262GB of Windows 95 and 98 games to play for free – eXoWin9x

We’re all used to reliving the golden years of consoles and home computers, but we sometimes forget that the early versions of Windows played a really big part in the development of today’s gaming genre.

Windows 95 was the first, true Windows Operating System, launched oddly enough in 1995. The previous Windows branded applications, Windows 1,2 and 3, were all basically graphical front ends for MS-DOS and based on its 16 bit architecture. But Microsoft decided to build a graphical operating system that interfaced directly with the new 32 bit arcitectures to take on the PC threat from IBM’s OS/2 Warp and compete with Apple Macintosh’s Mac OS.

The development team took the decision to make Windows 95 backwards compatible with MS-DOS applications to keep their massive user base but added many new features that are still the core part of today’s Windows systems. The Start menu was created along with the Taskbar and Notification area, and file names lost their 8 character maximum length so you could start to use understandable labels instead of the weird abbreviations to fit inside the 8.3 MS-DOS format. Direct X was also developed during the Windows 95 era to further enhance the system’s graphics and games capabilities.

Microsoft gave the new OS a big marketing push and I guess the rest is history with Windows 98, ME, XP etc. following on to give Windows it’s market dominance.

So back to the Windows 9x versions which covers 95, 98 and 98SE which were in operation from 1995 to the early 2000’s.

As Windows became the primary operating system for PC compatibles it’s no surprise that the games industry started to move everything over to the platform. This gives us a great catalogue of retro games where developers could start to use CD ROM based content, could rely on a mouse being present and could start to make use of the Internet.

The eXoWin9x project is designed to bring all of these great games back to your PC in a very user friendly way.

Normally you would need to set up a virtual machine on your PC, install Windows 95 or 98 and then start configuring it to play the games. But all of this is handled by eXoWin9x using mostly DOSBox X and a bit of 86Box. But the great thing is that all of the setup and configuration for each individual game is handled automatically. All you need to do is browse through the games list and click the play button.

If you want more details on how this was achieved, I highly recommend watching the eXoWin9x introduction video from eXo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJrC5YdB6hk

He’ll walk you through the development and problems they had to bring, what they initially thought was impossible, to your PC.

So with eXo handling rest of the background info let’s get started on installing the project.

Installing eXoWin9x

First off, this is a big project. You’ll need to download 265GB of data. If you’re used the previous eXoDOS project you might have used their Lite version to reduce the download size, but this is not yet available for the Windows 9x project. So make sure you’ve got enough drive space to both download and extract these files.

The download itself is delivered over a Torrent feed. If you’re not familiar with these, you’ll be using what’s known as a peer to peer file sharing network where other people who have downloaded the package help to deliver it to new people. This sharing is all handled by a Torrent application which ensures the security and validity of the network.

To be able to use this you’ll need to install a Torrent Client application. My preferred app is QBitTorrent which you can download from here.

https://www.qbittorrent.org/

Head over to the downloads section and select the Windows downloads. Use the latest version and download the x64_setup installation file. Once that’s downloaded run the installer to set up the Torrent client.

You now need to go to the eXoWin9x website at

https://www.retro-exo.com/win9x.html

Scroll down until you get to the Full Release download link and download the torrent file. This is a small file that tells QBitTorrent how to get hold of the full 265GB package.

If you now open up the QBitTorrent application and go to the file menu and load torrent file. Find your downloaded eXoWin9x torrent file and open that.

A new window will pop up so you can set up the download. Really the only thing you need to do is to set the Save At destination so it will be saved on a drive with enough space. Once you’ve done that click the OK button and the client will start to assemble the download.

You should see it in your torrent list as the client finds peers and seeds to download the data from. It’s now just a matter of leaving it running in the background until the download completes.

Once complete you now have a choice. The whole system relies on people making their download available to other people by leaving the torrent client running. This is totally safe and sort of polite practice to try to share back as much as you’ve taken. I tend to leave mine running for the rest of the day after I download something.

Setup

So now we have the files downloaded we need to get the application set up.

If you browse over to your downloads you’ll find a Setup eXoWin9x.bat file. Double click this and it will run the installer batch file to set up the application.

The installation process goes through a number of stages.

First you’ll be asked about merging some of the eXo projects. I’m not planning to cover this is this video, but you can install more than one project at once. For now we’ll just press C to continue.

The batch file will now extract the Lauchbox files and get that set up for us.

The next step is to extract the Launchbox meta data which tells the front end about the games and how they are arranged on the disk. So just let that run through as well. Although it says 25 to 30 minutes it will probably be much quicker.

Step 3 is to extract the game configuration files which help DOSBox set itself up to run the games as well as possible. So again just let this process run through.

There are now a few options to work through.

First we can set up multiplayer gaming using a local network. This uses an application called ncap. So if you want to install that just follow the on screen instructions.

Next we have an option to hide adult games from the front end. This doesn’t delete them, it just hides them.

Finally we have a few screen options.

First we can set the display to full screen when games start.

We can then tell the software what our screen resolution is so it can scale things correctly.

And finally we can specify if we want our games kept at the correct aspect ratio or if they should be stretched to fill the monitor. If you’re using a widescreen monitor I’d advise saying Yes or your games will look distorted.

So that’s the application fully installed. The very final option is to have a desktop icon created.

You should now have an eXoWin9x folder with all of the extracted files in it.

Playing the Games

eXoWin9x uses a front end application called LaunchBox to run your games library. This is a great retro gaming launcher and one of my favourites. If you want more info have a look at one of my Launchbox videos.

At the moment eXoWin9x has installed a stand alone version of Launchbox. If you want to load these games into your existing Lanchbox setup you just need to move the files over. The pdf manual you’ll find in your downloads, or on the main website will show you which files and folders go where.

For now we’ll just use the stand alone version.

Once that boots up you might be asked to install Direct X or the C++ runtime library. Just follow any instructions to download and install those.

With all the dependencies installed you should then drop into the main Launchbox interface.

To play a game you simply double click it in the games library. Each game does need to be fully installed the first time you run it, but LaunchBox will prompt you to do this and then run the whole process automatically.

Once the game is ready eXoWin9x will launch DOSBox, attach a hard drive and launch the game in Windows 95 or 98.

To exit from a game simply quite the game as normal to get back to the Windows 9x desktop and then shut down the virtual machine. This will drop you back into LaunchBox.

What’s Next?

So that’s everything set up and ready to play all of the games.

This initial release of eXoWin9x covers games from 1994 to 1996. The team have planned to release updates to add later games as they work their way through the Windows 9x collections so make sure to check back with the project from time to time. As they release I’ll be covering the new games on this channel as well so don’t forget to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don’t miss those videos.

All that’s left is to boot up some games and have fun with some retro Windows gaming.