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Windows 9x in DOSBox

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First post, by Tertz

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Oldbie

General theme about work and installation of Windows 95(abc)/98(SE) systems in DOSBox.
As DOSBox's moderator closes themes about this in DOSBox general discussion section, it's better to be situated here.

For now moment Windos 9x systems work reasonably good in ykhwong's builds of DOSBox and not always bad in DOSBox 0.74.
2D and Direct3D 5.x games may be played not bad, but this needs ~3 times faster CPU cores for good fps than we have today or better support of 3D cards in the emulator.

Besides DOSBox, on today I know only one emulator supporting Direct3D in Win9x as guest OS: PCem (S3 Virge/DX). And other may to give it some time: SPC (Voodoo Rush).

Related themes:
Windows 9x DOSBox Guide by DosFreak
Windows 95 on DOSBox 0.74 by dada
Minimal Win9x install for gaming (with truth5678's guide for Win95b installation)
Network and WLAN
Access to host's files by network

In general, to install Win9x in ykhwong's build you need:
1) In DOSBox type: imgmake с:\hdd.img -t hd_2gig. This will create 2 Gb FAT16 HDD image.
2) In dosbox.conf input:
machine=svga_s3, vmemsize=4, memsize=128, core=dynamic, cputype=pentium, cycles=max, isapnpbios=false
in [ide, primary], [ide, secondary], [ide, tertiary], [ide, quaternary] enable=true;
- in [autoexec]:
imgmount a "c:\fddboot.ima"
imgmount c "c:\hdd.img" -t hdd -fs fat -ide 1m
imgmount d "c:\win95.iso" -fs iso -ide 2m
boot -l a
(fddboot.ima, for example, you may get in [boot] folder of .iso Win9x CD after opening it by 7zip)
3) Run DOSBox. Run setup from CD image. After setup change to "boot -l c".
4) Some had problems with Microsoft's S3 driver during setup, so you may need to choose VGA there. After installation you may set recommended S3 drivers from DosFreak's guide, driver for SB16, Voodoo, DirectX 8.0a. Some games may work better with other video driver, for example some VBE. SB settings in Device Manager should be manualy set to base 220 irq 7 dma 1 dma16 5.

DOSBox CPU Benchmark
Yamaha YMF7x4 Guide

Reply 1 of 1, by Dominus

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DOSBox Moderator

Moved to the dosbox guides section. It's still a dosbox topic. I'm still closing it. If you want to discuss other flsvours of Dosbox please open a new forum somewhere else.

Windows 3.1x guide for DOSBox
60 seconds guide to DOSBox
DOSBox SVN snapshot for macOS (10.4-11.x ppc/intel 32/64bit) notarized for gatekeeper