Win-OS/2 under DOS

[os2fan2]

I've decided to see exactly how much of Win-OS/2 can be added into DOS, and whether OS/2 can be coaxed to run the resulting mess. IBM recompiled Win-OS/2 using the watkin compiler, and a good number of files are different. I even found some files dated from the windwos 3.10.101 pre-release lurking in the differences.

It's pretty much the same thread i have used on previous windows builds, but a tad more aggressive.

After several days of grovelling through the ecs 2.2 beta, i have come down to a fairly extensive set of files that represent Win-OS/2. It has a *lot* of Lexmark/IBM drivers in it, but i have filtered these out to 'disk 9'. The current layout follows setup.inf,

• disk0 uncompressed files. I've added *.src, and control.inf to allow these to be adjusted.
• disk1 The generic windows, as far as the video drivers, (user.exe, os2k386.exe, etc).
• disk2 The video drivers and most of the *.fon files
• disk3 The keyboard, system, and language files
• disk4 The network drivers.
• At this point, windows into graphics mode and then continues the installation
• disk5 The basic shell files (comctrl etc) + installable drivers (midimap, etc)
• disk6 Optional apps (eg pbrush.exe, sol.exe) + bitmaps + multimedia
• disk7 TTF and some general printer files (dmcolor.dll, post-script, fsinstall, genutil.dll)
• disk8 printer drivers
• disk9 lexmark printers.

Win-OS/2 has a number of features that MS-Windows does not have, such as support for ATM fonts, some windowing drivers, and the assorted files necessary to run Windows on OS/2. Most of these are in one file (WINENVFP) on the OS/2 diskettes. There are a number of files one has to fetch out of the OS2_IMAGE structure, not in DISK_W1 to DISK_W5.

A number of files from HOBBES windows section helps here too.

[jimmsta]

I'm interested in the results you end up with. Looks like an interesting project.

[Resident007]

what is Win-OS/2? I googled it but found nothing

[Overdoze]

A slightly modified version of Windows 3.1 that runs under OS/2 for compatibility with Windows applications.

[os2fan2]

You do need to copy some files across to WIN-OS2. If you plan to run both side by side, you need to do some renaming. Much of this is elsewhere known, there are a couple of files on HOBBES in the windows directory, which go about running Win-OS/2 under ms-dos and Windows under OS/2. This is basically from this.

In WINOS2\SYSTEM, rename user.exe to os2user.exe and gdi.exe to os2gdi.exe.

Winos2 still runs under OS/2, if you fix up the corresponding system.ini entries

system.ini [Boot] os2user=os2user.exe
system.ini [Boot] os2gdi.exe=os2gdi.exe
system.ini [Boot] os2user.exe=os2user.exe

Copy these files from a win31\system directory:

gdi.exe, user.exe, vga.3gr, vgacolor.2gr, vga.drv, lanman10.386, vddvga30.386, vtda*.386.

Copy these files from a win31 directory

pifedit.exe, pifedit.hlp

Now, you have to edit the system.ini file.

Code: Select all

system.ini
[BOOT]
display.drv=vga.drv    ;  add this
mouse.drv=mouse.drv  ;  check this is right.
; remove the semicolons before the grabber lines
os2gdi.exe=os2gdi.exe
os2user=os2user.exe
os2user.exe=os2user.exe

This picture shows the default main group, and the control panel. The icon at the bottom left comes from winoa386.mod, which is a DOS session under Windows. The standard version is the windows one. It is interesting that IBM provides these, but not the grabber files necessary to run them in Windows. But then again, a DOS program runs in DOS, not a windows VM.



This is Win-OS/2 accessaries, with the shell.dll file and winver running on the right. winver says 3.10, but shell.dll (help.about) says 3.11. There's not much difference between them.

The calculator does not have the 3.11-3.10 = 0.00 bug.

MOUSE.DRV

The only other file that needs duplication is mouse.drv. If you are willing to do a string-edit on OS2K386.EXE, you can overcome this problem.

1. change MOUSE.DRV to MOUSE.OS2 or something.
2. Rename system\mouse.drv to system\os2mouse.drv
3. change references in system.ini to match mouse.os2, eg

System.ini [Boot] mouse.os2=os2mouse.drv

The mouse should still work in Win-OS/2. Note in IBM's OS/2 for Windows, the os2k386 looks for os2mouse.drv, but i suppose any name fits. It loads a driver that answers calls to mouse.

[johnlemon647]

IBM Win-OS/2 was fail intent to put OS/2 back on market but it work at first in tilt people start switch back Windows 3.1.
IBM want have integrated Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS run on OS/2 2.0 and also Win-OS/2 was too buggy for everyday user.
This link have info on Win-OS/2 http://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/ ... he_Desktop

[os2fan2]

Johnlemon648's comments are so far from correct one wonders where to begin.

Much of the comments in Clarkson's post rings pretty true for most emulations, including Wow/ntvdm in windows 2000.

In OS/2 1.x, there is the "DOS Coffin". You could only run one DOS session. You can quite happily install Windows 3.0 into this. There's an OS/2 1.3 vpc image floating around the net. You can easily download this yourself and do all this stuff.

OS/2 2.0 brought virtual DOS machines, a hack of the DOS code loaded by doskrnl. You could load "dos from drive a", a booted copy of a genuine dos like dr-dos, ms-dos, or pc-dos. I even loaded IO.SYS from windows 95 in one of these things. OS/2 2.0 had support for Windows 3.0.

OS/2 2.1 and later supported Windows 3.1. Windows in any of its forms is a fairly hideous hack, delving deep into DOS, and playing around with the interrupt tables. It knows DOS 5, and makes serious hacks about it. There are other programs that do this too, like the Software Caresoul.

To run Windows under OS/2, you have to severely hack some files, and if one knows which to replace, one can see the scale of this hack. The video drivers (there's a seamless one and a full screen one), don't understand the 386grabber thing, because Win-OS/2 does not load winoldap.

One should remember that something like 120 MB hard drive and 8 MB ram were the order of the day. Many machines got by on 2 MB or 4 MB. Having two copies of Windows (one for DOS, one for OS/2), did not really cut well, when one considers that each copy is taking 10 MB of hard disk. OS/2 for Windows was born.

One should not imagine that OS/2 failed on technical grounds. On the contary, it won the reader's choice of best software for many years running. It was quite technically advanced, even by today;s standards. The minimal boot gui on OS/2 is 9 MB (I used to burn cd-roms in this environment), yet you can't get windows xp under 70 MB. It just wasn't microsoft's baby, and microsoft worked to kill it.

Windows 3.x was just plain slow and buggy. You just have to look at some of the tag lines from the era to see this. I mean, "Speed kills. Use Windows". Or even "Microsloth Windoze". The 'three finger salute' or as you span your fingers to press control-alt-delete, you say "W-I-N". Let's be frank about it: most PC operating systems have a black screen of death. Windows has a nice blue one. You say x-y-z bluescreened.

Many programs of the era had splash screens that you could read while the app loaded in the background. Amipro 3.0 had the alphabet on its logo. I got as far as reciting it to T. "Slow, Dead slow, Windows" indeed.

Windows 9x, when the little blobs went across the screen, we used to go "bloop, bloop, bloop" as if to replicate lard dropping into memory. Things did not start to look up until later in the nineties, when machines were fast enough to run this junk.

I've always ran a fairly large windows hack from 1995 (mainly 1995-2000), largely because IBM's stuff was compiled with BUGS=OFF set. See, eg http://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewto ... =5&t=33572 .

OS/2 was the geeky PC-stuff of its day. There was no Linux, no Windows NT, Just DOS, OS/2, and Windows 3.1,

[xelloss]

Windows 3.x was just plain slow and buggy. You just have to look at some of the tag lines from the era to see this. I mean, "Speed kills. Use Windows". Or even "Microsloth Windoze".

In 1993-96 I was the owner of a 386SX25 PC with 2MB of RAM, later upgraded to 4MB.
I have used both Windows 3.1 and OS/2, and frankly you are very far from the truth.

Windows 3.1 ran comfortably even with just 2MB, albeit in standard mode. OS/2 with 4 MB was dead slow: turn on your PC, go have a coffee, and come back hoping that your desktop has finally loaded.

[os2fan2]

Many of the computers in the early nineties had little memory, and it was common for OS vendors to give a memory demand for the OS. This is the lightest working order (LWO), sufficient memory to load the OS without too many bells and whistles. For practical purposes ye need to double this.

The LWO of windows 3.1 was 2 MB. If you wanted to run enhanced mode, or use wallpaper on the desktop, or run one or two heavy apps, you generally need to exceed LWO by a factor of 2 or more. Yes, i have seen windows on 2 MB machines, and it was nowhere near as sprity as on a 4 or 8 MB.

The LWO for OS/2 2.1 is 4 MB, but even on 8 MB, you do well to turn off the zoom and wallpaper on windows other than the desktop. On the other hand, it is quite possible to run OS/2 in a memory constrained environment, by replacing the runworkplace and/or protshell lines in config.sys. I used to burn my compact disks under OS/2, using filebar, rather than PMShell ass the runworkplace. This gives a taskbar like windows 98, but in text, and the 'running tasks' were a menu item.

As the memory was upgraded to 20 MB, one could run OS/2 Warp 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0, Windows 95 and Windows NT 4. In this setup, you could run some apps as well. But the mainstay of my computing was still DOS, with stayings into win31 and so forth.

We used Windows 3.1 on PC-DOS 5, and an OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 server at work. While it did not take long for windows 3.1 to show its prompt, the applications (Amipro and Lotus 123) were a lot slower, and much less flexiable than the DOS programs they replaced. They were typically 4 MB 386 boxen.

[xelloss]

Many of the computers in the early nineties had little memory, and it was common for OS vendors to give a memory demand for the OS. This is the lightest working order (LWO), sufficient memory to load the OS without too many bells and whistles. For practical purposes ye need to double this.

The LWO of windows 3.1 was 2 MB. If you wanted to run enhanced mode, or use wallpaper on the desktop, or run one or two heavy apps, you generally need to exceed LWO by a factor of 2 or more. Yes, i have seen windows on 2 MB machines, and it was nowhere near as sprity as on a 4 or 8 MB.

The LWO for OS/2 2.1 is 4 MB, but even on 8 MB, you do well to turn off the zoom and wallpaper on windows other than the desktop. On the other hand, it is quite possible to run OS/2 in a memory constrained environment, by replacing the runworkplace and/or protshell lines in config.sys. I used to burn my compact disks under OS/2, using filebar, rather than PMShell ass the runworkplace. This gives a taskbar like windows 98, but in text, and the 'running tasks' were a menu item.

As the memory was upgraded to 20 MB, one could run OS/2 Warp 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0, Windows 95 and Windows NT 4. In this setup, you could run some apps as well. But the mainstay of my computing was still DOS, with stayings into win31 and so forth.

We used Windows 3.1 on PC-DOS 5, and an OS/2 2.0 or 2.1 server at work. While it did not take long for windows 3.1 to show its prompt, the applications (Amipro and Lotus 123) were a lot slower, and much less flexiable than the DOS programs they replaced. They were typically 4 MB 386 boxen.

Sure, with 8MB OS/2 was great. At the time, that was pretty high end.

[os2fan2]

8 MB was at the top end of the sweet-spot. Going higher cost a disproportionate amount of cash.

I had an 8 MB machine in 92. I got it the day Windows 3.10 landed, and we installed it in the shop before i took it home.

OS/2 was pretty disappointing on 8 MB, but DOS was pretty nifty and Windows sort of worked, although i recall feeling disappointed by progman and task management,

[johnlemon647]

How you Windows 3.0 install on OS/2 1.0?

[os2fan2]

I've never installed os/2 1.0.

You can quite easily install windows 3.0 in os/2 1.3 - there's a vm of it for vpc running around the internet. It also can run in real mode under OS/2 2.x.