dorking with settings for an hour.

Yup, that bootdisk did the trick.

I won't go through all the Windows 95 installation steps here. I'm gambling that you're already familiar with installing Windows and the UI is pretty simple to follow if not. On this first dialog make sure to have everything checked unless you want to disable network support. I went with the "install everything" approach when it came time to select components.

I remember wasting hours watching that little "Copying files" meter slowly climb. Out in virtual land it absolutely flies.

..and here's the sign of success. You'll have to go through yet another set of configuration screens after the first boot but if you got here then everything's fine.

I'm calling the Intel drivers an "optional tweak" because everything worked fine without them. Unless you're looking to try more advanced stuff than just old games then there's probably no need to install them.

For some reason which I will never comprehend, turning on the pointer tail solved the issue.

I look just like Buddy Holly, and you're Mary Tyler Moore.

The whole reason I went through this crazy endeavor. Now if I only had some actual time to play games..

"Heh, heh, did you see the chick in the last picture? She totally wanted me."

"No way butt-munch, she wanted me."

Ravenloft had some issues. I think I entered something wrong in one of its endless configuration screens.

Sierra had some pretty crappy Windows support back in the day. They had Windows 95 versions of all their games but insisted to run in 256 color mode.

King's Quest VII ran just fine despite all it's whining about the colors and video card speed.

In 1996 I bought Visual Basic 4 through a Microsoft resellers program for a dirt cheap price. I spent a lot of time during class breaks in 1997 self-learning the language. By early 1998 I was able to land my first programming job. Thanks VB4!

The drive booted just fine. Windows then detected a ton of new hardware and rebooted more times than I could count. Reboot->new hardware found->repeat. Eventually it got to the desktop but could only run in 256 colors.

After uninstalling the old video drivers and installing the Intel 440BX driver everything was working perfectly. It's exactly how I left it nearly 8 years ago and, to my surprise, fully functional. If I find any $1 hard drives at garage sales this summer guess what I'm trying..