Emulating Win95/98
 

Any good ideas for emulating Win95/98 so I can play older games on them? I've tried installing them on VirtualBox, but they don't work so well.

Microsoft Virtual PC is your best bet I think.

I have Windows 98 running in mine but it doesn't emulate 3D video cards from what I understand.

actually it does emulate the 3d video card. it doesn't use your host video card but uses it's own emulated video card emulated by your cpu, kinda sucks :/

it virtualizes cpu and ram though

Yes, Virtual PC is intended to support legacy business applications, needless to say Microsoft doesn't care about game performance in it. Nevertheless I have had great results with it, playing the Win9x and Win3.1 games that I want to, like Age of Empires II or Civilization II. I did have serious performance problems too when I tried VirtualBox, the OS itself ran very slow even before loading anything else; I didn't try hard to solve the problem, I just switched to VPC which works great out of the box for Windows.

How much RAM and HDD space should I give a Win98 VM?

All of them!!11

Really I can't tell you.

Well it depends on what you plan to install in it and run in it, does it? Regarding RAM, I have set 256 MB, which is overkill to make Windows 98 run smooth hardly ever touching the pagefile, and leaves an ample surplus for the old programs I have in there. And at the same time 256 MB is a small part of the RAM I have, an Internet browser can take that much, so I can give VPC that much too. And when you're running a virtual machine you're not supposed (?) to be running other resource intensive programs at the same time, so I can give VPC that much.

Even more so HD space depends on what you plan to install in it. Windows 98 SE takes less than 300 MB itself, the rest is what you'll need for your programs and stuff.

Note that you can choose to set up a fixed or a dynamic virtual disk, and the default option is the second one. It means that the virtual disk file will take in your real disk only as much space as it's actually occupied by files inside the virtual disk; the rest of free space reported inside the virtual machine will not be allocated in your real disk before it's going to be actually occupied.

So I recommend leaving this default dynamic option, and being generous with the maximum size. But don't go crazy, you won't probably want heavy files like pictures, audio or video in your virtual machine, if they can be in your real host instead. And the games you'll install in the virtual machine will be old and will take little space by today's standards, and many games for Windows 9x work on newer versions and you don't need VPC for them.

Depending on the number of game and programs that you're going to install, I don't think you need to think about more than 10 - 100 GB. But anyway since I think there's no downside to allocating too high a maximum size, because the file will actually take only as much space as it needs, you may want to make the maximum size higher for good measure.

(Dynamic virtual disk files do not shrink in size when you free space by deleting files inside the virtual machine; this is perhaps to prevent fragmentation from going wild. Actually if you want good performance I recommend you defragment the virtual disk file after its size has increased--after you have installed new stuff in the virtual machine.)

10 GB should be pretty much enough for a number of games, the biggest space a game of Win98 era could take is 1 GB, 600 MB more probable. 8 GB hard drive was all I ever used on my old Win98 machine, which was sufficient for everything.
Also some older Win 3.1 / Win95 games might have troubles with 256 MB RAM, 64 might be safer option in Win98 for backwards compatibility.

Well the RAM can be changed at any time the virtual machine is off--unless the maximum disk size which is trickier--so you don't have to settle with a value from the beginning. 64 MB will cause more or less severe trashing of the HD pagefile depending on what you're running. Anyway 256 MB never caused any problems with the Win3.1 games I have, of course it could happen with DOS real mode games, but those are for DOSBox. Again you can change the amount of RAM at any time (just like in a real machine, except that you only have to access a menu instead of opening the case).

One word: shared folder host/guest, you can use the whole host HD if you want.

...arf, that's more then one word, but who cares.