An open source GUI front-end for QEMU that is intended for installing and running Windows 98 inside of a virtual machine. Currently unfinished. Bundled with QEMU and written in .NET C#. Yeah, that means it won't work in macOS or Linux without any compatibility layers. On macOS 10.15 Catalina and above it won't even work at all. Sorry.
You need to provide your own Windows 98 ISO for use with this project, however a boot disk is already supplied. This ISO file must be named windows98.iso. For legal reasons, I can't include one in this project.
It is possible to boot other operating systems using their ISO files, but it is not recommended, as this project was created with Windows 98 in mind. If the OS in question supports i386 (Intel x86 32-bit) processors, it'll probably work.
If you already have a QCOW2 image for Windows 98 (or any other x86 OS), you can run it using this project. The image must be named win98.qcow2, however if you do not have an image, the program will use qemu-img to create one.
7-Zip supports opening, browsing and extracting QCOW2 files, but it cannot edit them.
There is a guide for mounting QCOW2 images, but it seems to work for a Linux system with NBD support only -- if on Windows, Cygwin or WSL might work. I don't know, I haven't tried it.
If you just want to copy a few files to the VM, use this utility to compress a folder to an ISO disk image and use Boot Options in the launcher to start up the machine with that ISO file.
QEMU is open source software licensed under the GNU General Public License V2 created by Fabrice Bellard, and is not affiliated with this project or me whatsoever.
For fun.
Whatever you can do with a Windows 98 VM.
Unless you somehow had a flipping modem from the 90's, then no, I don't think it'd have internet. (Disclaimer: even if you did have a modem I don't think it'd work)
No one said you had to, this was just an experiment. Plus it's more fun to play around with a VM that you could absolutely screw up if you're not careful.
Abso-fricking-lutely. I even made a custom QCOW2 image for it.
I kinda fricked everything up and did a git push -f origin master (wow, was that a mistake) but thankfully the old code with the original commit history was forked by dports, so I was able to reupload it to my own account! All the old code now resides at Windows98Launcher-classic.