I’ve found a stash of old CD-ROMs that say they require at least Windows 3.1, and some say Win 95. My laptop is running Win 10, and won’t run any of these, even when I try compatibility mode W95. Is there any way to run these on Win 10, or are they destined for the bin? Is it likely that any geeks would want these? There are a few games – Tomb Raider, Discworld, Worms and some football manager-type discs, as well as things like Encarta etc. I would imagine that these would only interest someone who had missed the low-tech era due to being born too late. I’m sure there is no value to them, but it would be a shame to bin them. Any ideas?
ATM: Old CD-ROMs
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I’ve not looked but I’d be surprised if it was too hard to find a Win95 Virtual Machine that you can fire up under VirtualBox. If you make an ISO of the CD you can mount that inside the VM and open it as if it was the original CD.
Exsqueeze me?
Are you asking for more descriptions? Virtual Machines seem a bit scary to start with but once you’ve installed the free VirtualBox and pointed it at a ready made image (and I’ve just checked, WIn95 one’s do seem easy to find) you’ll be up and running and it’ll all make sense.
Yes, a VM is usually the best option. A modern 64-bit installation of Windows 10 simply can’t run 16-bit Windows code for complicated technical reasons, which prevents any Windows 3.1 executable from running. You may have better luck with a 32-bit installation of Windows 10. However VMs aren’t that great at handling 3D graphics.
With some games there are open-source interpreters and the like which can run the game using its original data files. For example there’s ScummVM for running many point-and-click adventure games, but there are many more.
Hmm…this sounds a bit complicated for me. I wonder if the chazzas will take them?
I wonder if the Internet Archive would want them: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donation-to-the-internet-archive/
(There’s a UK postal address too.)