The Right OS
I had been thoroughly enjoying all my DOS games. I dabbled in Windows 3.1, although that didn't offer much to really entertain me beyond novelty. Then I remembered one of my favorites of the mid-90s.
SimCopter.
But that's a Windows 9x title. That means I have a decision to make. The obvious choice is Windows 98 Second Edition, so naturally I went with Windows 95 OSR2.
Why Windows 95?
Part of it is my silly desire to be different and to select the non-obvious choice. Part of it is how much I enjoy the Internet-Explorer-free UI of Windows 95. Part of it is just fitting the machine into a particular era. By the time Windows 98 came out, the Pentium II was all the rage. This Pentium MMX system would've been mostly obsolete.
It took some driver digging, as it typically does. Once I had all the hardware configured, the system was very stable. No hardware conflicts, everything working like it should. Time to take to the skies!
What a classic! Of course, it's not the most well-optimized game and a Pentium 166 isn't a real screamer, but who cares about such things when the game is so good?!
As a bonus, it solved all the DOS hardware hell too. Anything I tried worked perfectly in a Windows 95 DOS box, so I was done messing with pure DOS mode drivers. I know it's sacrilege to a lot of folks, but if you've got a Win 9x system and play DOS games, I'd strongly recommend trying things out inside Windows. It's a whole lot faster than rebooting!