First post, by rhayden
Hi, folks. I have been lurking here for months but just joined yesterday. I would add this to the guide to installing Win 3.1 in DOSBox but apparently newbies are (understandably) not allowed to do that so I started this thread. I hope you will let me know (gently) if I violate any local customs.
There is plenty of information out there on DOSBox and more than one good tutorial on installing Windows 3.1 in DOSBox. My interest was slightly different. I wanted to move several old DOS/Win3.1 machines from hardware to a spot inside my current main desktop Linux. Then I could toss the hardware and easily move the output of those old Windows programs to Linux. This post will show how I did that and (I hope) establish that it is reasonably doable. I'll assume you already know about DOSBox and running Windows 3.1 there.
Some of the old machines and DOS/Win3.1 do not support USB or burning optical disks so the first problem is to back up these systems to modern media. For that I used Puppy Linux. You could probably just boot it from a CD drive but I actually installed it on the hard drives long ago so I could do backups. Alternatively, in some cases I installed a USB port on a card. For reasons that do not matter here, a typical DOS/Win3.1 installation here had drives C through J. Those I copied to a thumb drive or CD using Puppy, putting D: in folder D, etc. Then I copied that to the .dosbox folder in an already installed copy of DOSBox for Linux. I modified the DOSBox configuration file to mount those folders as drives C: through J:. Then I ran DOSBox and when I landed at the DOS prompt on C: I typed WIN. To my amazement, in two out of four cases, Windows booted up and ran fine with all my applications already installed.
Let me digress here to explain why this is good news;-) Younger readers may not know that PC Magazine used to be more than half an inch thick. A review of word processor or spreadsheet programs might cover 20 or more. That diversity is gone today. If one of those many old programs fit your needs better than Word or Excel you are out of luck today. In addition, I had scads of old files created with those old programs that only those programs could open. (I work in an area where files created 30 years ago are still relevant.) The option of reinstalling Windows inside DOSBox did not appeal to me as I would then have to reinstall all my old software and make all my ancient tweaks and configuration choices. And that all assumes I can find the installation floppies for all those programs and that those floppies are still readable.
I mentioned that two of the four systems I tried this with worked "out of the box". Particularly important was that one of those successes was the granddaddy of them all, a huge installation on hardware that died years ago. That ancient machine was resurrected from backups. FWIW, that machine had a 233 MHz CPU and ran Puppy LInux fine and the backups were to CD-R via Puppy, so very low spec machines can be cloned. Another machine worked after minor surgery. In that case the original hardware was just a few feet away. The clone had three issues. One was found to also be an issue on the original. It was fixed there and the new WIN.INI copied to the clone. Another issue was memory management. You have to make Windows memory management adjustments from within Windows which is hard to do if Windows won't boot. So I turned off memory management in the original machine and copied the configuration files to the clone. Then I could boot Windows on the clone and turn memory management back on. Finally, a program in the startup group was getting into a fight with DOSBox and preventing Windows from running. I could not see how to change that from outside Windows, so again I looked at the original hardware installation. There I saw a known-to-be-nasty program in the startup group so I deleted it and again copied STARTUP.GRP to the clone. That did it. Moral: Settings that can only be changed from inside Windows can be an obstacle. Don't recycle that old hardware until you are sure everything is fixed!
While my own focus is not on games, some of you gamers may have an old computer in the attic with 47 well-loved old games installed of which you only now have three on DOSBox since those are the only ones for which you can find readable installation media. The above could allow you to install ALL those old games in one shot!-)