When prompted to install a printer, select the generic/text printer. Once Windows starts you’ll need to enter a user name. Installing WindowsĪssuming you have already installed and configured DOSBox, start it up, put the Windows 3.1 CD into your optical drive, and switch to the D: drive in DOSBox to run setup.exe. If you don’t have a copy of Windows 3.1, you’ll need to buy it somehow. You could also put the Windows files into a folder such as C:\DOSBox\WinInstall instead of using a CD-R (you’ll have to adapt the instructions below if you do). I can remember creating graphics in Paintbrush, playing Solitaire and Minesweeper, listening to audio CDs using the CD-ROM (we didn’t have a CD player back then), and of course playing Windows games (my favorite was King’s Quest VI Enhanced on CD-ROM).ĭOSBox does not emulate Windows 3.1 by itself, but Windows 3.1x can be installed in DOSBox. Fortunately I still had a copy of my parents’ Windows 3.1 floppy disks that I was able to transfer to a CD-R for easier access on my PC (I don’t even have a floppy drive in my desktop PC anymore). It had MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 on its 160MB HDD. My family’s first computer was an AST desktop with an Intel 486SX 25Mhz processor and 4MB of RAM that my parents purchased when I was in grade school.
