After I have set up a virtual Windows XP on my Vista box I also was attempting to get a Windows 95 image to run on my Vista using Vmware Server. Here are a few hurdles I had to go through to get it running in a more useful way:
- Audio didn’t work, even after enabling the audio device in my virtual computer before doing the install. Adding hardware is risky: when running the automatic hardware discovery the beast freezes including the host system and including a blue screen of death experience. When adding hardware the automatic scan should be skipped. A working audio driver turned out to be the Creative ‘Sound Blaster PCI 128′ driver as mentioned here, which I downloaded from the Creative archives.
- Network didn’t work. This was easy to fix by just adding the Microsoft TCP/IP protocol ( through “Network” in the Control Panel, Configuration – Add … )
The built-in browser (Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 3.0) was hopelessly old and did not render any web page correctly and threw thousands of “script error” messages. A browser working under Windows 95 turned out to be Opera version 9.22, as mentioned in this blog posting, which still is available from here. Before I tried to install older versions of firefox ( back to 1.5.0.9 ) or flock or Netscape without success: either the installer crashed or the browser itself after installation, and I couldn’t get any older versions of these browser.
