Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system.\u00a0 And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me.<\/p>\n
This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate Microsoft and proprietary software so much.\u00a0 Does anyone remember the Browser Wars of the late 90s<\/a>?<\/p>\n That was when I learned that some software companies think it’s okay to completely control the behaviour of your computer in order to stop you from using software made by their competitors.\u00a0 Microsoft did this in spades, which is why I switched to using free open source software and eventually Linux.<\/p>\n But now that I’m no longer susceptible to Microsoft’s vendor lock-in<\/a>, I can sit back and comfortably enjoy what’s actually pretty good about their products.\u00a0 I still use Windows XP every day.\u00a0 I have it installed natively as the OS on my gaming computer that runs my video game console emulators and most of my games.\u00a0 And I run it daily as a virtual OS on my Linux desktop because I prefer some Windows applications over their Linux counterparts.<\/p>\n All this having been said, I need to mention that I’ve dug through my CD-R archived software and found the Unofficial Windows 98 SE Service Pack 2.1a<\/a> that someone had compiled.\u00a0 This contains all of the security updates and hotfixes that Microsoft released as part of Windows Update.\u00a0 One of those updates fixes the “512MB” RAM bug that stopped more than that amount from being used without causing errors.\u00a0 The service pack also contains the latest version of Tweak UI for Windows 98 and some other OS enhancements.<\/p>\n Since installing it, I’ve been able to up my RAM memory on that virtual OS to 768.\u00a0 That seems to be the max that both Windows 98 and all my installed apps are happy with.<\/p>\n So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’ll talk about the games I run on my snazzy new Windows 98 gaming laptop.<\/p>\n Anno 1602<\/a> But the original 1602 just won’t run on Windows XP.\u00a0 I remember having to play it on my very first computer with its slow 266 MHz Pentium 2 and (at the time) 160MB of RAM.\u00a0 Not a good gaming experience, especially when factoring in the very dark and faded CRT monitor I was still using at the time.\u00a0 On the new laptop, everything is crisp, bright and responsive.<\/p>\n Caesar II<\/a> Settlers II<\/a> SimTower<\/a> I’ve also installed Age of Empires<\/a>, Civilization II<\/a>, SimCity<\/a>, SimCity 2000<\/a>, and SimCity 3000<\/a> on this thing.\u00a0 All of those actually work better on my Windows XP computer because they require MIDI support.\u00a0 My virtual Win98 computer doesn’t emulate a hardware MIDI device, so I won’t ever hear MIDI music playing from it.\u00a0 Also, a higher resolution and much larger monitor make for a better gaming experience on the XP computer.<\/p>\n That leaves a few more old games that I will talk about in the next post.\u00a0 Some I had success with, some I did not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system.\u00a0 And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me. This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,38,26],"tags":[80,133,435,333,10],"class_list":["post-1973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-video-games","category-windows","tag-90s","tag-microsoft","tag-strategy-games","tag-virtualbox","tag-windows-98"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1973"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1975,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973\/revisions\/1975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThis is a city-building and resource-managing strategy game from Germany.\u00a0 The graphics are absolutely lovely for its time, and its gameplay is engrossing.\u00a0 It has spawned 3 sequels and is still quite a popular series.<\/p>\n
\nAnother city-building game.\u00a0 This one will technically run on Windows XP, but there are some glitches and bugs when it does.\u00a0 It also is restricted to a rather small-sized window, so it’s a better fit for the Windows 98 laptop anyway.<\/p>\n
\nAnother city-building strategy game.\u00a0 This one is DOS-based, so I suppose I could run it in DOSBox.\u00a0 I actually haven’t figured out how to do that yet though, and believe me, I have way more fun with installing an entire operating system anyway.\u00a0 Yes, I’m weird.<\/p>\n
\nA hotel-building simulation game that is actually way more fun than the concept sounds.\u00a0 This one runs just fine on XP actually.\u00a0 But because of the tiny window (like Caesar II above) it’s a better fit on the laptop.<\/p>\n