Step one: You’ll need DOSBox installed and running. The latest release, 0.72, runs exceptionally well and gets rid of the old lag issues with previous versions, so that’s what I’m using here. You should probably not go into the DOSBox forums talking about this - running Windows isn’t what they had in mind with this project, and they don’t like that we’re doing this.

Step two: You’ll need the original Windows 3.1 (or 3.0) floppy discs. They usually come in a set of six. They’re commonly found in the back of the closet at any veteran geek’s house, or you can grab them on eBay for around 10 US dollars or 33 sheqels. Lacking that, you can also find a few copies kicking around BitTorrent sites - which is just as well, because you’ll want the contents of all the floppies stored on your hard drive already.

Now, the setting up of virtual drives is tedious. Make a directory which will be your “C:\” drive and mount it from DOSBox with ‘mount C ~/your_directory’. Now, when you change to that directory, you are on ‘C:\’ drive as far as DOSBox is concerned. You will have to make another directory and have it for your virtual ‘A:\’ floppy drive. DOSBox wants you to do that from its own internal virtual ‘Z:\’ drive. So switch to Z:\, ‘mount A ~/your_floppy_directory’ and then switch back to C:\. Are we confused yet?

Here’s the process: with an external program open (your file manager, My Computer, an xterm, whatever), you’ll be swapping the contents of the Windows installation floppies into the directory you have mounted as ‘A:\’ drive, then in DOSBox hit ‘Control-F4′ to re-read the directory so it can continue. With the first disk in the virtual floppy directory, go in DOSBox and type ‘A:\SETUP.EXE’.

When it asks for more disks, just jump to your file manager window and move the last disk’s files out, move the next file’s disks in, jump back to DOSBox, hit “Ctrl-F4″ to update the directory cache, then hit “enter” for the Windows setup program.

When you’re done, it’s a simple matter of ‘cd C:\WINDOWS\’ and then ‘win’… what, did you forget how to start Windows from DOS? OMG! It’s alive! I would close as many other programs as I could while running Windows in DOSBox if I were you; it does gobble a lot of CPU power. If DOSBox is the only running program when you run Windows on it, you should be able to get it going fairly smoothly on a modern machine. But really, when you’re happily playing all those Windows 3.1 games and drawing in Paintbrush and trying to remember how you set up PIF files, isn’t it all worth it?

Even the screensaver works!

Now, to try to get this next step I’m going to show you in this next screenshot, you’re on your own. But I ended up getting Mosaic 1.0 running in it, and downloaded a copy of my page to open it in Mosaic on Win 3.1 just to see what would happen. A mess is what happens; it errored all over the place because of Javascript from the future, and it can’t display the images because - duh - they’re not 8-bit bitmaps any more. But anyway, here’s AskReaMaor.com on Windows 3.1:

…with the beloved ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color theme and the ‘argyle’ wallpaper - because I demand only the finest in Microsoft style. There, now everybody stop whinging about Vista, will you?

Some links of interest to Windows 3.1 emulation:

• WinSite - HUGE archive of vintage Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11 abandonware, freeware, and shareware!
• Lightspeed’s reference page - Yes, it’s still going, animated gifs and all!
• Windows 3.1 FAQ - Very comprehensive page on running Windows 3.1 in today’s modern world.

And before anybody asks, no, this trick won’t work for running Win95 or higher in DOSBox. Because Windows up to 3.11 was just a DOS shell - everything after that has to be native on the hardware. So this is as good as it gets for running in DOSBox - just the thing if you have to run an old legacy program that requires this environment, or you just like a good game of FreeCell here and there!

Related Posts:

• Fixing Windows using a Live Linux CD - part four
• An Overview of Wine for Linux
• Fixing Windows using a Live Linux CD - part two
• The Quest for Quake
• Fixing Windows using a Live Linux CD - part three

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