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My son was given a game for his birthday but it runs on window 95.
I tried downloading the windows 95 emulador but it didn't work. Is there any way i can make it work on Ubuntu?

José Añez
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  • May be you can try WINE. – Kulfy May 26 '19 at 12:50
  • Depending on what the game is, I'd try wine, playonlinux (which uses wine so really a second form of wine) or dosbox. – guiverc May 26 '19 at 12:50
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    Short answer... don't try and use/install an old game made for Windows 95. Buy your son a newer game, or install one of the many free games that work directly with Ubuntu. Emulators/API software like wine/etc. only barely work, and really shouldn't be used. Virtualbox, and a legal copy of Windows, are required to make most Windows applications run properly on Ubuntu. – heynnema May 26 '19 at 14:12
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    Seems like a white elephant, which may not be intended to run in the first place. – user535733 May 26 '19 at 17:25
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    Wine works surprisingly well, especially with windows games. There is no need for a VM to run windows applications in many cases. @José it would be easier if you told us which game you are talking about. – danzel May 26 '19 at 21:17

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I'm not sure how far wine will get you, especially with games (which are notorious for using dirty tricks to increase performance on the Win9x line of OSes) but you have other options as well.

First there is DOSbox, which gives you a virtualized DOS machine in which you can install Windows 95.

An even more foolproof way is to install VirtualBox (available from the repos via "sudo apt install virtualbox"). This is a virtual machine that will let you run any OS in a completely virtualized environment, including Windows 95. I'm running VirtualBox with Windows 10 in it (because I simply have to have support for the applications required by the people who pay for my meal ticket) and it works very well. It also allows me to treat the whole Windows environment as a Linux application, which both sandboxes it and allows me to simply suspend or kill it should it misbehave.

Note, though, that any form of virtualization will come with a performance penalty. So whether or not either of the above two will give you enough performance for a smooth gaming experience is something you will have to try.

Wine does not fall into that category since it is neither an emulator nor a form of virtualization; it merely adds a Windows API to Linux but this has its limitations which means not every Windows app will run equally well. However, the ones that do run well do so without any noticeable performance penalty, or so it has been my experience.

Frank van Wensveen
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