this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Easiest way to get old Windows games to run? (self.retrogaming)
submitted 3 weeks ago by leisesprecher to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
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I'm trying to get an old Windows game running for a friend.

It seems to be a 16bit macromedia app and I kind of got it running in a Win 98 VM using Virtualbox. DOSBox seems to get confused by it being a Windows app.

Thing is, the friend is very much not good with tech and I want to set everything up for him to "just work". Installing VBox might be a bit too much.

Apparently, you can install Windows inside DOSBox, but is that really stable and usable for layman? Are there any other approaches?

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[–] aaaaaaaaargh 4 points 3 weeks ago

I'd always try wine (x86) first. I remember a friend and me wanted to play Dungeon Keeper 1 a couple of years ago and after fiddling around with Windows 7 for ages we finally tried it on Linux using wine and it worked out of the box and even simulated IPX. Now, about a decade later, I'm using wine for pretty much everything, not only games.

And if wine doesn't work for you, try pcem. Might take some more time to set up, especially because you're aiming for a win16 app, but it's also closer to the original hardware (because other than wine it's an actual physical device emulator).