In an attempt to get some old games working that I have lying around the place, I realised that Virtualisation could be the answer! It seems that some of the old goodies from DOS just don't like Vista.

Getting Windows 98 installed on VMWare is a piece of cake, just follow the usual simple steps, and perform a minimal install. You absolutely must install the VMWare tools package, otherwise your mouse will be incredibly sluggish.

The first problem I came across was that none of the drivers installed correctly from the VMWare tools driver package, so for the mouse and video adapter I had to manually point Windows to the VMWare Tools CD. (I'll expand on this another time)

After this, I found that the sound card is emulated in VMWare using a Soundblaster PCI128, and none of the Windows 98 drivers worked. I found a driver on the Creative website, so download that to the VM and just run the setup. After a reboot it worked a treat. (I'm not sure what Creative's ideas of long-term support are, and the fact this driver still exists there is promising, but if you can't find it on the link above, just let me know and I'll find one for you)