I've seen some old DOS games packaged in DOSBox in Steam and thought it was pretty slick how they packaged them to be able to play so easily. So recently I decided to try installing DOSBox itself on my system to play with it a bit. I'm a bit surprised how easy it is to set up and get going. DOSBox emulates a Sound Blaster (and can also emulate a GUS Ultrasound), and it pretty much just works. I was able to set up some DOS games in it and play them, with sound and everything. Also, after following a guide, I got a couple of DOS communicaton programs set up (Telix and Telemate). Telemate seems to work okay when using a BBS via telnet in DOSBox, but I've had problems with Telix sending empty data to the BBS and garbling ANSI. Telemate was my favorite back in the day, so I might just use that.

Windows 3.1 even works in DOSBox. I installed Windows For Workgroups 3.11 in it and even installed Win32s - The 32-bit Freecell included with Win32s runs in Win 3.11 in DOSBox. The same 32-bit Freecell executable (which I think is from 1993?) runs on my native 64-bit Windows 10 install. Seems a bit humorous to me. :P

One tricky thing seems to be TCP/IP networking. I wouldn't mind trying some old internet software in Windows for Workgroups 3.11, but it seems you might have to download a special build of DOSBox with network card emulation (specifically, people seem to like the NE2000 card). I'm not sure yet where to get such a build or if there's a better way. Also, WFW 3.11 complains on startup that the network interface couldn't load (or similar error).

One thing I noticed though, is that WFW 3.11 often complains that there isn't enough memory to do some operations, even though I've configured DOSBox to provide 32MB of RAM. Some of the icons in Windows are black, and just trying to fix that is one thing that causes the Windows error saying there isn't enough memory to complete the operation.

Nightfox
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