Hi everyone.

I have tried a lot of virtualization/emulation softwares.. but can't get it working great.

- With VMWare Fusion
I can install MS-DOS, Windows 3.11, but no sound support.
But the Windows/DOS environment works very great, every software that I have (that don't use sound) works like a charm.

- With Parallels
I can install Windows 3.11 too... but a lot of apps crashes with memory error. Maybe the memory controller from Parallels is not that good.
But can't have sound too.. no SB16 support.

- VirtualBox
Have SB16 support (wow). Every game that needs sound works very good... but the memory controller sucks. Games like DOOM 2 got crashed after some minutes playing. Can't install Windows 3.11... it crashes after installing EMM386 - the memory controller software.

- DosBox
Works great with sound, and all the games runs great...
But for Windows 3.11, it's not that great... very slow. And it's hard to change disks to install softwares.


Some one has had good experience using DOS within OS X?

ie. I'm using Lion.

I've found DOSBox to work fine for most things, screen redraw is a bit slow but you can always modify DOSBox 0.74 Prefs.Conf you know..... you can also dump the disks to folders and instead mount it under 'D'.

QEMU would do the job. Just install XCode on your Mac then compile the latest QEMU source.

If you are trying to run some old games you can also consider MESS (in your case MacMESS). Maybe it's not such intuitive as DOSBox, QEMU or other virtualizer, but it's extremely accurate. AFAIK it's the only emulator where you can run OS/2 1.0 and who knows it also knows that the first version of OS/2 is not easy and it doesn't run on any virtualizer.

You never need EMM386 for Windows 3.x at all if you don\t plan to use Windows as a DOS multitasker.

In fact, EMM386 becomes inactive once Windows 3.x starts in Enhanced mode (and reactivates at exiting it). The Win386 layer of Windows takes over all functionality of EMM386 entirely.

Good to know it.

I just need to make the SB16 work within VMWare...

Have you already tried Boxer? http://www.boxerapp.com
I have it installed here (i'm also using Lion).

I'm using DosBox, very smooth, but running Win 3.11 in enhanced mode is just not usable... In normal mode it works fine though.

I tried a few games with it, just had some trouble with Caesar II (still don't know why )


EDIT: Btw, it's running on Leopard on a Compaq netbook (iDeneb)

I've experimented with some alternatives:

1. Bochs is also a good piece of code.
It is a traditional (non-recompiling, non-virtualizing) x86 emulator. Its codebase is mature and focuses a lot on being compatible at the expense of performances.
It *is* slow, and you can't really count on its GUI to help you, but it works ok.

2. If you find your VMWare setup would be perfect if only it supported DOS audio, maybe you can try to make VMWare emulate an old-style ISA SB16 card instead of the default PCI thing.
Just edit the VM's .vmx file with a text editor and replace "es1371" with "sb16" in this line:


AFAIK, the lines you should leave behind for good results are:


This should be enough to run a Creative's Win3x sound driver and gain PCM sound under windows.
Most DOS legacy apps that know how to drive a SB8/16 card should also work once you set some environment vars in AUTOEXEC.BAT (installing a DOS/Win3x Creative's sound driver package can set those up for you).

By default, the virtual hardware is mapped as:
Creative SoundBlaster 16 Compatible
Base Address = 0x220
IRQ = 5
8-bit DMA = 1
16-bit DMA = 7
MPU401 = 0x330
OPL3 = 0x388

And any other 386 memory managers that are running (for example, instead of EMM386 itself, many people used more advanced packages such as QEMM/QEMM386 and 386MAX).

This point was proven by Andrew Schulmann of "Unauthorized Windows 95", who even confirmed that whatever memory that was being managed by those memory managers was taken control of by Windows itself.