You may have thought you grew out of them, migrating to more graphically advanced games like “Counter Strike,” “Battlefield 1942” and “F.E.A.R.”īut let’s face it. As the operating systems advanced, the old DOS games became less and less playable.

Your parents decided to upgrade the family computer to Windows 95, then to Windows 98, then to Windows XP. My first computer ever was an old late-80s Tandy machine that was running MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 - I got it when I was in kindergarten or first grade, and kept it until after I started 7 th grade.Do you remember those old DOS favorites? Those excellent games you never wanted to stop playing, but somehow left? So, I have more than a few nostalgic memories with the operating system, and have been trying to somehow virtualize it and relive a little bit of my past. The first virtual machine software I found in the last year or two was QEMU. It wasn't an easy virtual machine to work with, and I could scarcely get even Windows XP to function to my liking with it, let alone try running a dinosaur of an operating system that isn't up to speed with current hardware, like what QEMU emulates for its virtual machines. I was able to install Windows 3.1 on top of the DOSBox emulator. It installed, and ran, and I was able to install Chip's Challenge from Microsoft's Best of Windows Entertainment Pack and play it, with sound effects and everything. However, DOSBox wasn't made to run Windows.

Windows uses a VGA graphics driver by default, which gives it an entire 16 colors to use with a 640x480 pixel desktop. If I wanted to upgrade it to, say, Super VGA and get 800圆00 pixels, or even do something as crazy as to get 256 colors, DOSBox didn't handle it well. Sure, Windows would still run, however its color palette would be off (brown dirt blocks in Chip's Challenge would be teal, for instance), and many programs would cause DOSBox to entirely crash. So, DOSBox isn't a very satisfactory emulator for running Windows 3.1 on. So, after I discovered VirtualBox, it became my favorite virtual machine software. I use it all the time to do all kinds of mad scientist experiments with my operating systems. So, I tried installing Windows 3.1 on this. Dosbox windows 3.1 games small install#.

Windows 3.1 free download for dosbox