From: jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa) Thanks for the tip - I wish I'd known about that 15 years ago! From: "Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> I believe that Win98 tries to use its own drivers for disk, but if it can't find any that work it just uses the ones built into the BIOS. Performance suffers, because all disk I/O becomes blocking, but it still works. With a modern disk with built-in cache, one probably wouldn't even notice the difference (except for the floppy). I would expect that you could successfully boot and install Win98, although you couldn't use all the drive in one volume (FAT32 is good for a little over 100 gig); I've never tried partitioning up a terabyte drive and running Win98 on a appropriately-sized partition, but it seems like it might work OK. As above, the BIOS will take care of the fact that Win98 never heard of SATA, and also abstract the USB keyboard and I think the mouse to look like AT-type devices. As I mentioned, though, it won't know about the video adapter, so that will run in VGA 640x480 16-color mode; the sound card won't be available either, nor the network interface. VirtualBox simulates all nice period-style hardware for those things. I suspect that both of those would run on Windows XP, and VirtualBox handles that extremely well. From: Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> As I predicted... :-) But it runs quite nicely in just 64 or 128 meg, which was much more typical of a machine of that period. Yup, that's what seems to work best for me. From: "js at cimmeri.com" <js at cimmeri.com> Yup, that's true. VirtualBox will provide one or two com ports (optionally mapped to the real host ports, or just pipes to other virtual machines), but it doesn't support the parallel port. And as you've pointed out, any specialized hardware won't work at all (because the backplane doesn't really exist). Also true... From: Josh Dersch <derschjo at gmail.com> Wow! I guess it is open source, but that would be quite a bit of work, I expect. If you do it, let me know - I've got an old Needham's PROM programmer that would be nice to have working again. From: John Foust <jfoust at threedee.com> I used an earlier version of Virtual PC on XP, and found that it worked fairly well, although it was very resource intensive. So many applications failed to run correctly on Win7 that Microsoft felt compelled to make a very tightly integrated version for that operating system (Pro or greater only); it was pretty neat how tightly integrated it was. That's how I ran QuickBooks and a couple of other recalcitrant programs, but it wasn't a panacea. In particular, applications that had several programs running simultaneously, especially if they communicated via DDE (DDEML) were still broken, and the tight integration was always a little scary to me. (If I fired up a "stand-alone" XP machine, it would always want to log off or shut down the one that had been running some other application, and because of the Draconian security, I was never sure that I'd be able to get it back...) This is what I did with the earlier Virtual PC on top of XP, and it worked fairly well. Like VirtualBox, it's free, but I find that VirtualBox tries to do less integration "magic", and therefore feels like a more stable and clearly delineated product. I've seen no mention of Virtual PC on Win8 / 8.1 / 10 - does it still exist, and is that "XP-mode" feature still available? ~~ Mark Moulding