Another day at the office... it's obviously time to bang my head against a proverbial wall trying to get Windows 95 to run in a VM on a Windows 8 host!
Actually, today's work was surprisingly productive. When I last left off, I had Win95 going in VMWare player happily doing its own thing, totally disconnected from any other real machine. Unsurprisingly, it continued to have random blue-screens (as the real Windows 95 does), but I did finally notice some malfunctioning devices in Device Manager. After removing those, as recommended by some VMWare KB article, network connectivity started to happen! At first, it was only able to see the host machine. Then, after some more research, messing around, and configuration of a bridge, I did finally get the VM to see the rest of the network. With a reboot, the rest of the network recognized the VM as a real computer!
Of course, Windows 95 doesn't understand the amazing new network standards, so it can't reach out to use network printers or file shares. Other new machines, however, can use its file shares, so I can transfer stuff. Printer setup is important, but if worst comes to worst, RTF files can be transferred out of the VM into the host computer for printing. The next big hurdle is getting the programs out of the real 95 computer onto the back-up-able VM.
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