Might be the wrong place to ask it, but has anyone managed to get Windows 3.11 running under the PC emulator/simulator Bochs at a decent speed? I've been using Bochs for a long time and running 3.x inside it seems to be fine, other than the speed, which I know has to be configured to your machine - i have a 1600 Athlon XP CPU and 512MB RAM, but i'm not totally sure how to configure Bochs to work at its best, and I was wondering what settings others have used to get it running at a good speed.

Yes. Actually, I got the older Windows 3.1 (Not the 3.11 Workgroups), but I ran at a very decent speed. Actually, I would recommend the Qemu x86 Emulator other Bochs now because its uses a different x86 decoder than Bochs, so any application would run close to real speed. In fact, sometimes, it was hard to control the Windows 3.1 mouse becasue it went too fast, I had to lower the setting. Windows 3.1 running on Qemu would be close to real-speed (Depending on hardware, but still way faster than Bochs). But I'm looking foward to Bochs Release 2.2. To get Bochs to run faster, just tweak your "ips:#######" number and the VGA Interval Number in the Bochsrc. Hope you get your VM running faster =).

Good News. When it comes to running Windows 3.1 on emulator, you can still ask here because it's Windows 3.1 and emulation is as good as the actual PC hardware now. Configuring Windows 3.1 on Emulator is the same as configuring Windows on actual hardware. Sure the emulator may need some tweaking, but hay, it not rocket science. (Now when it comes to compiling Bochs, that's a whole different story that should be asked somewhere elese, but I'm assuming that you, like everybody else, including me, download the binary straight from the internet). The 3 main emulators for Win32 are Bochs x86, Qemu, and Virtual PC. =).

Oh, I forgot to mention that Qemu is easier to use (No more hard-disk geometrys!). Just 1 Qemu command line prompt at C:\ (Or shortcut), and your VM is up and running

A qemu systax goes like
C:\qemu.exe -L ./ -m 64 -boot a -fda floppy.img -hda harddisk.img -cdrom cdimage.iso

Enjoy =).

Ok, thank you for your information! I'll look into it.

Great to see people are always willing to help on this board!

Cheers

Hey I got Windows 3.11 running in it, great speeds like you said! I have two problems though:

QEMU says it emulates a cirrus 5446 VGA card. I got the Windows 3.1 drivers for this and have tried them but there's display corruption in every mode i try.

Another thing is, it says it has sound emulation, but i hear nothing! The sound is setup in Windows 3.1 on the virtual machine and the SET variable is set in the autoexec.bat. What could I be doing wrong?

Thanks again for any info on these points,

Alex

This is where I also had problems. I used the Cirrus drivers, but they only worked in 640x480 and 800 by 600 16 colors. They didn't work in any other mode. I say wait till the Cirrus emulation improves (If the 800x600 mode didn't work, use the default Windows SVGA 800 by 600 driver). As with the sound, I couldn't configure it in Bochs, and even though Qemu can emulate a soundcard (SoundBlaster compatible with IRQ 5 and Address 220), the drivers don't work and Windows refuse to start. I couldn't get sound to work on Qemu.

I have 2 questions, what resolution was you running Windows on with Bochs, and did you have SoundBlaster support in Bochs also? The only emulation where I got Windows to display more than 256 colors and sound was with Virtual PC. If you can get your hands on Virtual PC(trial version), then you got it made. I created a VPC configuration with Windows for Workgroups running at 1024x768 16-bit color with SoundBlaster Support with QuickTime 16-bit.

Hi, thanks for the reply.

On Bochs, I had good sound emulation. All i did was set my sb16 line to:

sb16: midimode=1, midi=/dev/midi00, wavemode=1, wave=/dev/dsp, loglevel=4, log=sb1631.log, dmatimer=600000

...and then in Windows went to Control Panel, Drivers, and added the Sound Blaster 1.5 driver, set it to address 220, IRQ 5 and that was all there was to it, all worked fine. I've done the same in QEMU, and when selecting the address/IRQ in the drivers panel, it actually says the soundcard is configured properly! I think it must be some conflict, because when using the Winplay MP3 Player, it said the sound device is already in use, and won't work until it is free. Curiously, the Multimedia player QuickView for MS-DOS plays all sound fine, and runs MP3s properly. So it must be a problem with the configuration in Windows 3.x

As for 256 colours in Bochs, no not had any luck, at least not using the new cirrus support in the 2.2 pre-release. I can only run 640x480 at 16 colours. Selecting the SVGA 256 640x480 standard 3.x driver *works* but it actually still shows only 16 colours for some bizarre reason! I would like to get more than 16 colours in both Bochs and QEMU but have had no luck unfortunately.

I have used Virtual PC before, but i find it more interesting messing around with these freebie emulators :)