I suppose technically DOSBox doesn't "officially" support Windows 3.1, but, well, is there something DOSBox does or does not do with Windows 3.1 that you find to be lacking?

I think you can disregard Virtual PC. It dosn't work with Dos 3.x.
Or at least after two days of research and effort the tech. told me it doesn't.
Let me know if it does. No guarantee on Dosbox but it will definitely work with old Wn3.x programs. (or should I have said older?)

DOSBox is great as long as you don't need share.exe for your game.
I was able to test Windows 3.11 in Virtual PC 2007 and didn't notice any problems there.

If you booot from a disk image, share will work in Dosbox

So far I've got the following games and apps working in Win-3.1 hosted by DosBox.

Magnaflux Runner
Nanotank
Chessmaster 4000
Lander
Word 2.0c

All seem to work fine, Perfectly..
Lander needs a much MUCH slower cpu cycle setting of around 800 or 900.
But then again, this is a 30k LunarLander game, and is probably not speed aware and would be unplayable on real machines that were running fast.

I'm just looking to start adding more and more windows 3.1 games and applications. And I want to "standardize" on the single best platform, that's why I ask! My next task is to get office 4.3 rolling.

I was also trying to run Norton Utilities SpeedDisk in DosBox too, but SpeedDisk reported a virtual device driver at the disk selection screen, so it was not runnable. Anyone know how to get around that? Or would Virtual PC run it? Well seems like lots of fun and experimenting are ahead!

Running Norton Utilities in a Virtual Machine is not a good idea. Just think for a moment! When you run dosbox and just mount a folder then what should be the sense of speed disk? Muck with the virtual drive and rearrange the blocks of that folder? Do you realize that this sounds ... ?
It might make more sense to do that on hard disk image but barely, since the fragmentation takes place on the hatlrd drive the image is stored at.
Anyway Dosbox is for games. Running Windows programs is bound to fail. If that is your goal you should at least put everything on a jd image and boot from that in dosbox.
Otherwise everything needing share will fail, for example office.

I was more after getting some screenshots of the interface that norton utilities was using, and some of the sub-applets too. I wouldn't really be using them for any practical purpose or file & disk maintenance.

I just found out about the share.exe issue. Can I assume virtual PC with booting from dos 6.22 and then running win 31 won't have the share issue? I really wanted to cruise around some office apps.

Yes, as I wrote you can even use Dosbox to circumvent this. If you are just after screenshots and not actually want to use the programs you can fakeshare, attached to my Win 3.1x guide.

Keatah wrote:

So far I've got the following games and apps working in Win-3.1 hosted by DosBox. All seem to work fine, Perfectly..

I myself have a seperate installation of DOSBox running W3.11WFWG as well. Some that I would add to the list that run perfectly (at least on my PC) are:

Catz/Dogz/OddBallz (they use the same program engine)...

...as well as Tetris Classic for Windows (which was the initial reason that I installed W311 under DOSBox in the first place) 😀

It's awesome for testing 16-bit KNP/TGF/CNC games i'll tell you that.

I'm thinking it might be difficult to find something that doesn't work under Windows 3.1 and DOSBox that isn't somehow strongly hardware-dependent.

Fragmentation files on a Hard Drive image will occur within the hard drive image. The fragmentation of the hard drive image itself will be caused by fragmentation of the underlying file system that the image sits on.

So, using defrag on a disk image is actually just as reasonable as it ever were before... well, ok, unless the disk image is sparse and doing otherwise weird things...

Jorpho wrote:

I'm thinking it might be difficult to find something that doesn't work under Windows 3.1 and DOSBox

Dark Seed 2 has problems, I can never get the AVI or speech to play.
Quantum Gate is disjointed, playing scenes in the wrong order.
In The Madness Of Roland several buttons don't work.
They run better in VPC, though.

As far as fragmentation goes, I would tend to think that the older systems' we are emulating, their demands, are well within the capability of modern hardware to cache and pretty much bury any latency resulting from fragmentation.

Fragmentation files on a Hard Drive image will occur within the hard drive image. The fragmentation of the hard drive image itself will be caused by fragmentation of the underlying file system that the image sits on.

so if the fragmentation is caused by the host, running a defrag inside the image is useless...

That really IS a bad idea. NU? In DOSBox? Go ahead, FAT yourself to oblivion and I really don't know how much you weigh 😀

I got nu running perfectly in dosbox, I installed DOS 6.22 in it and then ran NU. I was able to low-level edit the disk image with DiskEditor. Of course, the low level only goes as low as the disk image, and it doesn't edit the real physical hard drive. As to be expected.

So that is very very cool!
Real fun to watch SpeedDisk crank through hundreds of megs in a matter of a minute or two!

It would be nice. Have you lost anything yet? Have you run the XP windows defragmenter yet?
Are you using 36 bit? (Obviuosly)
NC was always my favaorite tool except for... you know.

norton speeddisk and diskedit can only work on the virtual image. Anything beyond that is under control of windows. Dosbox and dos622 fool the utilities into thinking they're running on a real disk.

Yeh, you can run a defragmenter in NU and real windows xp at the same time, with no loss in data on either side.