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in dosbox, emulator, legacy windows, tutorial, windows - on 10:42 PM - 42 comments
Looking at how OS had marvelled over these three decades starting from the 90s
somehow makes me reminiscent the good old days of Win 3.1, Win95 and Win98. I
certainly missed playing my first ever computer games such as Prince of Persia, Mario,
and Doom.
And so embark my journey to relive those memories again in the modern machine. To
do that, I selected DosBox, which is an emulator that fully emulates those legacy
machines. Like many others, I started off to search for related tutorials and what-not on
Google, only to found that most of them are either too fragmented or requires me to
piece up the tidbits.
To save time, I had decided to write up this tutorial just so you wouldn't had the same
experience that I did.
DosBox
MS-DOS Boot Disc
Windows 95 Installation Disc
Hard disk image that host your Win95 partition
Just like any VM, I know that I will need hard disk image to host the Windows 95 OS.
Many tutorials covers the steps to build your own hard disk image, requiring somewhat
technical understanding. To avoid these complications, I simply choose a blank pre-
formatted FAT16 .img from https://sites.google.com/site/dotalshoff/games/dosbox.
Don't be surprise with the capacity as the file is compressed and barely reaches 200 KB
even for 1GB. This is because they are empty disk image. For me personally, 1GB is
more than enough. DosBox requires the hard disk image to be flatten out in size instead
of dynamically growing like many VM implementations nowadays. Upon extraction
you will get the full blown size of the selected disk size.
Launch DosBox
Since the blank image I downloaded is already formatted as FAT16, I don't have to
format it again. The following just to verify that.
Note that I did not specify the drive name such as c or d since there I assume there is
still no file system (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS) on it. Instead, I use 2 which will mount it
on native system hda. (0-1 will mount to fda and fdb (floppy disk a, b) and 2-3 will
mount to hda and hdb).
In addition, it is also necessary to specify the exact disk geometry (i.e. sectors,
cylinders) to let the file system utility that we'll use next (fdisk) know where the disk
ends. If you grab the pre-formatted hard disk image
from https://sites.google.com/site/dotalshoff/games/dosbox, simply replace the value
matching the ones you downloaded. For instance, I will enter 512,63,64,520 since I'm
downloading the 1GB image.
After mounting the disk I then boot into MS-DOS 6.22 by typing
boot 622c.img
Verify that the disk is already formatted using fdisk.
Restart DosBox and mount the image as drive c by typing:
imgmount c hdd-1gb.img
Extract the contents of the Windows 95 installation disc (win95_en.iso) using WinRAR.
mount d .\win95_en
Make a new directory called WIN95 in C:/ which is your empty hard disk image. We
will later copy the entire content of folder WIN95 from Windows 95 installation disk
here.
c:
mkdir WIN95
copy D:\WIN95\*.*
3. Installing Windows 95
Follow the wizard and it will ask for a CD-Key at some point. I use the following:
12095-OEM-0004226-12233
After finishing the installation the system will restart, i.e. DOSBox will quit. You'll
have to relaunch it again.
To boot from the hard disk image, simply type the following:
Note: Some tutorials make some mistake in this step by typing the following:
imgmount c hdd-1gb.img
boot hdd-1gb.img
Instead of typing these every time you launch DosBox, you may add them in the
[AutoExec] section in DosBox configuration file. You can edit it by:
To prevent graphical glitch, lower the CPU speed in the configuration file:
FAQ
Q: I cannot enter backspace \ . It is mapped to right bracket ].
A: Start DOSBox with the switch -startmapper.
(Reference: http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Keymapper). To do so, right click at the
DOSBox shortcut found on your Desktop and add the switch in the Shortcut Tab.
The next time you start you will see the Keymapper. Click on the \ and the 'Add' button,
then press your Backspace key. Delete the binding for [ and ] to avoid conflict.