Seriously. We've got DosBox so we can still use old Dos-based games/apps. How long you figure until someone makes WinBox, so we can play pre-Win95 stuff? Or is this something already in the works?

Pre-Win95? Are you meaning Windows 3/3.11?
I wonder if Windows 3.11 works in DOSBox... I should try that one day!

You can follow this guide if you wish to give it a shot

http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=9405

I've tried putting Pearson Wung's "Rogue's Quest" in DosBox and I got a message saying DosBox couldn't run it because its a Windows program. RQ was designed for Win 3.1 & still playable through WinXP.

[edit] Kabuto's post showed up after I typed my response, but thanks for posting. That all looks too complicated for me, so I'll wait for a Win3 equivalent to DosBox. Oh, and I also found that there's already a WinBox, but it has nothing to do with what I'm hoping for.

I think that you can do something like that with DOSbox if you've got a copy of Win 3.1 handy. But if you want to keep it all above board that's a pretty big if.

Tried Virtualization?

Maybe if we get louder, Microsoft will release free images of pre-2k OSs meant for virtualization? :D

They already give away XP for free to Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate users.

There are a few games that might be difficult or even impossible to run on Vista/7, so something like "WinBox" would be good for that.

Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat was a tricky one, that's for sure. I reviewed it for Abandonia, and I think I required some sort of workaround, but I can't recall what at the moment.

Would ReactOS in a virtualbox not work for this? I haven't tired it so I don't know, but either that or possibly a similar set up with Wine and Linux ought to do the trick. I think that the support for programs gets better the older they are, for the most part.

I actually bought old versions of Windows 95, 98, 98 SE and ME for this purpose. They were like a buck each. Now I'm just waiting for my PC to be able to run these...

You now get a much better XP compatibility mode available for download for all versions of Windows 7.

"Would ReactOS work" is the funniest question you could possibly ask.

It does not work in any circumstance. It never will. The dev team are hilariously under motived and delusional (just idle in their IRC for 5 minutes) and the mainstream Windows is moving too fast and Wine is moving too slow.

ReactOS will never be stable.

I don´t think that kind of emulator is necessary, most of the games of the time were made for MSDOS. My opinion is totally contrary to yours, we need "emulators" for post-95 operating systems, or at least programs that can fix most of the incompatiblities that we have today.
I cannot play today one quarter of the games that are on my shelves, really annoying.

We also need programs that bypass the installed versions of DirectX / DLLs and point the programs to the versions that they expect.

I have some Windows 95/98 games that won't work because they can't handle the notion that a "DirectX 9" exists.

I don't dispute that we could use better post-95 emulators, I just happened to notice that a game from Win3.1 that I'd like to play again doesn't work in Win7 or DosBox, so that's what I'm focusing on at the moment.

[edit] The reason I specifically said "Pre-Win95 stuff" was because Win7 already has a "Run in Windows <O/S here>" mode which, for better or worse, tries to emulate pre-Win7 stuff.

I really don't remember a whole lot of Windows 3.x games that weren't really DOS games. Wasn't SimAnt or It Came From the Desert or some other giant ant game on Win 3.x? It was a lot better on the Amiga. And a lot worse on the SNES. The same can be said of Lemmings. You're probably better off getting the licensed Amiga emulation package from Cloanto and snagging the Amiga analogues of the Windows 3.x games that you're wanting to play.