2) the idea of dosbox is emulation. So for most things: "no passing throught to the OS". The ISA soundcard will work though if you have windows drivers for it(and good directX drivers) As dosboxs internal soundcard sends it output to direct X

I understand...it just didn't work that well at all anyway...of course I could have been doing something wrong...

This was under ME with a SB64 Awe card running proper Windows & Direct X drivers.

Qbix wrote:

2) the idea of dosbox is emulation. So for most things: "no passing throught to the OS". The ISA soundcard will work though if you have windows drivers for it(and good directX drivers) As dosboxs internal soundcard sends it output to direct X

Qbix wrote:

2) the idea of dosbox is emulation. So for most things: "no passing throught to the OS". The ISA soundcard will work though if you have windows drivers for it(and good directX drivers) As dosboxs internal soundcard sends it output to direct X

No it doesn't. It sends the sound data to the Wave Mapper. I know this because if I run Winamp in WaveOut mode at the same time as DOSBox, they both get scratchy and eventually DOSBox kills my Wave Mapper output (e.g. no Windows sounds can be heard - just DirectX works) until I close it and start a couple of songs in Winamp in WaveOut mode. DOSBox running by itself gets scratchy and eventually kills the Wave Mapper too, so it has nothing to do with Winamp.

I should mention that that's with a recent CVS (Oct 7th or so), but I doubt that it has ever been any different. I'm also using an Audigy 2 Platinum under WinXP SP1 + DX9.0b and the latest Creative drivers, properly installed and fully working.

It would be nice if DOSBox used DirectX for video and sound, but it seems that due to its use of the SDL it uses Wave Mapper for sound, and I wouldn't be surprised if it uses GDI for video instead of DirectX (otherwise, why would scaling the screen reduce performance? All modern video cards support scaled blits in hardware AFAIK, and some are even fancy enough to filter the resulting bitmap automatically).

Originally posted by Sky_Eagle1
Another thing I think would be nice if but a pipe dream...to be able to install and get Windows 3.X working through it....not sure that'd be possible or what point there'd be to it, but it'd be a fun idea...

That actually seems to be a good idea, and very useful. Even for games, some Win3.11 games does not work well on Windows XP. Not to mention all other Win3.11 programs.

I agree most definitely - there's lots of Windows 3.1 (or even Windows 95 stuff - get a install called Win32 and you got 95 stuff mostly covered in Windows 3.x) stuff that could still be run...useful utilities along with other stuff like games - in fact I got a 3.1 game that's a clone of Missile Command called Warheads I like to play, but it won't work right on either 98/Me or XP.

Of course, I actually did try to install Win 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and got this as a result:

MIDI:Opened device:win32
Exit to error: an unsupported feature
Press enter to continue.

Oddest part too is I got a message in the windows setup before this claiming that it scanned the system and found "JOIN.EXE" and "SUBST.EXE" that were "non-supported versions of those files". Couldn't find them anywhere in the directory I mounted and as far as what the setup should see, but found them on the drive as a whole (OpenDOS files incidentally) in a directory not even mounted to DOSBox....

The offer is still out there to the developers...if you want some DOS utility specific observations regarding DOSBox (I got LOTS of those, including some programming insights perhaps), just say the word.

ChaosFish wrote:

That actually seems to be a good idea, and very useful. Even for games, some Win3.11 games does not work well on Windows XP. Not to mention all other Win3.11 programs.

Yes, it would be useful to run old win3.1 games using windows from DosBox. I remember windows 3.x (3.0 , 3.1 and 3.11) could run windows 2.x games (yes, I was running windows 2.x games on my windows 3.x box; it was a couple of shareware games).

But...

Most windows 3.11 software requires windows started in 386 protected mode, and it is not suported in dosbox, is it?

(OK, all of the windows soft I ran on my 286 could run on a dosbox windows box, but...)

I've seen there is a VOGONS forum on old windows soft.

questor wrote:

Most windows 3.11 software requires windows started in 386 protected mode, and it is not suported in dosbox, is it?

No, like lots of things (like something in that setup that dosbox didn't like - of course I didn't like the fact that setup saw beyond the virtual drives in dosbox)...but I think you can run it in either 286 or 386 mode depending on how you set it up.

I might try running setup sometime in real dos get windows 3.1 going and then bounce back into dosbox and see if it actually runs there...might be fun for more observations....

Though in my experiences, it seems more that I've tried with DOSBox seems to NOT work than it work.

3.11 doesn't work.
Maybe it will oneday. I don't know. 😀
Know that it will be hard.

Your best try is using an allready installed win3.11 i think. setup is hard.

Excuse Me, Sky_Eagle1. I miss-understood some points of your message.

I understood you were unable to run SOME windows soft, not the windows setup. The windows setup *should* run OK in standard mode.

In other hand, that curious fact of windows reading real hard drive instead of emulated drive seems too weird.

Well, I used dosbox from BeOS, not from Windows, and used PC-Tools PCShell to try to use a nicer shell. Since PCShell tried to read FAT, it did not work. So I supposed dosbox did not emulate the disk FAT. But PCShell couldn't read outside of the box.

Speaking of 3.1, do you know that there's an awesome modification that makes it look more like Windows 98 (Calmira 3.3) or Windows XP (Calmira 3.31 XP)? You can check that out here:

http://www.calmira.de/

I tried running Windows after setting it up in real DOS, I got the same message as I got in the setup.

Does anyone know if windows 3.x uses 80286 protected mode?
I remember it can't run on a 8086.

You can install both windows 9x and 3.x in same computer as long as you keep different .swp files (i.e., as long as you shut down windows and kill 9x .swp file *before* starting windows 3.x)

(yes, I've tested it, but outside dosbox).

Maybe this hack works with dosbox?

(The problem could be somewhere else: unsupported low-level graphic routines, unsupported I/O, etc.)

windows in standard mode uses 286 protected mode yeah, and you could also run it in 386 protected mode. Although most of the internals still run in 286 protected mode.

just tried 0.60 and the first thing I tried was running Windows 3.X.

Got farther than the messages this time, but it claims that "not enough expanded memory is present to run Windows in standard mode".

Looks like Windows 3.X is going to be a pipe dream for a while.

Got more to figure out than that...my CONF files are mucked up beyond belief now (the old values don't seem to get honored).

At least most of the games I tried that use protected mode works.

Originally posted by Sky_Eagle1 Another thing I think would be nice if but a pipe dream...to be able to install and get Windows 3.X working through it....not sure that'd be possible or what point there'd be to it, but it'd be a fun idea...

Not a pipe dream, but probably not worth the effort.

For those few titles that need Windows 3.1 to work properly, I recommend "Virtual PC". It seemed to run Windows 3.1 game titles fairly well and they ran better than on an (emulated) Win9x system because DOS/Win3.1 needs less resources.

Only downside is the cost.

questor wrote:

Does anyone know if windows 3.x uses 80286 protected mode?
I remember it can't run on a 8086.

Windows 3.0 worked in 386 protected mode by default if it found a 386 or better CPU, but it could also be installed and run in 286 standard mode ("win /s") and also in 8086 real mode ("win /r").

Windows 3.1 and 3.11 both required 386 protected mode to work.

Regards,

has anyone tried using the built-in win 3.1 program manager on XP?

Start > run > progman.exe

Supports drag'n'drop too 😁

It's true. There's a runnable progman.exe - What is its purpose?

eL_PuSHeR wrote:

It's true. There's a runnable progman.exe

Yes, it's been there since Windows NT 4.0. Remember that NT 3.5x still used the old look and feel (based on File Manager and Program Manager) and 4.0 was the first NT-based OS to use the new desktop based on Explorer.

What is its purpose?

First, to ease the transition for old users, since you can set Windows to use Program Manager as you standard shell, instead of Windows Explorer. Second, because a few 16-bit programs used a wrong way of creating program groups writing directly to .ini files, instead of using the correct DDE interface that was emulated by Explorer. Therefore, having a copy of the old Program Manager allowed you to see the program icons created by such programs that would otherwise not appear under the Start Menu.

Regards,