# Previous version of Windows in VirtualBox - Boredom



## AltCapwn (Sep 2, 2020)

Hi everyone,

Just want to share my boredom. I made myself a little VirtualBox museum of old Windows versions, all functional!

Just hearing the sounds makes me nostalgic.





If you want to try yourself, ENJOY (archive.org).

You can find the .ISO too if you're interested to install it from scratch.

Those are completely legit btw . As long as it's not used for professional purposes I guess.
As stated on the site, "for historical research or museum quality display".


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## biffzinker (Sep 2, 2020)

No Windows 3.1 or Windows NT 4/3.5.1 since your doing this in a VM? I like the idea of doing it this way.


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## AltCapwn (Sep 2, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> No Windows 3.1 or Windows NT 4/3.5.1 since your doing this in a VM? I like the idea of doing it this way.



There's a link here for an .ISO compatible VMWare and VirtualBox. 








						Windows 3.1 : Microsoft : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
					

Windows 3.1 For VirtualBox And VMWare And Limbo(All .IMG Files, not ISO.)Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing...



					archive.org
				




Haven't tried yet tho, but hey, I'm bored, so why not! 

Started using it at Windows 98, never saw 3.1 in my life.

And you're right, what a time to be alive and be able to run those in a VM.


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## neatfeatguy (Sep 2, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> There's a link here for an .ISO compatible VMWare and VirtualBox.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



My mom always got pissed at me when I changed all the colors and rearranged all the windows in 3.1. I don't know what her deal was, I was making it look good in the eyes of a 12 year old. Then I load up Commander Keen - Goodbye Galaxy and play that for a while (always thought it looked like he was wearing a Green Bay Packer's helmet - so awesome!) until I'd beat it and then I'd load up Duke Nukem.....awesome side scrolling games.

Then again, maybe she was always pissed that I'd figure out the password to get online on Prodigy....I was amazed at the new speed the 14.4k modem brought in, made the 9600 feel slow.


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## Octopuss (Sep 2, 2020)

The memories of 3.11 still gives me the creeps.
My father's PC got so bad the fucking Word v6 was typing stuff on its own. Just like that. Creepy AF.


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## stinger608 (Sep 7, 2020)

Hell, I might do this just for nostalgic memories.


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## R-T-B (Sep 11, 2020)

Octopuss said:


> The memories of 3.11 still gives me the creeps.
> My father's PC got so bad the fucking Word v6 was typing stuff on its own. Just like that. Creepy AF.



I remember in middle school I sat down at an old PC like that, started writing a science report, and it kindly informed me I was gay in the middle of my paper.


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## Octopuss (Sep 11, 2020)

LOLWHUT


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## Devon68 (Sep 11, 2020)

> I remember in middle school I sat down at an old PC like that, started writing a science report, and it kindly informed me I was gay in the middle of my paper.


The word gay used to have a different meaning back in the day. It meant "Happy". The same as "Fag" used to mean cigarette. But yeah in this context it is really funny.


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## windwhirl (Sep 11, 2020)

Devon68 said:


> The word gay used to have a different meaning back in the day. It meant "Happy". The same as "Fag" used to mean cigarette. But yeah in this context it is really funny.



As a non-native English speaker, I was not aware of that until I played Ni No Kuni and stumbled upon a sentence talking about children playing "with gay abandon" while reading the in-game Wizard's Companion. Admittedly, my brain short-circuited for a moment and then went "WAIT, WHAT THE F***!?"  



Octopuss said:


> My father's PC got so bad the fucking Word v6 was typing stuff on its own. Just like that. Creepy AF.



Perfect for an after-horror-movie prank


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## AltCapwn (Sep 12, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> No Windows 3.1 or Windows NT 4/3.5.1 since your doing this in a VM? I like the idea of doing it this way.



I haven't spent much time yet but I'm still figuring out how to install Windows 3.1 in my virtualbox   .
Working on making a custom setup as the floppy disk simply won't boot.

Worse than making Windows ME work.


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## biffzinker (Sep 12, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> I haven't spent much time yet but I'm still figuring out how to install Windows 3.1 in my virtualbox   .
> Working on making a custom setup as the floppy disk simply won't boot.
> 
> Worse than making Windows ME work.


You need to install MS-DOS 6.22 first to the C: drive then you can execute the setup.exe off the floppy disk image. A:\Setup


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## R-T-B (Sep 12, 2020)

Devon68 said:


> The word gay used to have a different meaning back in the day. It meant "Happy". The same as "Fag" used to mean cigarette. But yeah in this context it is really funny.



Yeah, this was the 90s so no question what it meant.  The wording may have been less kind and more similar to a "cigarette" too.


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## Mr Bill (Sep 12, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> You need to install MS-DOS 6.22 first to the C: drive then you can execute the setup.exe off the floppy disk image. A:\Setup


I can remember the first time I tried to run DOS on my 8088, I accidentally picked up a 45 record instead of the floppy, stuck it in, and my PC started playing "To Much Heaven" By the Bee Gees.


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## R-T-B (Sep 12, 2020)

Mr Bill said:


> I can remember the first time I tried to run DOS on my 8088, I accidentally picked up a 45 record instead of the floppy, stuck it in, and my PC started playing "To Much Heaven" By the Bee Gees.



Oh lookie here boys, we got a hoity toity with a sound card...


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## dorsetknob (Sep 12, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> You need to install MS-DOS 6.22 first to the C: drive then you can execute the setup.exe off the floppy disk image. A:\Setup


yes Dos  first and it can be any version from Dos 5 upwards (6.22 was the last true Dos Version and the best)


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## AltCapwn (Sep 12, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> You need to install MS-DOS 6.22 first to the C: drive then you can execute the setup.exe off the floppy disk image. A:\Setup


Oh well you're right! Thanks for your wisdom, it's installing.  

Now I can say I did installed, in my life, MSDOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1.



6 Floppy disks later


And a benchmark to check the performance


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## Naito (Sep 12, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> And a benchmark to check the performance



That made me laugh more than it should've 

My first Windows was 95. Prior to that it was GEM UI on top of DOS. Still got the machine too


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## dorsetknob (Sep 12, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> 6 Floppy disks later


Win 3.1 was a 7 disk set up ( last disk .... disk 7  is a printer driver disk and not generally needed  )


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## AltCapwn (Sep 12, 2020)

dorsetknob said:


> Win 3.1 was a 7 disk set up ( last disk .... disk 7  is a printer driver disk and not generally needed  )


Yes I haven't had to use it in that case .



Naito said:


> That made me laugh more than it should've
> 
> My first Windows was 95. Prior to that it was GEM UI on top of DOS. Still got the machine too


Hahaha but seriously I have to admit it's very responsive tho. I guess it wasn't the case back then. Took like less than 5 minutes to install. 
I remember the last time I installed Windows XP it was so fucking long. 

I did not know that MSDOS had some 3rd party UI. Very interesting.
In fact, checking Windows history is very interesting.

I just started another MSDOS install to check that out


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## biffzinker (Sep 12, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> I did not know that MSDOS had some 3rd party UI. Very interesting.
> In fact, checking Windows history is very interesting.


Windows v1.0-3.11 is just a GUI shell on top of the underlying MS-DOS operating system. Windows 95 is when Windows started to go beyond just being a pretty GUI on top of MS-DOS.


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## AltCapwn (Sep 13, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> Windows v1.0-3.11 is just a GUI shell on top of the underlying MS-DOS operating system. Windows 95 is when Windows started to go beyond just being a pretty GUI on top of MS-DOS.


I just realised that when I had to enter the command "win" to start windows 3.1.


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## biffzinker (Sep 13, 2020)

altcapwn said:


> I just realised that when I had to enter the command "win" to start windows 3.1.


Are you gonna boot Windows 1.04, 2.0, and 2.11?


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## johnspack (Sep 13, 2020)

Just found this in my vmware collection,  converted it to virtualbox for linux:




This is Neptune booting up....  it never made it out as an os...  too bad!


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## TxGrin (Sep 13, 2020)

Mac OS and Windows 7 running in Windows 10


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## stinger608 (Sep 13, 2020)

johnspack said:


> Just found this in my vmware collection,  converted it to virtualbox for linux:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




So you actually use Virtualbox and might be able to answer this question? 

I loaded Windows 98SE in the install went just fine. It rebooted and then states "not enough memory, please shut down anything running" or something very similar. 

I have to think it's something to do with Virtualbox. 

I have the latest version with the correct extension pack. Not sure what is going on.


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## windwhirl (Sep 13, 2020)

stinger608 said:


> So you actually use Virtualbox and might be able to answer this question?
> 
> I loaded Windows 98SE in the install went just fine. It rebooted and then states "not enough memory, please shut down anything running" or something very similar.
> 
> ...


You get that far? I just get stuck halfway through before Explorer starts throwing errors and exceptions. 

Though maybe it is a Ryzen thing? Heard something about it a while ago, but can't really remember what exactly...


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## biffzinker (Sep 13, 2020)

windwhirl said:


> Though maybe it is a Ryzen thing? Heard something about it a while ago, but can't really remember what exactly...


Are you referring to this?





						Re: Windows 98 SE installation fails
					

There have been several other threads on this (including one of mine) - Windows 9x fails in Workstation 15 on AMD Ryzen.  Apparently there is a mistake in AMD's implementation of an obsolete instruction set called VME that causes issues with 32bit real-mode drivers.  Supposedly AMD somewhat...




					communities.vmware.com


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## windwhirl (Sep 13, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> Are you referring to this?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Yeah, that seems to be it. I might have to disable Hyper-V first, though...


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## johnspack (Sep 13, 2020)

Here's my settings for win98se for virtualbox,  and 98se running..


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## stinger608 (Sep 13, 2020)

johnspack said:


> Here's my settings for win98se for virtualbox, and 98se running..



Awesome bro. I'll look at my settings as see if something is amiss on it. Thanks for posting these.


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## johnspack (Sep 14, 2020)

Heh,  here's a mongrel os.  It's basically windows 3.1 on top of ntfs!  Requires 3 boot floppies and the cd.  Video driver was a pita to install,  no guest additions for this os....









Might as well show how much NT 4 progressed.  It used the slick "new" win95 interface.  I dual booted with it and win95,  win98 and 98se until win2k came out and I dumped them all.





Well,  that  double posting feature is annoying...  I needed to separate the nt 3.51 from the nt 4 screens...  it wouldn't let me
Well as long as people know they are competely different oses on the same screen!


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## biffzinker (Sep 15, 2020)

johnspack said:


> Well as long as people know they are competely different oses on the same screen!


The GUI change should be obvious which screenshot belongs to NT3.51, and NT4.0.


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## johnspack (Sep 15, 2020)

Well for most of us in here....  the funny thing is not much difference under the hood.  Both NT.  But that god awful  win 3.1 gui on nt...  I have to try to install NT 3.1 still.  Very  first NT,  grandfather  of
all modern oses.  Amazing these old NTs are what windows 10 is based on!


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## lemonadesoda (Sep 15, 2020)

These screenshots are like going into a museum of classical paintings.


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## johnspack (Sep 19, 2020)

Well might as well finish the museum with grandaddy.  NT 3.1,  where it all began.  This took a pile of tweaks and hacks to get installed,  but
all updated to sp3,  it's ready to go!


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## biffzinker (Sep 19, 2020)

@johnspack 
Are up for trying OS/2 Warp 4.52?


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## birdie (Sep 19, 2020)

The worst thing about old operating systems is that you cannot browse the web with them any longer: the WWW has long shifted from insecure OpenSSL cyphers to TLS 1.1 and higher and there aren't that many websites which still work via the plain old HTTP protocol. Luckily we have http://web.archive.org but it's pretty limited as you must know all the URLs in advance and then it doesn't serve fresh data unless it's been saved by someone. Oh, and forget about searching the web. Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo all work via https exclusively.

It's even started affecting currently supported operating systems like Windows 7 and 8. Install them and you'll find out that you cannot even download updates automatically any longer. You first need to patch them extensively to enable modern HTTPS ciphers. Sigh.


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## lemonadesoda (Sep 19, 2020)

birdie said:


> The worst thing about old operating systems is that you cannot browse the web with them any longer: the WWW has long shifted from insecure OpenSSL cyphers to TLS 1.1 and higher and there aren't that many websites which still work via plain the old HTTP protocol. Luckily we have http://web.archive.org but it's pretty limited as you must know all the URLs in advance and then it doesn't serve fresh data unless it's been saved by someone. Oh, and forget about searching the web. Google/Bing/DuckDuckGo all work via https exclusively.
> 
> It's even started affecting currently supported operating systems like Windows 7 and 8. Install them and you'll find out that you cannot even download updates automatically any longer. You first need to patch them extensively to enable modern HTTPS ciphers. Sigh.



seems like we need a proxy server that converts https to http


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## johnspack (Sep 20, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> @johnspack
> Are up for trying OS/2 Warp 4.52?


C'mon,  you know I'm already on it!   Still figuring out drivers ect,  it's much bitchyer than nt...


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## johnspack (Sep 21, 2020)

If you want to see what happened to warp,  this is it.  eComStation 2.1 last version from 2011.  Not really sure why really...




Bigger pain to install than NT 3.1.


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## AltCapwn (Sep 23, 2020)

biffzinker said:


> Are you gonna boot Windows 1.04, 2.0, and 2.11?



Maybe? 

But I'm now on a project to configure a fortigate at my home so this will have to wait.
And I'm stuck at playing Dying light hellraid and The Outer World new DLC


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## johnspack (Sep 23, 2020)

I'll try windows 2.11 next,  have the installs.  Back in the day I didn't bother with windows 1 and 2,  stuck with dos.  So I am kind of curious.

Jeez...  okay,  got it installed.  Dam it's primitive.  Was able to use dos 6.2 to install it on top of.




Apps and commands are what you see.  You click on an exe to get it to run.
You have no idea how jealous I was of my professor when he got a brand new 386 computer,
and all us students had were xt computers..  not even 286s,  which he just replaced...  bugger....


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## johnspack (Oct 13, 2020)

Thought this might be fun to see.  A 32 bit os from 2000 running 8 cores and 8GB of ram!  Windows 2000 Advanced Server.
Also have kernelx installed so can run firefox esr 52.9 and load modern web pages.  Don't recommend this though,  TPU is
the only page I tried.


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