386 PC emulator for Windows?

paddyrg

That is brilliant! I am so pleased it is the tinkering angle - hoorah! We in IT are at such risk of losing our heritage as things develop so fast - thank goodness for TNMOC. I have to wonder if there is a lot of circa 1990 kit still kicking around - best bet may be other geeks backrooms for old laptops they couldn't bring themselves to throw out. An old friend had a 386 'laptop' and knowing him it is probably in a box being hoarded in case it is useful one day - there must be others. Can you appeal to the broader local geek community to ask for a 386 box to be given a new lease of life?

Reminds me of my first laptop - an 80286, 20MB hard drive(!) and a colour lcd screen! Here, I use colour in the loosest sense, it supported 16 slightly different hues of grey murkiness, but what a machine. About the same size etc as my current HP i7, mega hi-res etc lappy, but you never forget your first lappy. £200 secondhand in 1992

Edit - seems the issue for virtualisation will be getting something to emulate a bare-bones 386, then getting drivers that don't support all the modern interfaces which may interfere with the very particular. So, thinking, who was early into the virtualisation game, perhaps there's an old version of citrix or vmware that better emulates an old bare-bones machine?

Also try VirtualPC (the one from MS) as that *may* be back-compatible with DOS 4-ish era machines, and that's the right era for you IIRC??

esuhl

paddyrg wrote: »

seems the issue for virtualisation will be getting something to emulate a bare-bones 386...

That's what I was thinking...

Have you tried QEMU? I've only scanned the wiki quickly, but it sounds like it might offer the flexibility to emulate/virtualise old 386 hardware:

http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/QEMU
http://www.opensitesolutions.com/services/virtualization.php

prowla

Yes - I think I'll have to try Virtual PC, but I wouldn't want to run it on the same host as my VMware, so I'll have set up a separate machine as a host!

The ideal would be something that could coexist...

I've also got a Linux system, and could give its VM system a try too.

paddyrg

prowla wrote: »

Yes - I think I'll have to try Virtual PC, but I wouldn't want to run it on the same host as my VMware, so I'll have set up a separate machine as a host!

The ideal would be something that could coexist...

I've also got a Linux system, and could give its VM system a try too.

Ironic you need fresh tin to run a different virtualisation platform, and can't just nest them!! Also, of VPC gets close but misses, try virtual server - MS bought the product from ??? some years back whilst I was still there - VPC was derived from VS (although VS had some security issues when they took it over, so it will have had some big work). What I am saying is a technet copy of VS from about 2004ish will be effectively a different platform again, may be worth a try - and server-targetted products often are mor back-compatible. Just a thought.