I got Win 98SE and installed it. It took 3 tries to get it right.

Yes, installing a compatible version of VMware Tools is a must. There are couple of patches mentioned in the link below (which still seem to be available) - you might want to give them a shot.

Game crashes still. HELP

Look for Winterfury's post on the last page of the thread.

I think those fixes are only for installing on XP, not a Windows 98 VM.

How to Adjust the video acceleration in Windows 98 -

Right click My Computer icon on the desktop
select properties
click the performance tab on the top of the window
Click the graphics button on the button of the screen
you will now see a slide bar.
click on the bar and move it all the way to the left
click the OK button repeatedly until the window closes
then reboot the computer.

You can see why it might be easier to try reducing video (aka hardware) acceleration in Windows 98. I don't remember exactly how to do it and don't have Windows 98 in front of me at the moment. I found these instructions on the Internet

Do you think I need to reset the audio performance?

I've got to ask, in laymans terms, what is VMWare? What do you use it for?

Unfortunately the current version of VMware Player does not support Windows 98.

I tried over and over again to get W98 to work on a variety of programs - Virtual PC, Oracle VirtualBox and VMware - but finally admitted that my brain was not up to the task. So I fired up my old W98 computer and am steadily re-running my old games for the last time before the old machine gives up the ghost.

I am grateful for all the advice and help that I received during my attempts, but it is clear that I am unable to achieve my end aim.

I do have XP sort of available in Oracle VirtualBox so I can run any of the old XP games that will not run easily on Windows 7. Surprisingly enough, quite a few of these will run on Windows 7 - Syberia 1 and 2 and Lost Horizon to name but 3 - so the time has come to move forwards. There must more games like those three available, and perhaps GBs can point me towards those?

If you can't boot Windows 98 from CD
If your Windows 98 CD isn't bootable, then we're going to have to boot from a (virtual!) floppy, much like the process we use to install Windows 95. Just save this win98se.img file to your XP hard drive. Then follow the steps below to install Windows 98 to your virtual machine.

1.Insert the Windows 98 CD in your CD/DVD drive
2.On the Virtual PC console, select the virtual machine you have created for Windows 98 and hit the Start button
3.The first time you bring up this new virtual machine, you get the following error message:

Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device



4.Not so fast. First, while we're here, we capture the CD for subsequent reboots. On the virtual machine menu: CD -> Use Physical Drive D: (or whatever the letter is of your CD-ROM drive)
5.Then, we capture the win98se.img file from where ever you saved it to on your XP hard drive via: Floppy -> Capture Floppy Disk Image...
6.Now reboot the virtual machine via: Action -> Ctrl+Alt+Del
7.Your virtual machine should boot off the floppy image, and you eventually wind up at the A:\> prompt :-) For future reference, note which drive letter the CD-ROM has been mapped to. Mine was D: (you see something like: Drive D: = Driver MSCD001 unit 0)

Next, we create a primary DOS partition:


8.At the A:\> prompt, enter: fdisk
9.Do you wish to enable large disk support (Y/N)..............? [Y]
Choose: 1. Create DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive
10.Choose: 1. Create Primary DOS partition
11.Do you wish to use the maximum available size for a Primary DOS Partition
and make the partition active (Y/N).....................? [Y]
12.You get a message that: You MUST restart your system for your changes to take effect.
13.So... Press Esc to exit FDISK, then from the virtual machine Action menu, select: Ctrl+Alt+Del (you boot again from the floppy image)
14.When your virtual machine boots this time, choose: 1. Start computer with CD-ROM support.
(again, note which letter your CD-ROM drive has been mapped to. Mine changed from D to E here)

Now we format the DOS partition:


15.Now comes the really fun part, and your trust factor has to be high for this :-)
At the A:\> prompt, enter: format c:
(the virtual 16MB primary DOS partition you just created will be formatted in FAT32 format)
16.After that, just hit Enter to accept a blank volume label. Now we're ready to install Windows 98 to the virtual machine you have created. Don't worry that you only allocated and formatted a 16MB primary DOS partition. The virtual machine hard disk you created is *expandable*, and will take anything you can subsequently throw at it :-)

Install Windows 98:


17.Now remember which drive letter your CD-ROM is mapped to, and switch to there via entering something like: e:
18.Begin installing Windows 98 by entering: setup
(allow ScanDisk to run, then the Windows 98 install 'splash' screen comes up)
19.When prompted, DON'T create a startup disk
20.The very first time you're asked to restart the computer, go to the virtual machine menu (remember, hold down Right+Alt and then move your cursor). Choose: Floppy -> Release "win98se.img". This way, when the virtual machine reboots, it will now boot off the hard drive rather than the floppy image!
21.Windows 98 should now boot from the virtual machine hard drive. Each time you're susequently asked to restart the machine during the installation process, choose option 1 to boot from the hard drive (instead of the CD).
22.Bear with it for a few more restarts, and finally you should have Windows 98 up and running :-)

I did download a 'Win 98 Boot Floppy, and tried to use that but the instructions in the web site that I started from were then to "Drag and Drop 'Win 98 Boot Floppy' into the Virtual
Machine window".

But it won't go.

Maybe I should have stuck with my original plan to use the old W98 machine - which I am still using - but it annoys me that do not have enough nous to work out what I am doing wrong.

Perhaps, because my W98 disk was not the SE version, the installation booted from the CD.