Windows 95 games on DOSBox using Mac
 

I successfully installed and played a few DOS games from the olden days (Command & Conquer and Settlers II!) on my Mac using DOSBox.

I have to say that I have spent quite a few happy hours playing them on the plane!

But I have got a few ultralonghaul flights coming up and I fancy playing some Windows 95 games I have got in a box too!

So I have two questions:
* Am I correct in assuming that I can just install Windows 95 through DOSBox and run it correctly? :)
* Any ideas where I can find a copy of Windows 95/98? :D

Many thanks in advance.

The best way to run DOSBox on a Mac is via Boxer:

http://boxerapp.com/

It even has a great way to manage your games collection. :)

Win95 + DOSBox = buggy
 

All reports I've come across say that, while it can be done, performance and stability are terrible. Of course, it's been a couple of years since I last checked so things might have improved. A quick web search restricted to results from the past year should give a good idea of where it stands.

Good luck!

I must say I've been quite happy with the Boxer application, which has allowed me to run one of the best Amiga/Atari ST games ever: Dungeon Master.

The question now is: how can we run Civ2 on our Macs? :) I know there's a freeCiv clone, but I'm only interested in running the real thing.

Shouldn't just about any VM solution work with Windows 95? I'm guessing there are ones with better win95 extensions than dosbox. I've used VMWare to run Win98 - but not on a mac.

Virtualbox does well enough, and is free and cross-platform. Pretty much any Win95 game would run on Win98SE, and I'd recommend installing that as the last stable iteration of that line (ME is best ignored.)

DosBox is great, but becomes very battery unfriendly with later-generation performance sensitive DOS games because it's pure emulation. Virtualization is rather more battery friendly and faster although I don't know if it will play games well in terms of the 2D graphics speeds.

I'm not sure how Crossover Mac will do for this, but on Linux, Crossover Games is ideal for older Windows games.

Boxer is a great app, one of my favorites. It doesn't make a good solution for win95 games, however. I've installed win95 in DOSBox, took several hours and many failed attempts, but it still exits unexpectedly and sometimes refuses to boot unless I run a scandisk first.
Virtualbox isn't really a good solution, because it's not optimized for win9x. It may be more stable than the DOSBox solution, but it's many times slower, and somtimes just plain unresponsive.
I'm still digging for a free virtual solution for windows 95 games. It would be ideal if I can have the games on the shelves with my Boxer games. Even if each game has it's own windows installation to support it. Would be nice to just click and go.
In the meantime, I still have an old PowerMac G4 with Virtual PC v5 that runs windows 95 much smoother than my much faster intel mac can. But it would be ideal if I could play any of these games on one machine.

That is really, really bizarre. Running DOS and Windows 98 on a PC with VirtualBox or VMWare usually produces a VM that is too fast. I've seen something like this with Intel macs and newer OS's, though. I'd make a Windows 7 based VMware image using VMWare Workstation on Windows and when a colleague attempted to run that VM on VMware for Mac - it was so slow as to be unusable until it was moved back to a PC. I have to wonder how well Macs really support the virtualization extensions.