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Comment by tommek4077 | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the discussion on Twitter as I have no account and do not see.the answers on Twitter, but don't you just need virtualbox?

CD-Roms are still there and the the underlying tech is also still the same.

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Looks like it's an Access database. Perhaps convert it to SQLite and publish with something like https://datasette.io/?

I think the problem is, thread author doesn't know how to rip an ISO of the CD or move the database out; looks like they are getting help already though.

Yes, if the author was technical enough to rip an ISO and host (or seed) it somewhere, there would already be 3 Github projects linked in this thread extracting and visualising the data.

If they manage to get the ISO available can someone please share here ? I really don't want to sign up to Twitter just to follow along.

VirtualBox dropped support for 9x versions of Windows some time ago, and although it's "possible" to get it working, it works very badly.

Just use https://86box.net/ it's updated regularly and works wonders!

How is it possible to do this? Isn't all you need is to emulate is at least a 386 or 486? They removed emulation of that cpu target?????

Not just the CPU, but also the older chipsets that Windows 9x thinks is current. It only supports emulation of chipsets much newer than those versions of Windows.

Where did you get that idea? Windows 98 is still a default template in VirtualBox 7.0 and fully supported:

https://youtu.be/yxJDK5xmTFQ?si=5yJScYparrURTAWH

And here:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Guest_OSes

You just don't get accelerated graphics or USB sharing.

You're being very generous. With no guest additions, I'd say that's "unsupported". It will work as well as any other arbitrary Intel software, but it won't be usable.

I'm not being "generous". If anything, I just think you're using an overly ambitious definition of "supported".

Oracle isn't going to guarantee your Windows 7 install works or help you debug issues. And running an OS non-accelerated is a perfectly valid and functional way of doing so, even if it doesn't fit your personal metric of usability.

Regardless, you implied that something changed for the worst. VBox offers as much "support" in version 7.0 as they did in 1.0. If anything it's better today as VBox used to be unbearably unstable in VESA or SVGA modes:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=83281

And running 16-bit applications (WoW/ntvdm) on 64-bit VBox installs used to crash the whole machine (or run unbearably slow) due to incomplete CPU emulation, something that has since been remedied. A feature that only old 32-bit Windows OSes use.

It happens to work but is not really supported. Mouse is super laggy, there are no guest additions and last time I checked it used a full CPU core at all times.

Thus:

> You just don't get accelerated graphics or USB sharing.

Every OS that has to use VESA in a VM is slow. It doesn't mean they're "unsupported". Unsupported would imply that the OS doesn't boot/function properly or that you have to do abnormal things to get it to work.

It's not like Oracle offers some sort of guarantee that your Windows 7 guest will function or offer support if you have issues.

> Every OS that has to use VESA in a VM is slow.

Actually, that is not necessarily true. If properly done, VESA is just a large shared memory framebuffer which is practically as fast as you can get on a VM, barring 3D acceleration which the GUI of 9x doesn't really benefit from.

Heck, for a fun experiment, Haiku on _real hardware_ using "VESA" (actually, the EFI GOP) beats the shit out of Windows 11 with accelerated GPU drivers. Even dragging windows around feels much faster in Haiku. Obviously 3D is going to be a problem, but...

Sorry, I said "a VM" when I should have said "VirtualBox". VBox just has a suboptimal VESA implementation. And I overloaded non-accelerated into that for simplicity's sake.

Qemu shows that VESA/SVGA drivers can perform decently, the VBox team just hasn't prioritized making them do so. But the point stands that a non-accelerated video option will perform worse than an accelerated one for all VMs for anything but the simplest of blitting pipelines.

What do you mean? The VBox VESA BIOS is buggy? (There's not much else in a "VESA implementation") I really don't think that's the case. It is a bit slower than VMware, but never felt ridiculously so. And definitely qemu feels slower, and IMHO has a much worse and less compatible implementation (yes, the VBox BIOS forks from qemu, but at a point where qemu cared a bit more about retro-compatibility than nowadays). At worst I'd argue they are practically the same implementation.

> But the point stands that a non-accelerated video option will perform worse than an accelerated one for all VMs for anything but the simplest of blitting pipelines.

That's why I put the example that Haiku on a completely not accelerated framebuffer performs miles better than Windows 11 on an accelerated 2 year old GPU. The GUI parts only, of course. Try it. It's just insane difference. And yes I do have 5k screens..

For 9x, even if it actually supported 2D acceleration, newer cards seem to do a terrible job at it.

You are exaggerating a lot. Windows 9x works perfectly fine, and is much faster than on emulators. You can even use USB tablet emulation to get as good as it gets mouse support.

What does "supported" mean? Are you a paying Oracle customer? Because otherwise _nothing_ is supported.

If you pay them, they for example support several 9x era hardware (like the SB16).

VirtualBox defaults to emulating a PIIX3 chipset which is absolutely Windows 95 vintage.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch03.html#settings-system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PIIX#/media/File:Intel_sb82371...

It actually works very well, and there was an HN top post a couple weeks ago about how someone had even written a 3D capable video driver for 98 and VirtualBox.

I agree but you don't need to run Windows 9x. NT 4 or 2000 should work fine and are well supported in VirtualBox.

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