But I think could do with usability improvements, for example typing 'dosbox win98.iso' at a prompt should end up with me at the win98 desktop.
All the config should be auto detected and auto set unless overridden.
it emulates ~8086 through Pentium II or so. maybe a bit further on both sides; my machine struggled to maintain 100% emulation speed with the highest end CPU selected.
This gives me the opportunity to test out my wiki install for note-taking in real time; set up 86box and do the same things i've been doing with pcem (clone the drives (copy/paste)), screenshots, the works. +1
I don’t recall how it was all figured out int he days before modems. I remember dos came with a nice chunky set of manuals, I guess games might have had information in there too, but I for one don’t really understand the different between high and low in the first megabyte, or between extended and expanded memory, or what an Irq really was, I just knew you had to live the jumpers on the sound card - which I assume I got from the manual.
playing with it gives you a sense of mastery (even if small), is satisfying, and may be the necessary "training" to get used to using/installing/configuring the full windows 98.
How is it even doing this? A full DOS/Windows 9x environment—running on an M1 Mac?? On so many architectures and OSes? With a ton of options, yet somehow everything just works—games, operating systems, all of it. Like a time machine you can configure. Seriously cool
i got windows 98 networking working (on macos needs sudo dosbox-x) and browsed google from ie 5. most websites will not work (due to TLS/cipher mismatch).
i want to write a very thin, old JS client for BrowserBox to let you connect to bbx running on local network so that old OS like this can browse the modern web.
HN, read only over gopher: gopher://magical.fish
Also:
gopher://magical.fish
There's a TLS 1.3 fix for Rzilla too:
https://msfn.org/board/topic/177106-running-windows-98-in-20...
Making it unsuitable for the types of secure use cases I envisage with this.
Windows 9x doesn’t (normally) use real mode DOS / BIOS calls for disk access, it has its own 32 bit disk drivers and file systems running in the virtual machine manager kernel (vfat.vxd and so on). So DOSbox has to do things in a far more traditional way, presenting a virtual hard disc device etc.
Later windows came with different looks, UI toolkits, ribbons, and what nots. It became a messy UI. And what the NT-stack was probably better in all kinds of ways, it always felt like it was slowing things down...
Oh, and I think we're forgetting the Ad Panel on the desktop, absolutely huge (at least on 800x600) toolbar buttons in Explorer, and other "bloat" IE integration brought us in W98 ;)
Other than that, why not? It’s interesting to see how things used to be…
Start->Run
regsrv32 %systemroot%\apppatch\slayerui.dll
This enabled the Windows 95/98 compatibility options for desktop shortcuts a la XP. Just set them with the right mouse button and they will run fine.
On DOSBox-X, once w98se it's installed, the dynamic core will run it much faster.
W98+DosBox-X did the job. With a sufficiently powerful machine, the phony system was at least as speedy as machines of the era. And there are enough tweaks to speed up the boring parts. That one worked so well, I tried some demos from that time frame, and most did fine.
Lockal•8mo ago