I use Virtual PC. It emulates an S3 Trio 64 graphics card. You need MS-DOS, though. There are Virtual Machine Additions for DOS somewhere on vetusware, but I'm too lazy to find it.

Same here. Works well..

SB16 drivers work, too. You only need to remove the MPU drivers,
because the MPU part is not emulated.

Network is supported by ODI drivers (DC21X4.DOS with OEMSETUP.INF).

And don't forget to install WQGHLT (by Weiqi Gao) to lower CPU load.

Yes, VirtualPC is better than VMware or others for WfWG 3.11. You'll want to grab the DOS additions from VirtualPC 2004.

How is vpc better than dosbox?

WfWG. Not DOS.

It supports printing, networking, floppy drive, SB16 and S3 video "out of the box." It also supports hard drive images better than DOSBox and installation of operating systems within that image file. Yes, you can do that with DOSBox, but it's not as seamless.

How is vpc better than dosbox?

When you want gaming and great sound support Dosbox is it, if you want something else, then Dosbox is not up to it.
Especially networking, printing and support for office suits is not availlable in regular Dosbox, support for office suits isn't even there in special builds (it's actually support for share.exe/vshare.386 that isn't in Dosbox and will prevent the start of (probably) all the latest office programs for Win 3.x).

Virtual PC is better for running Windows 3.x in general, except for MIDI sound. Listening to MIDI music in VPC makes your ears bleed.

VPC is the way to go for networking with WFW 3.11.

Unlike DOSBOX which has it's own DOS built-in you will need to create a virtual machine within VPC, install MS-DOS then WFW. MS VPC emulates an intel NIC so you'll need to download the NDIS2 Unified DC21x4 drivers for WFW. You'll also want to S3 Trio V2 drivers for WFW - The download link I have for them no longer works - maybe someone else can post a working link. These drivers are necessary if you want SVGA.

Otherwise you're stuck with 640x480x16colors. Install the Soundblaster 1.5 drivers. NOTE: MSVPC does NOT emulate adlib or Midi so although you can install the Adlib driver you won't hear any Adlib/Midi music, just digitized sounds. Same applies to DOS games - If you can get them to work at all only Soundblaster digitized sounds and music will work.

The MS-DOS additions are built-into VPC - once you create a virtual machine for DOS there will be a menu option to install those additions.

I only use VPC/DOS when I want to mess around with WFW and networking. Anything else DOSBOX is the answer since it has superior sound and graphics support compared to VPC.

@valnar

> WfWG. Not DOS.

You always assume people don't read the thread they're replying to? Yes, talking about win 3.11 & wfwg.

>It supports printing, networking, floppy drive, SB16 and S3 video "out of the box."

OK, out of the box, but once out of the box, is it better, if so, how?

>It also supports hard drive images better than DOSBox

There's supporting more formats, but supporting images better? How so?

>and installation of operating systems within that image file.>

Installing other OSs isn't a notable feature for comparing running w3.11 & wfwg between dosbox & other vpcs.

@Dominus
>When you want gaming and great sound support Dosbox is it, if you want something else, then Dosbox is not up to it.
Especially networking, printing and support for office suits is not availlable in regular Dosbox, support for office suits isn't even there in special builds (it's actually support for share.exe/vshare.386 that isn't in Dosbox and will prevent the start of (probably) all the latest office programs for Win 3.x).

A first real difference, share/vshare. Are there other things like that lacking in DOSBox? I consider patches available to do networking and printing being up to it. Is VPCs networking and printing better, how so? Are the capabilities of the networking and printing for DOSBox lacking?

I consider patches available to do networking and printing being up to it. Is VPCs networking and printing better, how so?

IMO it is a serious lack and certainly lacks the out of the box feature. The patches are also hopelessly out of date and not easily applicable to current version or SVN of Dosbox. You CAN use Hal's megabuild, though. But then again people need to be told to use that one instead of normal Dosbox. Information how to set these things up with Dosbox are not that easy to find.

So I stand by it, if you are not interested in Games then VPC is most likely better. An exception of course when you want to do stuff with music/sounds, there Dosbox wins again 😀
Another area where Dosbox wins is exactly the fact that Dosbox does NOT need to be installed on an image. It's a real time saver if you can directly access the files from your host and don't need to access the image first, which can be a real hassle.

Personally I don't see any reason for networking on Win3.x, except for the short "look I can access the internet from Win3.x" moment.
Almost everything except gaming can be better done on the host, so I stick by Dosbox and if I EVER needed to open old files with win3x office programs (I still have some old files created back then, especially Publisher files, which don't work well with today's programs), I know a quick and dirty workaround 😀

Thanks for all answers.

@ih8registrations
I use DOSBox for games, but for WfW it seems not the best solution. The first problem I encountered was the lack of share.exe. Sure, there were some fakeshare.exe etc, but there were also comments that if it works it might be unpredictable and can break in another build. Networking is the feature I was looking for, because I would like to know how it works and that it works before I start experimenting on real hardware. DOSBox's emulation of a wide range of soundcards and VGAs isn't needed for Windows (I'm not going to make music on these VMs, and S3 graphics seems to have good compatibility with Windows).

OK, so THE difference that makes VPC better for networking and printing is them being there by default, not that they actually function better or have better features.

about fakeshare or earler Dosbox versions not reporting back that share is not working: With that you can start the programs that won't start otherwise but the features of share are not there and therefore you might experience crashes and/or dataloss in the files you are working on. That said, have you been able to actually find fakeshare? The only link I found was dead and since there seems to be something called fakeshare around, that is not for Win3.x but for filesharing purposes that enlarges your "share" for file sharing networks I wasn't able to find the real thing 😀

I use DOSBox for games, but for WfW it seems not the best solution.

Dosbox is the best solution for games under WfW 😀

Dominus wrote:

have you been able to actually find fakeshare? The only link I found was dead and since there seems to be something called fakeshare around, that is not for Win3.x but for filesharing purposes that enlarges your "share" for file sharing networks I wasn't able to find the real thing 😀

I haven't tried. If wd and hal say share is not supported - i trust them 😀.

ah, that reminds of something else, share does actually work in Dosbox when you use a dos image. AFAIK you also need a dos image to make use of the network patch (I *think* recently this was discussed somewhere here in reference to HAL's magebuild).
Edit: and I think the reason why the network patch only works on a dos image is that the network driver for W3.x also needs share... 😀

It needs IFSHLP.SYS at least.

So, when setup, DOSBox is better.

It's worse than I thought. Launched VirtualPC, installed DOS 6.22, installed VPC 2004 DOS additions. Before installing WfW I wanted to install NC 5.5 - it fails when it should copy files. Tried both 2004 and 2007 with the same result. I don't think Symantec used a sophisticated installer for NC and it makes me worried what else will fail on VPC. (Also tried VirtualBOX. After some problems with DOS setup not being able to format the HDD, I managed to install it. Now I will have to setup the CD-ROM driver).

ih8registrations wrote:

So, when setup, DOSBox is better.

No.

I don't know why I have to spell out the features of DOSBox, but it is not a PC emulator. VPC is.