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« on: October 09, 2018, 06:35:13 am »
Thanks Dave for the suggestion of DosBox.
My observations on DosBox are:
1) Once DosBox starts you can mount a network drive and have that drive accessable inside DosBox, which also means accessible inside a Windows 3.1 application running in Windows 3.11 running in DosBox.
2) While DosBox has a mount command to mount a floppy drive, the Lotus Improv install program doesn't think it is a floppy drive. Which means the installer will not run.
I manually installed by copying the files and editing WIN.INI and the other *.INI files.
3) When you click the mouse in the DosBox, the mouse pointer is "captured", just the same as in vBox and Virtual PC without guest additions. Ctrl-F10 releases the mouse pointer.
4) I found a Windows 3.11 with SoundBlaster installed as a *.rar packaged for DosBox - which worked great and saved a lot of time. I believe all the Warp 4, eComStation and AOS licenses come with license for Windows 3 - so I don't think licensing is an issue when using that method to install Windows 3 that is running in OS/2.
5) What I ended up with is my Windows application running in Windows, running in Dos. In all its glory, and all its agony. Meaning I saw a divide by zero error in a worksheet that never experienced that before. And at one time Windows wouldn't load the application saying it had run out of application memory. Ah - the good old days.
6) OS/2 really is a better windows than windows. It has been such a long time since I ran a real windows 3 machine I had forgotten how well OS/2 runs Windows 16 bit (and some Windows 32 bit) programs.
7) What you lose in both vBox and DosBox when running windows 3 apps is the ability to cut and paste between windows and OS/2 applications, along with DDE and named pipes. Along with a truly seamless Windows application running on the OS/2 desktop.
But both vBox and DosBox offer the ability to run Windows 3 applications on my lenovo laptop that currently will not run WinOS2.
I don't think you can print - at least directly - from a Windows 3 application running in DosBox. You could create a PDF on a mounted drive and then print that PDF from OS/2.
With vBox running WinXP running Improv I can print from Improv directly to my color HP m452dn printer, which only has drivers for Windows XP and above.
DosBox on OS/2 is pretty impressive, and it will probably run games, and perhaps some applications, that vBox running Windows XP wont. But for Win 3.1 applications that need to print I think that vBox running WinXP is probably a better choice.