This guide will give a general description of installing Windows 95 in DOSBox-X, in addition to addressing some common issues.

If you don’t know which Windows 9x version to install, we recommend that you install Windows 98SE. If you want to stick with Windows 95, we recommend to use Windows 95 OSR2 or later.

There are other guides to installing Windows 95 in DOSBox that may be more or less applicable to DOSBox-X:

You first need to create a DOSBox-X config file.

Copy the above config and save it as win95.conf

The dynamic_x86 core, which should perform much better, has been sufficiently enhanced that it can now be used for most use-cases with Windows 95.

However, for now we still recommend that you do the installation of Windows 95 using core=normal until issue #2215 is resolved.

But after the installation is finished you should be able to change to core=dynamic_x86.

Should you run into problems such as application crashes or a Windows 95 blue-screen that cannot be reproduced with core=normal, please report the problem on the DOSBox-X Git issues page.

One known issue is that opening a DOS window in Windows 95 will cause a crash when not using core=normal.

Some parts of the installation, but also starting Windows 95 can take a considerable amount of time.

You may be able to speed this up considerably (depending on the host CPU) by using the DOSBox-X Turbo mode, which can be enabled from the drop-down menu bar by selecting "CPU" followed by "Turbo (Fast Forward)". This turbo mode is not like the old Turbo button on retro PCs, but functions more like a fast-forward, and therefore should not be used when interacting with the guest OS.

By default, the moment you press a key on the keyboard, turbo mode will disengage.

You may also want to enable turbo mode by default to allow Windows 95 to startup quicker by merging the following settings into your DOSBox-X config file.

Some quick rules about IMGMAKE (for more detail, see: Guide: Managing image files in DOSBox-X):

Alternatively, you can use the -fat option to instruct IMGMAKE to create a certain FAT type (assuming that is possible for the harddisk size).

First you need to start DOSBox-X from the command-line, using your newly created win95.conf. This assumes that dosbox-x is in your path and win95.conf is in your current directory.

Then in DOSBox-X you need to create a new harddisk image file with IMGMAKE.

This example uses an 2GB hard disk image with a single FAT16 formatted partition. This is the maximum size for FAT16 and supported by all Windows 95 releases.

Or if you’re using Windows 95 OSR2 or later, you can create a FAT32 volume. Technically the FAT32 filesystem is capable of supporting partitions up to 2TB, but the generic IDE driver in Windows 95 cannot handle volumes greater than 32GB. Larger partition sizes may be possible with 3rd party drivers but are not covered here.

In later Windows versions, starting with Windows 2000, Microsoft won’t let you format a volume bigger than 32GB with FAT32 using its built-in formatting tool, this was presumably to push migrations to NTFS and later exFAT.

Or if you want to create a larger disk, you can create a custom type. This is an example of a 16GB (16*1024=16384 MB) disk, which due to its size, will be formatted as FAT32.

Other installation methods are possible than the one described below. This method is however considered to be the quickest one with the least number of steps.

Once Windows 95 is installed, here is some additional software you may want to install or update:

This may also be of interest: Forum thread about: Last versions of software for Windows 95

DOSBox-X supports mounting CD and diskette (floppy) images, and making those available to an OS booted in DOSBox-X.

To do so, an empty diskette or CD drive needs to be attached before booting a guest OS such as Windows 95, or diskette or CD images need to be attached (which will automatically cause an appropriate drive type to be emulated).

For example, to specifying multiple image files with the IMGMOUNT command:

You can then swap between disk images with the "DOS" → "Swap floppy drive" or "Swap CD drive" option from the drop-down menus, or using the hot-key.

To enable networking, you first need to enable NE2000 adapter emulation in your win95.conf config file and select an appropriate back-end for the NE2000 emulation.

The default video adapter that DOSBox-X emulates is the S3 Trio64, which is the best emulated video adapter that DOSBox-X offers, with the widest range of resolutions and colour depths.

There is a newer S3 video driver for Win95, version 2.11.03, dated June 12, 1996.

This update adds some additional video modes. But it does not add support for 8MB video RAM, or wide-screen video modes.

The available video modes with the updated S3 Trio64 driver are:

A few enhancements have been made to the emulated S3 Trio64, compared to a real S3 Trio64:

However, these enhancements cannot be used in Windows 95 with the S3 video driver due to driver limitations. As such you will be limited to the above video modes with this driver.

The emulated sound card used in this guide is the SB16 Vibra, instead of the default SB16. This is simply because the SB16 Vibra is an ISA PnP card, and therefore automatically detected by Windows. There is no other real advantage of using the emulated SB16 Vibra over the SB16.

An optional driver update to 4.38.14 is available on the VOGONS Vintage Driver Library (ignore that the download claims it is for Windows 98, the update is for both Windows 95 and 98).

If you have a working DOSBox-X General MIDI setup, either emulated or real, you can use that in Windows 95.

Go to "Start", "Settings" and open "Control Panel", and then double-click on "Multimedia".

Now on the "MIDI" tab, change the "Single instrument" option to "MPU-401 Compatible", and click OK to close the window.

For more information about setting up MIDI support, see: Guide: Setting up MIDI in DOSBox-X

Also see the Guide: Setting up printing in DOSBox-X

The emulated 3dfx Voodoo PCI device is enabled by default in DOSBox-X, but Windows 95 lacks drivers for it by default. As such a "PCI Multimedia Video Device" will show in Device Manager with a yellow exclamation mark.

A driver package is available here (v3.01.00) to enable support.

If for some reason you do not want 3dfx Voodoo emulation, it can be disabled by adding the following lines to your DOSBox-X config:

In "System Properties", select the "Performance" tab, and click the "File System…​" button. A separate "File System Properties" window will open. On the "Hard Disk" tab you can specify the Read-ahead optimization.

Based on benchmark results (WinBench 96), it seems that setting this to "None" gives the best performance in combination with DOSBox-X, although the difference is marginal. This is no doubt because the host system is better at caching then the Windows 98 cache function.

Starting with DOSBox-X 2022.08.0, there is optional support to dynamically convert a host folder mount to an emulated FAT harddisk for use when you need to boot a guest OS, such as Windows 95. This can be accomplished in one of two ways. Either when you issue the boot command, you add the option -convertfat. e.g. boot c: -convertfat.

Or by setting the following option in your DOSBox-X config file:

When you now boot from a real image file, it will attempt to convert ALL folder mounts at the time of booting to emulated FAT Harddisks.

One thing to note, is that there is no way to specify the FAT type to use for the conversion. The FAT type will be automatically selected based on the aggregate size of files in the folder, plus 250MiB (this can be adjusted with the convert fat free space option in the DOSBox-X config file). If the total space of files + 250MiB does not exceed 2GiB, it will convert it into a FAT16 disk. Otherwise, it will become a FAT32, which in turn will require a guest OS with FAT32 support.

Alternatively, you can also make the emulated FAT drive read-only by using the -convertfatro option with the boot command. Or by setting convert fat free space=0 option in the DOSBox-X config file.