I created a Windows 98 SE VM on my desktop with Windows 98 Second Edition and had everything setup and working great. So I moved the files over to an Atom-based device (and at first I wondered if it was the CPU difference) because whenever I tried to start the VM it would take forever during the startup process and eventually pop up an error before I ever got as far as the GUI stating:
"A fault has occurred causing a virtual CPU to enter
the shutdown state. If this fault had occurred
outside of a virtiual machine, it would have caused
the physical machine to restart. The shutdown
state can be reached by incorrectly configuring the
virtual machine, a bug in the guest operating
system, or a problem in VMware Player.
Click OK to restart the virtual machine or Cancel to
power off the virtual machine."
As you would expect, if I hit ok it reboots then does the exact same thing all over again and if I hit cancel it powers off the VM and exits VMWare. At first I thought it was something to do with that other device and tried a bunch of different settings always with the same result. Eventually I decided something must have differed in the two setups and I decided just to reinstall it all on that device (unfortunately it's a lot more inconvenient to do such things on than my desktop, but I went ahead at this point.) Everything was working right up until the point I installed the sound drivers to get sound within the VM and then once again I got this error. In the best case scenario the host figured out that it was the sound driver failing and disabled it automatically, but in no case do I have working sound.
BTW, for reference, I'm using the Creative 128 PCI soundcard driver that pretty much everyone seems to recommend recently. I did try a couple of older ones (including one for a 64 PCI) recommended in much older threads, but either I get BSODs and the driver disabled due to the BSODs or I get that crash again. (Also, it seems once you setup the sound device with one it's a royal PITA in 98SE to switch it to another.
I moved the new VM back over to the desktop. Once again it worked. However, when I updated to VMWare Player 14 on the desktop, it now fails every time with that same error message. (On the one hand I kind of regret updating, but on the other I guess it doesn't matter much since it's that other device that needs the VM working and I just used the desktop for the convenience.) Am I going to have to track down an older version of VMWare (I have no clue about 13, but I guess I know 12 works)? Or is there a more proper solution here that allows me to continue using the latest version? Using an old version is obviously not a long term solution and eventually won't be possible, so I'd rather actually solve the problem instead of replacing it with a slightly less bad one, but a lot of the other device's software is to be more or less frozen without updates, so I can live with an older version if this is strictly necessary. I have no clue how a fairly standard sound driver would cause this of all things though. Honestly though, I still don't understand why VMWare emulates a branded soundcard and doesn't just do something more generic and provide its own official drivers instead of relying on a third party who may or may not abandon legacy software at any given time (having used non-Creative soundcards in the actual Windows 9x days I can definitely testify that there is no real loss of functionality and perhaps even a cleaner overall setup depending.)
PS. May or may not be related, but I'm forced to use a virtual cable "soundcard" driver since VMWare for some reason requires you to setup a listening device to have sound within a VM now (I'm pretty sure it didn't do this in the past) and neither system provides a "stereo mix" or whatever to use (this is actually a bit problematic and I hope they fix it soon because your default recording device can't always be the stereo mix.) It works fine with the other VMs I've tried including a Windows 7 and a very recent Linux (Lubuntu 17.10.1) even in VMWare Player 14, but it's something introduced in 13 or 14 that seems to break the 98SE VM. I did wonder if I should change the mixing setting on the virtual cable -- I tried setting it to 16-bit 44100Hz since this is what most stuff probably does in the VM for instance -- but nothing seems to have made a difference. The desktop uses a USB DAC but the Atom device uses its own internal sound which passes through I2C to an internal DAC which basically looks to normal software the same as if it had a standard onboard chips, so that part of the setup is quite different. As far as I know most software (presumably including VMWare Player) doesn't know the difference however. The desktop is running Windows 7 x64 and the Atom device is running Windows 8.1 x64 (probably doesn't matter, but I thought I'd throw that in there for whatever it may be worth.) Thus far I have not noticed any other problems in any other VMs with the update to VMWare Player 14, but lack of sound has kept me from evaluating the 98SE system very thoroughly. (Nothing else I installed so far has caused problems up to this point though, just that.)
