virtualbox.org

Hi!

There is one game i was looking for - SimTower.
It looks like this game will not run under WinXP and runs too fast under Win98. But I know it will work correctly under Win3.11 (last time I played this game on notebook with windows 3.11).
So I want to get win3.11. I know that I need to install MS-DOS and windows 3.11 on it, but I dont know actually how to do this.
If someone could give me a step by step maual, I'll be very grateful.

I suppose, I need MS-DOS installed, afterwards windows3.11 and VGA and sound drivers.
I have WinXP as host system, but no floppy drive.

Do you have the floppies for DOS and Win3? If so, you can get a USB floppy drive and hope for the best. Those floppies are probably better quality than blanks made in 2000 onward, but don't count on the drive being a very good one. Maybe you can get a floppy drive made before 2000. (Nothing happened in 2000. That's an arbitrary cutoff year based on my experience.) Once and if you can read your floppies, make images. You can do this for free if you boot a Linux live CD and use the dd command. Otherwise you can buy an imaging product. Once you get your images, you can add them to the VBox media manager.

You might also consider http://www.dosbox.com/ instead of VirtualBox for this game.

Raven wrote:Do you have the floppies for DOS and Win3? If so, you can get a USB floppy drive and hope for the best. Those floppies are probably better quality than blanks made in 2000 onward, but don't count on the drive being a very good one. Maybe you can get a floppy drive made before 2000. (Nothing happened in 2000. That's an arbitrary cutoff year based on my experience.) Once and if you can read your floppies, make images. You can do this for free if you boot a Linux live CD and use the dd command. Otherwise you can buy an imaging product. Once you get your images, you can add them to the VBox media manager.

You might also consider http://www.dosbox.com/ instead of VirtualBox for this game.

I tried dosbox. It worked, but the game was too fast, like under Win98. Dosbox can "slow down" the system, but it does not help.

Google says that there are bootable floppy images with ms-dos, floppy images with ms-dos system files and ISO images with Win3.11. But I have not got it all installed correctly.
I mount image of a bootable floppy disk ms-dos 6.22, then created partition C: with fdisk and did format C:. Next I've loaded VM from ms-dos 6.22 floppy image and run sys C:. But after rebooting without any mounted images, I found that C: crontains only COMMAND.COM file. And I don't know what to do next, or maybe I should find another floppy image which will work correctly?

Here on the forum I found several topics about installing the various drivers on Win3.11, but I have yet to install the system itself.

Insane wrote:But after rebooting without any mounted images, I found that C: crontains only COMMAND.COM file. And I don't know what to do next, or maybe I should find another floppy image which will work correctly?

If the VM booted successfully then what you have there is a complete DOS VM. Your procedure worked. However its usually convenient to copy all the DOS command line utilities into a folder, and set up the path to include that folder. It's also useful to set up a CONFIG.SYS which loads a number of drivers into high memory, including CDROM and keyboard drivers. The search path and CDROM OS extension (MSCDEX) is done in autoexec.bat.

Some of this is covered in the "Howtos and Tutorials" forum. The rest is generic DOS stuff you can find on the web - it doesn't have much to do with VBox.

For Win 3.1x you will of course need the Win3 setup program on CD or floppy.