Any mismatch of any component would render the whole thing unusable as everything has to work together just like it does in the real world.Īlright, so here's another (potentially) stupid question: would it be at all possible to install the VMware hardware drivers prior to or during the virtualization of the 95 machine?
and to do that well took a decade and was ground breaking how well they did it - and they got to pick and choose the "best" hardware to mimic (and actually fudged it and made the drivers to go with it so they controlled both the hardware and the software completely in software.)Įven doing a single piece of hardware that they didn't have absolute control over would be disastrous, doing it with hundreds of thousands of pieces of hardware and hardware combinations would be impossible. VMWare emulates one NIC, one SCSI driver, one motherboard, etc. The problem with this approach is that every possible piece of hardware has to be reverse engineered with absolute perfection.
Billions upon billions of man hours to code with new hardware being developed at a pace impossible for mankind to keep up with. But it would, in my estimation, be a project larger than the whole of human software development history to date. In theory, and theory only, detecting the drivers installed and mimicking the hardware could be done. It's that there are slightly better tools to do this under Vmware. They both present to the hardware the same way.
It really doesn't matter what platform you use, Virtual PC or Vmware. It is migrating the existing hardware install to virtual that is going to be nearly impossible. A fresh install is trivial to get working. The included virtualization is Virtual PC 2007, nothing special but it works fine. I don't suppose anyone has had experience with such a thing?Īnd thanks again for helping to clear things up for me. I am unsure, however, whether it was a fresh install or a pre-existing environment.
Evidently, he has been able to get a Windows 95 installation to work using the virtualization software that comes with Windows 7 (or, at least, I think that's what he was saying). Nonetheless, my boss is back from vacation and I have discussing this with him. I was under the impression that VMware could, somehow, read the installed drivers and mimic the hardware. I apologize for my denseness, but I've never understood the specifics of virtualization.
Although, come to think of it, we do have a few Windows 98 installation CDs, if it might help to, somehow, upgrade the 95 installation.Īnd now I think I understand things a bit more clearly. if you where doing a clean install of 95, here would be no issue, but this comes back to the issue of not having teh software.here is thought though.Ĭould he upgrade to 98 then virtualize that? doing a upgrade should retain the software. memory is not a issue, again as SAM pointed out, 95 only needs about 128mb, or 1/8th of a Gb. this is where a "in place repair" would come in, but 95 does not support or work well with that process. what SAM is saying is that 95 does not like to change platforms, and you may never get it to run properly. The issue is taking a image from a physical machine with "X" drivers for "X" hardware installed and moving to a VM that emulates "F" hardware and requires "F" drivers. You have massive overkill already, more overkill is just. Getting a bigger, faster machine with more memory is not going to make things better in any way. You literally have orders of magnitude more memory than necessary for what you are trying to do. Until that is addressed, you are spinning your wheels. Your issue is that Windows 95 is not prepared to have its existing hardware ripped away and replaced with VMWare Player as its hardware. the hypervisor (Virtual Box, VMWare Player, whatever) add a layer of abstraction so that no matter what hardware you run it on, the Windows 95 guest will always see the hardware as VMWare Player. With a new computer comes 64-bit Windows 7 and all the memory I could ever want. Hmm.correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't someone mention that VMware or VMplayer accounted for the change in hardware? The only reason I'm not using VMware now is because of memory issues on this relatively archaic machine I've been working with. Your issues are with Windows 95, not with the hardware. So a new machine will look just like an old machine to the VM.
The whole point of virtualization is that it abstracts away the hardware.