Any reason you're looking at Windows 95 specifically as opposed to Windows 98? Anything that can run on 95 should be able to run on 98, whereas the latter will be better suited for the specs you list.

Well, I do have a separate Windows 98SE system for several purposes.

I just wanted to have a separated PC, one for Windows 95, for regular gaming. (Again, no DOS at all), and wanted to learn if 1.6 Ghz is too much..

Yes it’s too much 😀

I use Windows 95 on my 1995 "top of the year" computer.

It's a Pentium 133 (with late 1995 packing date) @3x66 MHz on an ASUS P/I-P55TP4N (with the usual boring clockgen IC).

It kind of makes sense to run Windows 95 on an 1997 PII-build. It'sa system I plan to build when I find my Asus P2L97.

A fully patched Windows 95 is almost functionally equal to Windows 98, almost.

Piggy backing on what everyone else has pretty much said, Windows 98 would be the right choice for that system. If you wanted a top end 95 system it would look more like a PI or PII, SLI Voodoo's. A3D sound card, Riva 128 video.

But I'm a sucker for period correct builds. Don't get me wrong. I do rock an "off spec" gaming rig for that time. But it runs 98 (it really runs ME but I'm too ashamed to admit it). But it is only used for testing hardware. Games do wackado things sometimes on crazy-fast hardware. Generally speaking, Windows XP is the time where you can get obscene with your tech. But I have found it to be generally a better gaming experience to use top of the line period correct hardware for the Windows 9x generation. With, of course, the OS installed on you're choice of solid state media.

Are there any examples of speed sensitive games under W95? I thought that was mostly settled by then.

I like W95, best version Windows I think. As far as I know, there's no other version of Windows that allows you to run 16-bit DOS real mode drivers, along side 16-bit Win3.1 drivers, along side 32-bit W32 VxD drivers. Kind of neat.

bartonxp wrote on 2023-04-26, 21:22:

Are there any examples of speed sensitive games under W95?

There are. See the bottom of this list for various speed-sensitive Windows games: https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … sensitive_games

Shponglefan wrote on 2023-04-26, 21:26:

bartonxp wrote on 2023-04-26, 21:22:

Are there any examples of speed sensitive games under W95?

There are. See the bottom of this list for various speed-sensitive Windows games: https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/List_of_ … sensitive_games

That's a fairly select list. Most problematic are DOS games which is kind of expected and of the Windows games, most not worth chasing or present a workaround or non-issue. Hmm.

Pentium 4 is way overkill for win95, akin to running XP on a modern ryzen or i7.

In my opinion a high end win95 build would be a 400-450mhz pentium 2 or even a socket 370 pentium 3 / celeron. Pair that with a Voodoo 3, TNT2 Ultra or even a Geforce 256 (geforce 2 MX 400 would be a good budget option) and you have a rig that can run anything win95 can handle much faster then it needs to 😀

Also bear in mind win95 has issues with CPUs faster than 2GHz.

Somewhat ironically most games will be ok, It'll be Win95 itself that struggles with that hardware. Even WinME predates S478 and would be a better choice.
But I understand the challenge is part of the fun.
This looks like a good place to start
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/patches

Apparently according to the FastCPU patch above Win95 has trouble with CPU's P4's fixed with the well known AMDk6 update and again with CPU's faster then 2.1Ghz which MS never officially patched but is fixed as a side effect of another patch.

Good luck!

I've got a Pentium 1 MMX @ 233 MHZ, paired with a Voodoo 1 for that period and a AWE64 Gold.
The problem with the win 95 early 3d period is it relies alot on proprietary 3D graphics cards,
and things can get pretty expensive pretty quick once you look into things like the Nvidia NV1 or the Rendition Verite or the PowerVR.
Though its a very interesting period due to myriad of choices before everything got standardized.

Your hardware seems pretty overkill though but who knows , I guess try installing it and give it a shot and see how it goes.

I emulate W95 under qemu all the time and experiment with OS changes/hacks before applying them in the real world. Although that's not the same thing it seems to run ok, and isn't a P4 1.6 similar to P3 1.4 in performance?

deksar wrote on 2023-04-26, 17:00:

Well, I do have a separate Windows 98SE system for several purposes.

I just wanted to have a separated PC, one for Windows 95, for regular gaming. (Again, no DOS at all), and wanted to learn if 1.6 Ghz is too much..

I'd go with a lower spec system then. If the intent is practical usage, then a later model Pentium/ Pentium MMX or maybe a Pentium II would be the best choice.

I use a Pentium MMX 200 currently with two different CF card installs, one for DOS and one for Windows 95.

deksar wrote on 2023-04-26, 16:09:

Hi. […]
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Hi.

I've an Asus P4V800-X motherboard and socket 478 Intel Pentium IV 1.6 Ghz cpu, 128 MB DDR Ram system.

I just bought an Inno3D Tornado GeForce MX 440-8X AGP 128 MB vga card, for Windows 95 gaming purposes.

Is my CPU, being a 1.6 Ghz one, too fast for Win95 gaming platform? (I don't plan having DOS games)

If so, is it possible to downgrade CPU freq. through BIOS? To, let's say something around 366 Mhz, 400 Mhz.. Would the Win95 run correctly and stable in such case?

I don't really want to mess with AT systems (I got one, in horrible state; PSU, the case and all)

Looking forward to getting your suggestions.
Best.

I have to be the odd one out here (being that I'm the guy behind the Win95 guide), but even I would say your intention has to either be based on novelty or if you're going to be practical about it, you need to make sure none of the games you intend to play require DirectX 8.1 or DirectX 9. If they do, then Windows 98 or -XP will probably be a better fit for your system.

I have a similarly spec'd Athlon that runs Windows 95 and it is a great gaming setup!
Now if you're going to install Internet Explorer 4 on Windows 95 and butcher it, you may as well run 98 since you'll effectively lose the simple beauty of Windows 95 at that point anyway... 😀

edit: ...and just to clarify the bit about the CPU myth: there was a bug that limited Windows 95 to 350 MHz if you were running an AMD CPU before patching it. This did not apply to Intel! You could run CPUs all the way up to 2 GHz without ever patching it if you were on an Intel platform. The 2 GHz-barrier was broken later in a Dial-Up networking patch (1.4 I believe) that Microsoft released for Windows 95. This same patch is also included the unofficial update rollup, if you're really going to go above that CPU speed.

Quite useful and informative replies, thank you all, one by one. Noted them all down here.

And Win95 Guide was one of the best retro guides I've been reading here, great effort! Thanks for this, leonardo.

You guys know what, I installed Win95 to that PC of mine and and I was then, greeted with the following message:

"Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer."

But I got no CPU faster than 2.0 Ghz, and no 480 MB (another Win95 limit I guess) RAM here.. Any clue on this?

Socket3 wrote on 2023-04-27, 06:25:

Pair that with a Voodoo 3, TNT2 Ultra or even a Geforce 256 (geforce 2 MX 400 would be a good budget option) and you have a rig that can run anything win95 can handle much faster then it needs to

And by the way, I wonder what would you think about having Inno3D Tornado GeForce 4 MX 440 AGP 8X 128MB for Win95? The card supports up to DirectX 8.0, which is officially supported by Win95.

GF4MX is just fancier GF2MX, so only DX7 support in reality. Not like you would want to play any shader games in Windows 95 environment though.

Pro: MSAA anti-aliasing, so you actually can play old games with nice image quality improvement and still have decent speed.
Cons: Can't work with really old Detonators, compared to GF2MX, which may be useful for some games.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-04-27, 06:25:

Pentium 4 is way overkill for win95, akin to running XP on a modern ryzen or i7.

while i agree in principle, running xp on a modern 64 bit multi core system feels a lot more overkill

some people like doing that, i really don't

and i would out 98se on a P4 but would consider a P4 and Windows 95 a much closer match than XP on an i7

of course, in the end, one can put any OS on any cpu that will take it i guess, so its just about being optimal

gerry wrote on 2023-04-27, 18:00:

while i agree in principle, running xp on a modern 64 bit multi core system feels a lot more overkill […]
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Socket3 wrote on 2023-04-27, 06:25:

Pentium 4 is way overkill for win95, akin to running XP on a modern ryzen or i7.

while i agree in principle, running xp on a modern 64 bit multi core system feels a lot more overkill

some people like doing that, i really don't

and i would out 98se on a P4 but would consider a P4 and Windows 95 a much closer match than XP on an i7

of course, in the end, one can put any OS on any cpu that will take it i guess, so its just about being optimal

I do actually run 98se on pentium 4 era hardware - but there's a reason for that - the system requirements of late 98 era games are... I want to say wrong, but that's not quite it. Here's an example - Dungeon Keeper 2 came out in 1999 - system requirements say 166mhz pentium 1 and 2mb video card with 300mhz pentium 2 and 8mb video card recommended. If you run the game on the recommended system, it will not be a pleasant experience, except for maybe the first 2-3 missions. Even a 1.4GHz pentium 3 has trouble keeping up when there are a lot of spells and creatures on screen, even at 640x480. As it's one of my favorite games, I've tried it on many many builds, and I find the minimum requirements for perfectly smooth gameplay is a 2.5GHz pentium 4 or athlon XP 2400+ with 256MB of DDR memory. That's XP era hardware, but Dungeon Keeper 2 does not get along well with XP. Sure it will run, but it will randomly crash to desktop. I tried all patches, including community made ones - the game is only stable under XP in software mode. As for the video card, while the game recommends 8MB, I'd say the slowest card that can run the game well at 640x480 is a TNT2. For high resolutions like 1600x1200, I had to go up to a Geforce 4 Ti4200 for perfectly smooth gameplay on the aforementioned platform. Homeworld and Black and White 1 behave much the same, but unlike dungeon keeper 2 both will happily run on windows XP.