After some more tinkering I haven't gone further with the bootlog but now Dosbox crashes with "trying to read undefined DMA port f".
Actually it doesn't crash "right". It just hangs there and doesn't realize it has crashed. Just like Windows 95 did on real machines 😀

hmm well it needs some more work. but wd managed it as far as i know.

Except for the showofff of skills I see no use why dosbox should run win95

I have a few win95 games that won't run on Wine (including some which only run in 256 colors, which is difficult with my graphics card)

And then there is that program called "dosbox", they only have a windows binary, and I don't want to compile it by myself, so I could finally try that 😉

The dosbox i posted at
Precise page faults (dynamic/full core)
runs win9x to some extent.

wd

😀
I do agree that dosbox has no real need to run Windows95. It was just something that nagged me, after Win 3.1x ran 😀

Got to try WD's version.

If you could really get Windows 95 to boot into the GUI, it would prove that Windows 95 is only a DOS application. The next step would be Windows 98 and Windows ME.

not really, since it only really works with "booting" from an hdd image and not under plain Dosbox. And there is not much to proof anyway, is there?

What exactly does Win9x do to DOS as it starts up? Is it just one giant dos extender app? Lol....

Of course, the truth is more complicated than "win is a dos program", but yes, you could view win95 as a dos extender with multitasking, shared libraries (DLLs) and a common GUI system. These are the three most notable features it adds.

Windows 9x/ME does sit on top of DOS, although it requires DOS 7 which has extra hooks (bloat, in other words) to support Win9x/ME. Just like with Windows 3.x, you can hack Win9x/ME to boot up in plain DOS if desired (and then launch Windows manually from the DOS prompt! Of course, there is no "exit" option in Win9x/ME because they weren't intended to be used that way)

BootGUI=0 in msdos.sys, yes. I always set it so I can whip up DOS boot menus. The 9x exe is the same name as Win3.1 too, win.exe (or .com?)...

It was funny how MS didn't care that people knew win9x was built on DOS, until WinME when they hid it and in doing so made it a pain in the rear to use in many ways......

Here's the problem, it's possible to boot windows 95 but it won't run right because the prosessor a 386 is only 91% compatable. And you have to somehow boot from the hd.

Thread necromancer 😜

Necrophiliac, even. If you want to run Windows 95, don't use an emulator for DOS games. Are you hammering in nails with a screwdriver, too?

Actually, I found a very good use of that: running Windows 9x games in windowed mode!! 😀 Seriously. I think that's the best of both worlds, especially for RPG games..

I used VMWare and Virtual PC a lot recently to experiment that usage, with only some degree of satisfaction. Mostly the 2D acceleration is quite lacking (they both still emulate an old S3 card only that does not do video decompression well either, IMHO), and the D3D feature is totally non-existent.... Mabye DOSBox could evolve into Win9xBox, so that we don't have to mess with Windows XP/Vista for those old games. What do you think?

A.Lupin wrote:

Mabye DOSBox could evolve into Win9xBox, so that we don't have to mess with Windows XP/Vista for those old games. What do you think?

Sounds good. When are you going to start?

I don't know yet, as I am still evaluating this case 😁

I think the target should be just Win98 SE on Pentium. There are more smart and qualified people here to make it happen, potentially. What I am mostly interested in is DirectX redirection to the layer on the host, instead of full emulation. Time to dig out my Win98 DDK...

sh4ring4n wrote:

Here's the problem, it's possible to boot windows 95 but it won't run right because the prosessor a 386 is only 91% compatable. And you have to somehow boot from the hd.

Hey don't knock the 386's win95 compatibility, that has better win95 compatibility than today's hot processors

A.Lupin wrote:

Mabye DOSBox could evolve into Win9xBox, so that we don't have to mess with Windows XP/Vista for those old games. What do you think?

I think our best hope at the moment is Microsoft deciding to add 3D support for their Virtual PC. VMWare Fusion has shown it can be done.

I totally agree with your point, we can now run about 99% of old DOS games without major problems, but 3D accelerated games released during the Win95/98 era can cause major headache. 64-bit OS and dual/quadcore processors are not exactly "retro"friendly. Ati and Nvidia have removed dithering support from their latest GPU's, meaning that games using 16-bit color look much worse than before.