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Author Topic: Windows 95 Sound driver  (Read 15155 times)

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alan1313

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    Windows 95 Sound driver
    « on: September 21, 2019, 08:34:47 PM »
    I installed Win95 on a laptop. There is a graphics driver for Win95 for any modern hardware(https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm#2), but Is there a sound driver with the similar principle with that graphics driver for any modern hardware?

    DaveLembke



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    Re: Windows 95 Sound driver
    « Reply #1 on: September 23, 2019, 05:31:15 PM »
    Drivers are hardware specific. If a driver doesnt exist for your laptop then Windows 95 was never intended to be paired with that hardware. The best success with a build running an older OS is to have hardware that was designed to originally run that OS.

    On newer builds I have had some success with getting older versions of Windows to run within virtual environments such as using Virtual PC 2007 or older edition and the emulated hardware has drivers that work with that emulated hardware that by which it is able to transfer the sound to more modern audio chips running a newer version of Windows.

    Virtual PC 2007 however works ok with everything up to Windows XP SP3, and it can run on Vista and Windows 7 with forcing the OS to install it to run the Virtual PC software to host virtual machines. I haven't been successful with Windows 8 or 10 working with the older Virtual PC 2007. Virtual PC 2007 if you can find it online it was issued for free from Microsoft, however they have discontinued it and discontinued supporting it.

    VMware is another method of running other OS's within a system however I have never tried to get Windows 95 working on VMware to say whether it works ok or not.

    Lastly biggest issue with emulated OS operation in a virtual machine is that Video Games are not very happy with that environment. Some will run ok, but most that i have tried require them to be run on older hardware that was designed to run those kinds of games. So if you want to run a video game or anything else graphical you might find that it wont work from a virtual machine environment if you went in this direction to getting it to work.

    alan1313

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      Re: Windows 95 Sound driver
      « Reply #2 on: October 03, 2019, 02:21:33 AM »
      I mean, Modern Windows plays sound without drivers too, so the same thing that is compatible with Win95.

      BC_Programmer


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      Re: Windows 95 Sound driver
      « Reply #3 on: October 03, 2019, 12:01:15 PM »
      Modern Windows plays sound without drivers too, so the same thing that is compatible with Win95.
      It doesn't. "Modern Windows" Merely includes a wider set of drivers for pretty much everything, including audio devices.

      There is no "Generic Audio Driver" because there is realistically no standard "interface" across Audio devices.
      I was trying to dereference Null Pointers before it was cool.