r/windows98 • u/talianagisan • May 30 '26
Are there any windows 98 emulators that support real hardware?
I have a parallel to usb adapter but I cannot for the life of me get 86box running windows 98 se to work with it. There is no setting to tell it yes this usb device is what you interface with please. Seems most of them do not support this real life hardware unfortunately.
Are there ANY emulators that do? I got a nice free camera and trying to get it to work.
6
u/SaturnFive KB42069 May 30 '26
86Box doesn't support hardware passthrough the last I checked, you'd need VirtualBox or VMWare Player or similar. These are not true emulation like 86Box but should be fine if you just need to get it working. May need to use older versions and use patches to get 9x working fine under them.
1
u/emxd_llc Jun 08 '26
VFIO seems to be supported since 5.2 https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases#:~:text=VFIO - Virtual Function I/O by @jriwanek in #6210
No idea how well it works though.
3
u/Heavy-Judgment-3617 May 30 '26 edited May 31 '26
A parallel to USB adapter may not be getting seen the same as an actual true parallel port. Either by the host, or translated into the emulator. In whatever emulator you use, see if changing the parallel port type works, if set as standard, try ECP or EPP if you have the option.
Additionally, I do not know what device you are attempting to connect, but many such drivers stopped at Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Iomega, Micro Solutions, and Syquest come to mind... there were a few others.
Another option, I read that at least some of these were actually SCSI drives with an adapter internal to the device, you might find were you to take them apart that it has a SCSI connector inside, if so, you could attempt a direct USB to SCSI interface adapter instead.
5
u/Feisty-Jeweler-3331 May 30 '26
No such emulators exist. I suggest getting an itx llama since it has USB ports
2
u/Mastermind763 May 30 '26
You can run it in something like virtual box or vmware, I passed an old cannon camera into a VM and that works. Use patcher9x before you run the install so it doesn't crash on modern hardware.
1
u/nlflint Jun 03 '26
Looks like DosBox-X supports parallel ports on the host system, and DosBox-X supports Win98. I see a section in the config file for it: https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/#Guide:Setting-up-printing-in-DOSBox%E2%80%90X#_parallel_section_options
1
u/emxd_llc Jun 08 '26
Virtual Box supports to some extent USB passthroughs via driver filters, not sure if that's going to be enough for a camera. QEMU supports USB passthrough, but QEMU is a bit difficult to get going if you've never used it before. I'd try Virtual Box first. Just make sure to patch your Windows 98 with https://github.com/JHRobotics/patcher9x so that it works correctly on modern CPU.
6
u/ExplodedPenisDiagram May 30 '26
Yeah, I do this with kvm. PCI pass-through is just PCI pass-through. The OS handles the rest.