Has anyone managed to get better than 640 x 480 out of virtual box display on Win98? I have gone through endless hassle just to get the thing working at all, which it now does, and it will even install the package I wanted. This was a saga incidentally which may be of interest.
First you make a CD or ISO from your existing win98 installation, but using DR DOS as the image. Don't ask me why MSDOS doesn't work equally well, but it doesn't.
At that point you can boot into DR DOS and unlike if you boot into MS Dos, you can copy the files over from the CD to drive C. The reason you have to do this is that in MSDOS you can run the install program, but not see the files on D. In DRDOS you can see the files but not run the install program! Unless you can figure out how to raise the max program size in DRDOS, but that was too much like archeology for me.
So you boot from the CD with DRDOS, copy all the files to C, then switch to MSDOS boot from a different image, and run the install program, and some hours later you have a proper though rather slow Win98 install.
However, it is tiny. Perfectly formed but tiny, and you cannot up the resolution. Well, not quite perfectly formed, networking doesn't work and the CD drive is invisible. But that would be OK, if I could only get the display to work acceptably.
So next I tried to use Scitech Display Doctor 6.5 as recommended. Does not help in the least. Display Doctor 7 beta is no better, and in addition it doesn't come with a registration code. Getting this stuff onto drive C so you can install it is another saga - the only way I found was to put it onto the DRDOS install CD. Still, it does not actually work, contrary to what other people report.
I am now trying to use kqemu, but that won't boot from the image in a way that lets me get to the install files. I can boot from it, then do fdisk, then format C. But then I can't see the install files on the CD or the image to copy them.
What next? Is VMWare the only answer? Does that work in better than 640 x 480?
All this is on a Mandriva 2008 box. I cannot get VB to run at all on Debian.
Al
On Mon, 2008-02-18 at 09:20 +0000, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
What next? Is VMWare the only answer? Does that work in better than 640 x 480?
Dunno if it is the only answer, but it would be capable of resolutions higher than 640x480 as it has native drivers that install into Windows 98, networking would function (as well as it ever did in Win98) as would your CD Rom. The only slight complication you would have is that you either have to install the VMware Server edition or somehow obtain an existing vmware disk image you can install Win98 into and use it in VMware player (which as the advantage of being easier to install and a better desktop responsiveness but as a limited subset version of vmware workstation cannot create it's own images) Personally I would go with server.
Also of course if you have the necessary memory and licences then you could run a more recent copy of windows.
Performance wise if your machine is reasonably recent you should have no problems. XP here in VMware server on a 3 year old AMD64 feels almost as fast as it does on most machines native.
Other than that if you have a processor with VT extensions you could look at a more recent version of windows + Xen
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Peter Alcibiades -
Wayne Stallwood