Windows 98 runs surprisingly well in QEMU via UTM SE, but it requires some care in setting it up. It’s a great way to run old 90s Windows and DOS software on your iPad (and Mac too, though you have other options available to you, or an iPhone if you don’t mind the HID difficulties). This post provides some suggestions and tips for installing Windows and selecting the best emulated devices. The guidance is intended for UTM users on Apple platforms, but should apply to anything QEMU based (or QEMU itself). The advice might also be useful for other operating systems in UTM/QEMU as well. Plug and play BIOS issues (or: how to install with ACPI) When you install Windows 9x, PCI devices might be broken, and you’ll see a Plug and Play BIOS device with problems in the device manager: This seems to be a bug in SeaBIOS or QEMU; I haven’t yet seen an issue tracking this. Many guides (i.e. this one or this one) suggest changing the device and hoping devices re-enumerate correctly. However, there’s a simpler method available when using Windows 98 SE. (If you’re using Windows 95, you won’t be able to do this.) Windows 98 can use ACPI to enumerate devices instead of the legacy PnP BIOS. Unfortunately, it doesn’t use ACPI by default. (There seems to be an allowlist of known good ACPI BIOSes, as it was early days for ACPI.) To make it use ACPI anyways, boot with CD-ROM support from the Windows 98 CD instead of running the installer, then run Windows setup with the /p j flag, like so: C:\> D: D:\> cd WIN98 D:\WIN98> setup /p j It’s possible to convert an existing system to ACPI, but it’s much easier to do this from the start. When Windows is installed this way, it should correctly enumerate all devices. Device selection System QEMU can emulate devices Windows 98 supports out of the box, which is good as there are no VirtIO drivers. Make sure you’re using the i440-based “pc” rather than the Q35 based system, as it’ll be better supported for legacy systems. You don’t need to worry about...
First seen: 2025-09-13 00:15
Last seen: 2025-09-13 03:18