Summarizing my ways to access old environments

bgstack15 — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 12:58:00 GMT

Sometimes, I want to run old software from my non-free days.

DOS

I can use Dosbox or FreeDOS. These have always worked and are readily available.

Windows 3.1

I use DOSBox for this, already in my internal package win31games.

Windows 9x

There's no need for Windows 95 when Windows 98SE will work in Dosbox-X and 99.99% of software worked on the latter.

Windows XP

While I have a Thinkpad G40 somewhere with a real floppy disk drive and that runs Windows XP, I haven't need this environment specifically. Most XP-targetting software runs just great in wine.

Windows 7

If Wine does not suffice, then I have Windows 7 running in a qemu spice-enabled VM on EL9 which should be supported to approximately 2029. I haven't really needed Windows 7 specifically in a very long time, and I suspect my need for it will only dwindle.

Play Beyond the Titanic on GNU/Linux

bgstack15 — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 13:00:13 GMT

The story

One game I played in the past was Beyond the Titanic. It was a shareware game for MS-DOS, in the genre of text adventure (now known as interactive fiction). In 2009 its source code was released under the GPL (reference 2). An enterprising individual (not this author) modified it and made it possible to build with the Free Pascal Compiler (probably known as fpc in your distro packages). The game has an interesting quirk in that it really, really depends on having a terminal with size 80x24 and not anything else. And of course, my Fedora COPR was having trouble building the package, but I promise you the rpm spec works on Fedora 28 (reference 4) and the dpkg spec works on Devuan 2.0 beowulf/ceres. Although you could of course just run the BEYOND.COM version in Dosbox. I did observe the savegame files are not compatible between builds. Loading the fpc-version savegames into the DOS version of the game caused some funny and tragic endings where the monster killed me while I was standing on the deck of the Titanic. Happy typing!

Credits

The icon I used for my project is linkware, so by linking to the author's requested page at https://malagatravelguide.net/, I can use the icon.

References

Weblinks

gitlab: beyond-the-titanic/History/History.txt
Original release of source ftp://ftp.3drealms.com/freeware/tit_free.zip
Gamespot walkthrough for Beyond the Titanic
rpm and dpkg specs on my gitlab

Install Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (1996) on Linux

bgstack15 — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 12:50:29 GMT

Introduction

The game Logical Journey of the Zoombinis was an amazing game when I was young. It was fun, and apparently I learned a lot. I decided to try to install it on my Devuan ceres laptop. Here is the optimal route for making it work.

How to Install Zoombinis on Linux

The Zoombinis game was published in 1996, and it supports Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. We are going to install Windows 3.1 in DOSBox, install drivers, and then install the game.

Prepare Windows 3.1

Install DOSBox, which is probably in the main package manager on your GNU/Linux platform.

sudo dnf install dosbox
sudo apt-get install dosbox

Extract the Windows 3.1 VHD file (which I had from my old MSDN AA days). Also extract into sub-folders the Zoombinis disc contents, the sound drivers that DOSBox emulates, and the emulated video drivers.

mkdir -p ~/win31 ; cd ~/win31 ; 7z x ~/Downloads/Windows\ 3.1.vhd
mkdir -p ~/win31/zoominst ; cd ~/win31/zoominst && 7z x ~/Downloads/Logical\ Journey\ of\ the\ Zoombinis.iso
mkdir -p ~/win31/drivers/SB ; cd ~/win31/drivers/SB && 7z x ~/Downloads/SB16W3x.zip
mkdir -p ~/win31/drivers/S3 ; cd ~/win31/drivers/S3 && 7z x ~/Downloads/s3drivers.zip

Prepare a batch file for mounting the right drives in the emulated environment.

cat <<'EOF' > win31.bat
REM for Zoombinis
MOUNT C ~/win31
MOUNT D ~/win31/zoominst

EOF

Run DOSBox:

dosbox win31.bat

Run Windows:

WINDOWS\WIN.COM

It might prompt you about deleting a corrupt swap file. You can select "Y" to do so, and then go into the Control Panel, "386 Enhanced," Virtual Memory button, and save the information that is present. Then it shouldn't prompt you anymore.

Install sound and video drivers

Zoombinis will warn you about sound and video settings, so the driver we loaded earlier should cover this. Now we have to install them. DOSBox emulates the SoundBlaster and S3 video hardware, so we just apply those drivers for Windows 3.1, and then audio will work and higher graphics settings too. In DOSBox, cd to DRIVERS\SB and run the INSTALL utility.

cd DRIVERS\SB
INSTALL.EXE

Press enter to install the driver now. Press enter to do a full installation. Navigate with the arrow keys down to the Windows 3.1 path and enter in the "C:\Windows" value. Change the Interrupt setting to the DOSBOX default of 7, as seen in this screenshot (unless you modified it in the dosbox.conf ). If it prompts you about replacing a file, feel free. It will not harm anything to replace it. When that finishes, you can either reboot or stay on the current session. Now it is time to install the video drivers. In DOSBox, run the Windows SETUP.EXE utility.

cd WINDOWS
SETUP.EXE

Select the DISPLAY option and press enter. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and select "Other (requires disk...)" Type in the directory where the video drivers are, e.g. "C:\DRIVERS\S3" I am uncertain if Windows 3.1 has the ability to change the display resolution, so just pick your preferred screen resolution here. I picked the 800x600 64K color with small fonts (as opposed to large-print fonts). The SETUP utility will then return to the full list of system information, and you can select "Accept the configuration shown above." You might need to point it to the "C:\DRIVERS\S3" folder once more. Now you can run Windows 3.1 with sound and an 800x600 display!

WINDOWS\WIN.COM

Install Zoombinis

Use File Manager to navigate to where we injected the install files. Run the setup.exe! Make sure you have enough disk space. I installed QuickTime as well, although I don't know what its omission would do. Now you should have "Broderbund Software" group in Program Manager and the Zoombinis launcher inside it!

History

First of all, I had to find my old .VCD file (from my Virtual Drive Manager days on a non-free OS). I know those are basically ISO files and can just loop-mount them. Unfortunately, my .VCD file was corrupted. I then had to scrounge around for the old .FCD file and finally found it. But then, I had to try to get the contents out of it. I spent about 45 minutes researching online before I found IsoBuster. That software is shareware, but its free components worked enough to let me copy out the contents of the FCD file. On GNU/Linux these days, it's all ISOs, and those are much easier to work with and find tutorials. Did you know that 7zip can extract files from ISO and VHD files? That was very neat to learn. I tried installing the game in Wine, and after getting the cd check part to work (by modifying the ini file "INSTALLFROMDRIVE=D"), I ran into an error: "Cannot initialize graphics." And it included some contents of a register, and I never solved it.

err:int21:INT21_Ioctl_Block int21: unknown/not implemented parameters:
int21: AX 440d, BX 0004, CX 0848, DX db46, SI 0000, DI 0000, DS 0000, ES 0000
fixme:reg:RegOpenUserClassesRoot (0x7c, 0x0, 0x2000000, 0xe2e6d8) semi-stub
err:int21:INT21_Ioctl_Block int21: unknown/not implemented parameters:
int21: AX 440d, BX 0004, CX 0848, DX dde2, SI 0000, DI 0000, DS 0000, ES 0000

I think that's functionality that just hasn't been added to Wine. I'm pretty sure the game does some early DirectX fullscreen mumbo-jumbo and this version of how it does that was not implemented in wine. Ah, well. But, during all this work I had read the Zoombini readme and it indicates it can be installed in Windows 3.1, ergo the main part of this article.

Reference

Weblinks

IsoBuster https://www.isobuster.com/download.php General Win 3.1 howto https://www.howtogeek.com/230359/how-to-install-windows-3.1-in-dosbox-set-up- drivers-and-play-16-bit-games/ Another general Win.31 howto, with sound and video driver installations https://joshmccarty.com/run-windows-3-1-in- dosbox/ Sound driver SB16W3X https://joshmccarty.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/08/SB16W3X.zip Video driver S3 https://joshmccarty.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/s3drivers.zip

Knowledge Base (Posts about dosbox)

Summarizing my ways to access old environments

DOS

Windows 3.1

Windows 9x

Windows XP

Windows 7

Play Beyond the Titanic on GNU/Linux

The story

Credits

References

Weblinks

Install Logical Journey of the Zoombinis (1996) on Linux

Introduction

How to Install Zoombinis on Linux

Prepare Windows 3.1

Install sound and video drivers

Install Zoombinis

History

Reference

Weblinks