#RUNNING DOSBOX WINDOWS 95 256 COLORS SOFTWARE#

A fork, DOSBox-X, explicitly targets general DOS software and Windows 95, and provides much more stable hardware emulation. 0 But then, because it was designed to run on real hardware and expects to read and write disk sectors directly, it will not be able to access directory mounts, which are normally provided by DOSBox.Īnd even with the right version of MS-DOS, DOSBox doesn’t emulate PC hardware with the necessary fidelity to allow Windows to run reliably, though an unofficial guide to make it work has been written.

#RUNNING DOSBOX WINDOWS 95 256 COLORS INSTALL#

It is for this reason that you need to install Windows 95 on a disk image and tell DOSBox to boot from it: so that the bundled version of MS-DOS is available to Windows, which provides the necessary interface. As such Windows 9x is much more intimately tied to the version of MS-DOS it came with, unlike Windows 3.x, which can run pretty well even on DR DOS, despite Microsoft’s best intentions. Windows 9x, on the other hand, requires a much larger and deeper API/ABI surface of DOS to function, some of which is very poorly documented and understood. Other than that, games typically need access to sound, video and network hardware, with which DOS itself has little involvement.

#RUNNING DOSBOX WINDOWS 95 256 COLORS FULL#

More juggling of disk images and such, but if you can get the installer to complete then you should be able to just boot the mounted disk image and enjoy Win95, although with scaling and mouse capture weirdness if you're not in full screen.īest advice is go with the guides and start from scratch, but the general idea is that it is possible, though not as easy as you would hope.ĭOSBox as a project generally targets games, and as such its built-in DOS implements only the subset of DOS used by games, which is mostly memory management (including XMS and EMS memory), high-level file system access (files and directories, not disk sectors, aside from the occasional PC booter) and process spawning.Copying Win95 installation files over to your disk image so you can run that installer after you've installed MS-DOS on it.This usually involves juggling of virtually inserted 3.5' floppy disk images with DOSBox to format and install on the raw disk image you created. Install real MS-DOS 6.22 on the image.you can't just mount a subdirectory on your host machine.

This has to be mounted as a disk image, i.e. General steps involved to get Win95 running are: Windows 3.1 and later are all picky about what DOS they run on top of and will crash/halt/exit if you're using FreeDOS or DOSBox's DOS emulation.

This won't work because most importantly the DOS emulation that DOSBox provides will NOT run Win95 - you'll need to actually install a real MS-DOS version to install and later run Windows. I imagine you simply have a disk image with Win95 on it and you're trying to run it.

There are other web pages you can search on the web which will walk you through installation of Windows 95 on DOSBox (e.g.

#RUNNING DOSBOX WINDOWS 95 256 COLORS HOW TO#

There is another project called DOSBox-X which attempts to address some of the quirks that prevent Windows 95 from running on it and as such they have guides on how to do it. I went through the motions several times before I got it to work, but the main issue is that DOSBox doesn't really work out-of-the-box with Win95.

Running dosbox windows 95 256 colors