Why not Win95?

[spystyle]

Hi there,

It seems that the contenders are clearly Windows 98SE VS Windows XP for a cab (sure a few of us speak DOS be we're a dying breed)

I'm curious if there is a reason we don't consider Win95, specifically Win95A which is just a GUI for DOS requiring minimum resources.

Is there a real obvious reason I'm overlooking?

Thanks!
Craig

[DaemonCollector]

It adds absolutly nothing over dos, so if your gona use the extra space, go with 98. Any computer that can run 95 can run 98, and you need 98 for true USB compat.

[zvar]

Saying Win95 is just DOS with a GUI is no where near accurate.

But my thought is Win95 has always had horrible support for USB .  So either no mouse hacks or go with 98se.
And if no mouse hacks, might as well not have to deal with a gui at all and go with DOS.

Drivers can also be hard to get for win95 for simple stuff like a vid card or nic.
Also Win95 and 98se use basically the same resources (very little difference anyway in practical usage) and 98 improved the stability of 95 tremendously.

Steven

[maraxle]

But my thought is Win95 has always had horrible support for USB .  So either no mouse hacks or go with 98se.
And if no mouse hacks, might as well not have to deal with a gui at all and go with DOS.

You could hack a ps/2 mouse...

[jcrouse]

STABILITY! W95 is terrible. If it's between 95 and 98 there is really no comparison. It's almost like 2000 vs. XP. The latter being a much more mature OS in both cases.

Just my 2 cents,
John

[spystyle]

I see,

I've spoken to 2 real 'techs' about it, one said that Win98SE is just Win95 with all the updates, and the other said Win95 is significantly faster than Win98, so I was curious...

I guess I will have to benchmark the two against each other on the same system.

As for the above statement about Windows 2000, in my experience Windows 2000 SP4 is 15% slower than XP but as stable as a rock.

Thanks,
Craig

[jcrouse]

Bear in mind that in my statement I said stability, not speed. W95 maybe faster than W98. I'm can't comment and wouldn't actually care. I think all the benchmarking for a couple of percent is a real waste of time and effort when it comes to real world performance. I get a kick out of kids overclocking a $400 video card so they can run 110 FPS as opposed to 105

[Chris]

Lots of modern drivers won't work with 95 either.  I've had a DOS cabinet, a Windows 98 cabinet, and an XP cabinet, and all three have their positive and negative sides. 

Remember that Windows 95 doesn't support FAT32 unless you can get your hands on OEM Release 2, and you don't have any USB support at all until OEM Release 2.5.  Windows 95 can also have trouble with systems with more than 256MB of RAM, depending on the exact build, whereas Win98 should be okay up to a gig (and possibly more if you tinker with cache settings in the registry), although performance may fall over 256MB. These memory problems will be worse on a system with an AGP video card because of address space taken up by the AGP aperture (and again, AGP isn't supported properly until OEM 2.5 on Windows 95).

--Chris

[Lilwolf]

btw, 95 wasn't all that bad.... 

but you had to install a ton of patches... And in the end, it was VERY similar to 98... More like, you can take 98 and make it look like 95 but with all the patches installed.

The only difference is USB... If you have any USB devices don't use 95.

Next... 95 is discontinued.  You will NEVER find another fix for it from MS...

If it doesn't matter... go 98 and optimize it if you need.

it goes

DOS -
98 -
XP -

And skip all inbetween (2000 isn't bad... but it really isn't designed for gaming... MAME ran great on my system but had troubles with some newer games)

[Chris]

btw, 95 wasn't all that bad....

[Howard_Casto]

In regards to stability over speed.  I'll only run xp at this point.  You never run into trouble, and if you do it fixes itself.  I mean during development of my apps I've actually crashed the frikkin gui (something that'll NEVER happen in normal circumstances)  and XP fixed it by itself!  No restarting, no slew of half open apps wasting resources....  it simply closed explorer and reloaded it.  You can't beat that.  Also the current trend with high-end emulators (dreamcast, gamecube ect)  is that they run on xp only. 

[Chris]

I've only had XP crash twice on me, and that's almost ertainly because I'm running it on an older motherboard who's last BIOS update came out before XP did.

Of course, I have never had DOS crash on me.

So if I build any new cabinets in the future dedicated single-purpose cabs with no USB needs will be DOS and anything else will be XP.

--Chris

[BobbyG66]

And run fast and far from Windows ME.

[Lilwolf]

XP is MUCH better for stability then 98 for many.  I don't think mame machine would be as big a deal... but for development theres no question.  XP IS BETTER!

but..

XP doesn't allow one license to be run on 5 computers in your house... And I already own 98 about 10 times over... and only one with XP.

If your buying new... XP all the way...

but I wouldn't upgrade a 98SE machine for an XP machine at this point...  When its a games only machine.

[Howard_Casto]

XP doesn't allow one license to be run on 5 computers in your house... And I already own 98 about 10 times over... and only one with XP.

Heh... not that i condone illegal or psuedo-illegal activities in any way... but there are ways around that.