Navigation
Who's online
Featured on
|
Slashdot, Slate, The Discovery Channel, The Escapist, GameSetWatch, Good Deal Games, AtariAge, ClassicGaming.com, Las Vegas Review Journal, GAMERadio, The Mercury News, Maxim and many more popular media outlets!
|
Sponsored Links
Syndication
Running Windows 9x games on DOSBox? c:\>
Freeware utilities making it possible to run Windows on top of other operating systems are available in various flavours like Bochs, Qemu, Virtual Box, Virtual PC. The pay ware versions like VMware and Parallels also do a good job. But none of those is really meant for playing Windows or Dos games. Although the latest VMware 5.x & 6.x incarnations do offer some rudimentary 3D / OpenGL support when WindowsXP/2000 is used as a client OS, so games are somewhat possible. But how about a freeware solution that runs on multiple platforms allowing those older games to be played?
DOSBox is especially created for playing Dos-games, the level of game compatibility has surged and the emulator has progressed in such a way that it even has been possible to install Windows 3.x on top of the Dosbox environment. It's still a little buggy and one needs to find the proper drivers, but true solid Windows 3.x emulation through Dosbox on various platforms will become a reality in the near future.
Windows 3.1 is basically a Windowing environment that sits on top of Dos, so why can't Windows95 be emulated in the same way? Well until recently the hardware/software environment supplied by the DOSbox emulator just wasn't up to providing a Windows95 compatible environment but lately things have changed. Dosbox is able to boot 'real' dos from disk images and is also able to use certain hard-drive images. The largest size supported is 512Mb and the tool to create a Dosbox-compatible drive image is bximage that comes with Bochs. I started DOSbox, mounted the raw image, booted into a 'real Windows95a' floppy drive image and partitioned and formatted the hard drive image, made it bootable by formatting it with the format c: /s command.
After that I proceeded to copy the Windows95 installation files from a cd-rom into a directory on the host pc and proceeded to copy those to the hd-image by mounting the hd-image and a directory on the host pc. Then I booted from the HD-image and proceeded the installation, I needed to run setup with the parameters that skip disk and memory checking otherwise the setup would halt and find fault. The installation went well all the way through. Reboots will not be performed automatically, once the 'pc' has shutdown you manually have to close and open DOSBox and boot from the hd-image to proceed. After some 15-20 minutes I had a functioning, Windows95 installation. Here's a small video of it booting.
- Mark Vergeer's blog
- Login to post comments
Comments
Running modified Windows95 setup
Switches can be added to the Setup command. For example, setup /?
/? - This switch provides a brief summary of the available Setup switches and the correct command line syntax.
/c - This switch causes Setup to not run SMARTDrive.
/d - If you do not want Setup to use your existing Windows configuration
(such as your current Win.ini and System.ini files), use this switch.
/id - If you do not want Setup to check for the minimum disk space
required to install Windows 95, use this switch.
/it - If you do not want Setup to check for the presence of "dirty" or
"deadly" terminate-and-stay-resident programs (TSRs) that are known to cause problems with Windows 95 Setup, use this switch.
/ih - This switch causes Setup to run ScanDisk in the foreground.
/iq - If you use the /is switch to bypass ScanDisk or ScanDisk fails,
Setup checks your drive for cross-linked files. Use the /iq switch to prevent Setup from doing this.
/is - This switch causes Setup to not run ScanDisk.
/l - Use this switch if you have a Logitech mouse and want it enabled
during Setup.
You must run Setup from your previous version of MS-DOS or start Windows 95 in MS-DOS mode for these switches to function.
/n - This switch causes Setup to run without a mouse.
/p - The /p switch causes Setup to pass string(s) directly to Detection
Manager (or Sysdetmg.dll). Setup does not interpret the content of the string. The string can contain one or more detection options.
Booting the Image
Quick question for you Mark...
I used and fixed these systems at the time, but my memory seems to be a fifo buffer. How do you skip these checks?
-Cecil
HELP to do this yourself!
To David who wrote us about his own experiments trying to get this to work slowly driving him insane. I never meant this post of mine to be a tutorial. I did some searching and I found a nice tutorial about this and a lot of other things on the Vogons message boards - a board dedicated to emulation of old pc systems, dosbox and a lot of other cool things.
Here's the Windows 95 tutorial on the Vogons site
Good luck!
Editor / Pixelator - Armchair Arcade, Inc.
www.markvergeer.nl
Yeah, I loved the 3.1 interface and setup too
Yeah, I loved the Windows 3.1 interface and setup too. I always had a zipped windows and winapps directory on my harddrive/zipdrive together with some config.sys and autoexec.bat files. That made restoring to a working version dead easy without having to reinstall the whole thing.
Well I hate correct you guys but here were tons of Windows 3.x games out there. Of course a lot of freeware/shareware applications, but there are quite a few Windows games that actually use the old WinG library. There's a good Puyo Puyo made by the Russian Tetrisauthor and there are literally hundreds of Japanese Shmups out there for Windows 3.1.
Editor / Pixelator - Armchair Arcade, Inc.
www.markvergeer.nl
DOS, Windows and Stuff
I've never managed to get a 3.1 setup running. That'd be fun to play with if nothing else, though it's my understanding that there are no games for 3.1 that you can't easily run on DOS.
Indeed the vast majority of Windows 95 games will run in 98 or later, especially if you tweak the startup file. However, for whatever reason, Power Chess and Power Chess 98 are VERY peculiar. That was very disappointing to me each time I upgraded as I really liked those games. They essentially took the AI personalities of Chessmaster (which I play these days mostly on Xbox Live Arcade and especially on the Nintendo DS) and made them into full-size animated opponents.
I have an abundance of old Intel boxes lying about with various versions of DOS and Windows, though emulation in this case would be preferable from a convenience standpoint, versus my preference for generally running stuff on real hardware since there's not a huge difference between playing DOS/Windows stuff on a modern machine versus an old machine, especially "personality"-wise. I always liked Windows 3.1 when I used it back in the days before Windows 95, simply because it was fairly lean and quite quick, especially on faster boxes, even though it was a 16-bit (not 32-bit) operating system. There weren't many Windows 3.1-specific games other than the few that I still have, like CivNet and some comic space trading game whose name slips my mind at the moment. A few publishers definitely tried to take advantage of the windowing environment, but it obviously was too slow versus DOS for most fast action games (though after the release of Windows 95, a few fast action 3D-like games were compatible with both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95)...
Wii: 1345 2773 2048 1586 | PS3: ArmchairArcade
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.
I'm excited about this, too.
I'm excited about this, too. These are the games that gave me the most hell when I was writing my CRPG book. Even when I was able to get a Windows 95 game running in some fashion, it was too slow and buggy to play. I have an old PC here with Windows 98 that I should really get set up again if I need to delve into that again; to my knowledge, most 95 games will run on 98.
I've never managed to get a 3.1 setup running. That'd be fun to play with if nothing else, though it's my understanding that there are no games for 3.1 that you can't easily run on DOS.
I'll be keeping a close eye on DOSBox
For now Windows95 is very alpha, let alone Windows98 butI'll be keeping a close eye on DOSBox, it seems to evolve into a good 'almost real-time Virtual Machine-like' functionality. Especially the cross platform compatibility is what makes this very interesting.
Editor / Pixelator - Armchair Arcade, Inc.
www.markvergeer.nl
Windows 95/98
Very interesting. I have a couple of Power Chess games from Sierra that are actually quite good but actually require Windows 95 and Windows 98 respectively. It might be good to get this working.
Wii: 1345 2773 2048 1586 | PS3: ArmchairArcade
Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.
oh and it is still very buggy
so don't expect a solid win95 experience yet... ;-P
Editor / Pixelator - Armchair Arcade, Inc.
www.markvergeer.nl