Currently hosting 3 utilities for playing BeOS games!
Utilities for playing BeOS games
BeOS software can be run on any x86 computer, as well as many non-x86 platforms. How this is accomplished depends on what operating system your computer is running.
No version of DOS, Windows, OS/2, Linux, or macOS has native support for BeOS software. Haiku is a free and open source reverse engineered version of BeOS, currently in beta.
Operating Systems
BeOS Personal Edition
BeOS is an operating system for x86 and PowerPC-based computers. To help win over Windows, Be Inc. released a trimmed down, free version called BeOS Personal Edition which installs in a Windows folder and then creates a bootable floppy disk. The boot disk allows you to boot into and run BeOS without having to create a separate partition. The Windows version can install on a FAT32 or NTFS hard drive, but the boot disk couldn't find BeOS when I installed it in a copy of Windows XP, perhaps because it doesn't recognize NTFS 3.1. I have been able to run BeOS PE from a copy of Windows Me. It should work in Windows 95, 98, Me, or NT 4.0, but may not work under Windows XP or newer.
Haiku is a free and open source operating system that reverse engineers and extends BeOS. Haiku fixes a bug that prevented BeOS from using more than 1 GB of RAM, and a bug that caused timing issues on fast CPUs. BeOS' standard browser, NetPositive, has been replaced by WebPositive, which adds support for CSS, HTML5, SVG, and HTTPS. The 32-bit x86 version is compatible with BeOS software and drivers. The 64-bit x86 version cannot run 32-bit applications yet, which means that it can't run BeOS software.
VirtualBox is a straightforward virtualization package that allows almost any PC operating system to be run in a window on PCs running Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris, with virtually no loss of performance (as long as you have enough RAM to spare for the guest operating system). You can run a real copy of DOS (with or without Win16) or Win9x, to play games from this site and be able to switch back and forth between the host and guest operating system without rebooting. VirtualBox is a virtualization environment, not an operating system emulator, so you will have to install your own copy of DOS or Windows. VirtualBox can emulate a SoundBlaster 16, which is great for DOS and Win16, or Intel AC97, which may be better for Win9x games. Shared folders can be created to transfer files to and from the guest operating system. There are ports for Solaris and a number of Linux distributions, so I recommend visiting the home page if the version for your operating system isn't listed below.
Support for 32-bit Windows hosts was dropped in version 6.0. The table below shows the latest version of VirtualBox for each (host) version of Windows and macOS.
