I had been messing with PCem lately and when I got Windows 98 SE set up one of the first games I wanted to try was Sierra's Driver's Education '99. I had to settle for Sierra's Driver's Education 98' as that was the only one I could find. They are exactly the same except maybe some questions are changed in the test part? As far as gameplay goes 98 and 99 are identical.
I used to play this "game" a ton back in the day. It seems funny now but back then there weren't many games where you could just drive around freely and explore the map. This was even before Midtown Madness. You can do free drive mode where you don't have to obey any of the traffic laws. Or you can go through and take the driving lessons for each chapter where you have to use your turn signals, check your mirrors and stay within the speed limit. I ended up getting a steering wheel controller back in the day just for this game. As a kid with no license it was fun! There is even a chapter on drunk driving and when you take the driving test it tries to emulate as if you were drunk. It basically just makes your inputs very delayed. You pass as soon as you crash. I would play that one a lot and see how far I could get and if it would eventually end. I got pretty good at it but it just kept going and going. I was hoping there was an easter egg where it'd say something like "wow you can really hold your liquor!"
Anyways on to the main topic the graphical settings. You can change the details by using the F4-F8 keys. I had totally forgotten about this until I accidentally hit one trying to get back to the menu. This has to be one of the only games that has THAT big of a difference between low and high. Low looks like a Sega 32X while high looks more like a PS1.
The minimum system requirements are a Windows 95 machine with a 66mhz 486DX2, 16mb ram and a 1mb local bus video card. I need to test that out with PCem and see how it runs on a 66mhz 486. That would have been a very outdated machine in late 1998. That chip was first released in 1992. Even though 1998 was only 6 years later back in the 90s 6 years was a HUGE difference in PC hardware. It isn't like today where you could still run the latest Windows and games with 10 year old hardware. That top of the line 66mhz DX2 was almost unusable 6 years later in 1998.
The preferred requirements are a Pentium 133 or better, 32mb ram and a PCI video card. But this game also had support for a certain video card of the day. Oh yeah that's right Driver's Education 98 and 99 supported 3DFX Voodoo Cards! Except where in most games where 3DFX mode blew you away with how much better it looked Driver's Education looked exactly the same. There was one difference though. When in 3DFX mode it added crappy little 2D trees. Here is a pic showing those amazing 3DFX trees.
I guess it was mainly if your CPU wasn't fast enough to run it in software mode then the 3DFX would take some work from the CPU. Though if you were using a computer that slow you probably weren't the kind of person who was running a Voodoo card. In Glide mode the maximum resolution is 640x480 but in software mode it was 1280x1024 so it actually looks better at a higher resolution in software mode. It is one of the oddest 3DFX supported programs I've come across.
