I’ve been playing some windows 98 games with great success. I’d like to share the OS+game install with another computer on a separate network. Is there a guide on making the OS+disk image with game/directx/etc portable?
Thanks in advance
In your Retroarch/System folder there should be a .img file named after the disc you used to install Win98. I’ve copied mine to other computers so I could boot Win98 with all the stuff I installed in there.
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Hello.
Yes, the OS is installed in the System folder.
The game data is installed in Save.
If you have changed the core options, you need the configuration folder, and the status folder if you are interested.
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IME it’s not like a DOS application where modifications to the C: are saved in /saves in the .pure.zip files. The Win98 game data and the game saves are within the .img file in /system, along any other modification of C:.
Small difference, but something to keep in mind if you want to back up your saves.
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In Windows, games are intended to be installed on the D:’. Similar to a removable disk, it is unique for each game and is stored in the save folder.
The usefulness of this is that the C:’ disk of the OS does not fill up, each game has its data in its own file and if Windows crashes, no achievements are lost.
Can the path for the image file be changed? I want to make a big setup of several GBs and don’t want it to be in the small SSD where RetroArch resides.
You can change the whole /system folder location in Retroarch, in Settings > Directory > System/BIOS. You’ll have to move all your other BIOS files there as well tho… I dont know if there’s a setting specific for DOSBox pure to do that.
I dont think the whole system is designed with installing games on D: in mind, but maybe you could point on some documentation about that… In my experience some games wouldnt install and run on anything else than C:. Also, even with game files on D: or whatever there may be appdata or savegames on the C:.
The win98 C: .img file in /system will have a fixed size regardless of the actual data installed. It’s chosen during the whole Win98 install so I didnt find any benefit in installing games on another drive than C:. If at some point the image is full and I run out of space in the Win98 virtual drive I can just duplicate the .img file and have a clone of the Win98 VM. I kept a freshly installed Win98 IMG with nothing installed at all on it, except the 3DFX drivers to clone it.
In the RetroArch documentation and in the github of the core you get information. The core is very flexible, to use it in the most comfortable way.
There are very few games that are installed only on C:’ and in those cases they are shortcuts, which allow you to change the disk, they always save the information in the selected path.
I’ve read those and didnt find anything about installing win98 games on D: being the intended use. And lots of games installed from original ISOs will be picky about being installed on C:.
I think installing on D: would be useful in the case of using the core option to block any modification to the OS (the .img file). There’s a few downsides tho, because .sav files are not updated in real time, and I didnt find anything to open them as easily as the .img or .zip file the core is usually using for the C:.
But that way chances of getting Win98 fubar because the OS or the core crashed or that it wasnt shut down properly are greatly diminished.