/win311

VM with Windows 3.11 and a working internet connection

Primary LanguageShell

Warning

GitHub LFS considered harmful.

On 2023-08-13 GitHub has permanently disabled Git LFS for ALL of our repositories because we've "exceeded the data plan". Instead of limiting downloads to the allotted bandwith, they simply let them run wild and then shut it down entirely.

Let this be a warning to everyone (considering) using Git LFS on Github. They cannot be trusted. In the meantime, you can download hda.img here: https://rtts.eu/download/win311/hda.img

Virtual Machine with Windows 3.11

Here's a fully configured Windows 3.11 machine with a working internet connection and a load of software, games, and of course Microsoft BOB 🤓

Screenshot of Windows 3.11

The file hda.img contains the harddrive. You can mount it directly with the ./mount command to copy over files. The ./start command starts the machine using QEMU.

Inside QEMU, Windows 3.11 successfully connects to the internet and offers a very pleasant browsing experience using Netscape Navigator 3 with javascript disabled. Internet Explorer 3 and 5 are also included, but completely useless due to incorrect rendering of CSS.

Network configuration

TCP/IP networking is made possible by the Microsoft 32 bit TCP/IP networking stack (tcp32b.exe). The gateway address has been set to 192.168.178.1. To change it, go to Open Accesoires -> Windows Setup -> Options -> Change network settings and then find your way around vaguely familiar dialogs.

The installed driver is for the Realtek 8029 networking adapter, which is the one that is actually emulated with QEMU's ne2k_pci option (thank you Friedemann Baitinger for pointing me in the right direction in this 2004 forum post).

Display configuration

After a lot of trial and error, I have finally been able to get the Cirrus 5446 drivers to work properly. The resolution is currently set to 1024x768 but even 1280x1024 works perfectly. You can adjust the settings with the WinMode utility in the VGA Display group.

Persisting changes

Type Ctrl-Alt-2 to switch to the QEMU monitor, then type commit all.