While I completely agree with you -- that's what I would want too, I want Win98 without the pain, click or type and it's there, it's a very 2025 expectation -- I laughed because of the huge disparity between this and what installing DOS and Windows were really like. Part of the experience is selecting drivers and configuration :D (Even better in DOS with the IRQs and config.sys and whatnot.)

I agree with that, but then I tried the setup, and i found it was straightforward.

playing with it gives you a sense of mastery (even if small), is satisfying, and may be the necessary "training" to get used to using/installing/configuring the full windows 98.

How is it even doing this? A full DOS/Windows 9x environment—running on an M1 Mac?? On so many architectures and OSes? With a ton of options, yet somehow everything just works—games, operating systems, all of it. Like a time machine you can configure. Seriously cool

i got windows 98 networking working (on macos needs sudo dosbox-x) and browsed google from ie 5. most websites will not work (due to TLS/cipher mismatch).

i want to write a very thin, old JS client for BrowserBox to let you connect to bbx running on local network so that old OS like this can browse the modern web.

DOS box basically provides its own BIOS and DOS, so int 21h and friends are implemented by the emulator, so it can do things like redirecting access to the real file system.

Windows 9x doesn’t (normally) use real mode DOS / BIOS calls for disk access, it has its own 32 bit disk drivers and file systems running in the virtual machine manager kernel (vfat.vxd and so on). So DOSbox has to do things in a far more traditional way, presenting a virtual hard disc device etc.

UI-wise, perhaps, but the underlying foundation was far from solid. A single poorly written program would bring the entire system to its knees. Same for drivers. System startup files would occasionally randomly break, requiring booting with a startup floppy and manually restoring them. Plus a ~512MB RAM limit. Windows NT (even 4.0 at the time) was light years ahead of that.

Oh, and I think we're forgetting the Ad Panel on the desktop, absolutely huge (at least on 800x600) toolbar buttons in Explorer, and other "bloat" IE integration brought us in W98 ;)

Some old software doesn’t play nicely on NT based Windows, notably old games tend to be finicky.

Other than that, why not? It’s interesting to see how things used to be…

I actually did this just a few weeks ago. I was hunting for a shareware card game from 25 years ago. The installer was buried in a shareware DVD image; I could tear out the installer but of course couldn't run it.

W98+DosBox-X did the job. With a sufficiently powerful machine, the phony system was at least as speedy as machines of the era. And there are enough tweaks to speed up the boring parts. That one worked so well, I tried some demos from that time frame, and most did fine.