Hi. I have some legacy Win3.11 programs I can replace but not duplicate. The most critical of these is an old copy of Softkey’s Home Gardener which has maps of all my home’s septic system laid out in it.
I can’t install it with CrossOver or Wine because it’s a 16 bit program.
I’m running OpenSuse 13.1 on one of my boxes with lots of memory and hd space.
I’d like to install DOS/3.11 on VxBox and then be able to run my old Dos and Windows 3 stuff.
Because I no longer have a floppy drive, I’ve ordered a 3.5 In floppy that runs via a usb adaptor.
I also want to be able to print, if possible.
I don’t need networking for this.
Does this sound feasible?
Any obvious pitfalls?
The only other alternative would seem to be to install 3.11 on DOSBOX but that seems even more daunting.
I’d like to install DOS/3.11 on VxBox and then be able to run my old Dos and Windows 3 stuff.
Because I no longer have a floppy drive, I’ve ordered a 3.5 In floppy that runs via a usb adaptor.
You don’t need a floppy drive to install/use/ DOS/Windows3.11 in VirtualBox.
But you’d need it to be able to read your old floppies of course.
I also want to be able to print, if possible.
I don’t need networking for this.
Does this sound feasible?
Any obvious pitfalls?
Well, Win3.11 ran fine in VirtualBox when I last tried it a few years ago.
No idea about printing though. Depends on whether Win3.11 supports your printer I suppose, or whether a driver for 3.11 is available.
You might succeed with a generic Postscript driver though, and maybe as a workaround print to a file.
The only other alternative would seem to be to install 3.11 on DOSBOX but that seems even more daunting.
Windows 3.11 should run in DOSBOX as well I think.
The installation should not be different to installing it inside VirtualBox.
I haven’t thought about running DOS/Win3.1 virtualized since… forever.
DOSEMU http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSEMU
I haven’t touched this since… maybe 7 yrs ago when it supposedly was last updated. But, apparently someone is still trying to ensure it runs on a current kernel (see the notes for kernel 3.1.x)
You likely can do this with QEMU in full virtualization mode, emulating an x386 processor.
But, if you require old hardware, YMMV if it can be emulated or not. Or, maybe you’ll be able to just transfer the data from your floppies to an IMG format and likely be able to mount in a virtual floppy drive (far better than trying to mount a real USB device).
The above approaches are based on presenting virtualized 16-bit hardware to the OS.
The alternative is to run an OS that supports WOW(Windows on Windows).
More than likely that would involve either running a 32-bit or 64-bit Windows that supports 16-bit if Wine currently won’t support (apparently because of a hardware issue). So, with this approach you should be able to run a suitable Windows in practically any paravirtualization and run your DOS app in that.
I have MSDOS 6.2/Win 3.11 installed, and it works like a charm. NOTE: You won’t remember any machine being as fast as that when those products were at their heyday.