Sure, it was closely tied to DOS, but it was definitely an operating system in its own right, and certainly not just “basically a DOS application.” The disk driver is especially significant, as it as a 32-bit protected mode driver that completely by passed DOS and BIOS function calls. The Windows 3.1 instance and the DOS virtual machines were pre-emptively multitasked.Īs for the Windows 3.1 machine, it provided virtual memory (including paging to disk), its own interrupt handler (and didn’t use DOS’s), it used its own drivers for disks, mouse, audio, printing, and networking (When available – it could also use DOS drivers if Windows drivers weren’t available). Sure, it started from DOS, but when you launched Windows, it would replace DOS with a 32-bit hypervisor that would run a virtual machine with a single instance of Windows 3.1, as well as DOS virtual machines for running DOS apps. Basically, everything that an operating system does, Windows 3.1 without using DOS, and handled many things that DOS couldn’t. It was an actual operating system, really, by any reasonable definition of the word. Windows 3.1 was basically a DOS application. If you want to run serious DOS applications within a DOS emulator, you’d better try dedicated emulators such as vDos and vDosPlus instead, which are designed to run DOS applications rather than games. Some enhanced DOSBox SVN Builds may support these features, and you may try these builds if you want or need such features, but they are not supported by the DOSBox Team.
For example, features such as parallel ports, long filenames and Ctrl-Break emulations are never officially supported in DOSBox. The DOSBox project has a policy of not adding features that aren’t used by DOS games if they take significant effort to implement, are likely to be a source of bugs or portability problems, and/or impact performance. Non-gaming DOS applications are not the primary focus of DOSBox, even though most DOS applications might in fact work within DOSBox. From the DOSBox FAQ (emphasis mine):Īccording to its developers, DOSBox is focused on DOS games. I always understood it was because DOSBox was optimized for DOS gaming, and Windows 3.x suffered as a result.
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