Can someone help me run some Windows 98 software on Windows 10?

Hey gang,

When I was a kid, I had a friend who learned to play Electric Guitar. He primarily learned the basics through a CD-Rom called "Charanga Electric Guitar Coach" and learned really quickly. I want to do the same. I know there's probably other software nowadays, but I remember using it a little and finding it amazingly fun and easy to learn with. It's a Windows 98 CD-ROM.

Now, I bought the disc off eBay a few years ago, but I've never been able to run it. It didn't run in Windows 7, 8 or 10, only showing the contents of the disc when opened through "My Computer"

I was wondering if anyone can help me actually get this sort of thing working. I've read in the past about something called "Virtual Machines" but I tried it and failed spectacularly. I don't really wanna have to buy an old Windows 98 machine off the internet, if I could somehow run it easily on my laptop

If you have any ideas, could you please elaborate quite a bit. I'm not very good with computers.

Cheers guys!

There are a number of different solutions depending on what's going wrong. In this case since you can't even install it, it's hard to say what other steps you need to take.

I have no experience with the program you mentioned, so I don't know how it's supposed to work, but I assume the disc was autoplaying in Windows 98, and I think that feature was removed around Windows Vista because of how easy it was to spread malware and viruses when programs on CD's and USB sticks started automatically when they were inserted.

Have a look at the contents of the disc. Any autorunning CD will have a file called autorun.inf on it. If you can't find something called setup.exe or autorun.exe directly on the disc, you can always open up autorun.inf in notepad and read what file it would've opened in Windows 98, and then try to open the same file.

Windows 10 have a set of built-in backwards compatibility features if you encounter problems with the file, just right click it and select "Troubleshoot Compatibility", or go to "Properties" and the "Compatbility" tab where you can tell it to try to launch it as a Windows 98 program.

Without any more details it's hard to give any specific tips, but many graphics problems with Windows 95/98 programs are caused by old DirectDraw routines that are no longer supported. These can easily be emulated using Bitpatch's DDWrapper, DxWnd and DDrawCompat.

Since this isn't a proper game I doubt it used 3dfx, but that would also easily be emulated using nGlide.

@matoya: I am assuming you are still running windows 10, probably 64 bit which hates anything from that era. Try to run the install.exe on the disc in the command prompt/powershell first. if that fails try to run the install in DOSBox. you will probably have to mount the drive but that is simple.

Ok, I just looked up the system requirements for the program, and they mention it being compatible with Windows 3.1, which means it's a 16-bit program. 32-bit programs still run without issue in 64-bit Windows 10 systems, but there hasn't been any support for 16-bit programs since Windows XP (it was removed in XP Service Pack 2 as I recall).

It's not a DOS program though, so DosBox will not help directly. You can install Windows 3.1 in DosBox, but you're probably better off using VMWare or another virtual machine to install Windows 95 or 98, which would still be able to handle 16-bit programs and generally perform better than DosBox.

Setting up a Linux machine and trying to run the program in Wine may also work.