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Comment by krylon | Hacker News Reader

In a recent attack of nostalgia, I attempted to try and get SuSE Linux 7.0 running in a virtual machine, the first GNU/Linux distro I ever used. I could not find a an emulator and combination of settings that would run the system in a useful manner and gave up after a few hours. IIRC, the main problem was the graphics card, because I did not want to be stuck at 640x480 at 16 colors or something. :(

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I've been having similar issues with Windows 3.11; trying to boot a qemu image I made a few years back and it looks like networking has died in the meantime, and another image crashes when it exceeds some small amount of RAM usage. But at least there's nothing stopping us from running an older linux in qemu to easily use an older qemu version that way, avoiding the hassle of having to patch the source to work with recent versions of its dependencies.

You could try bochs. It's a full-blown emulator and probably much slower, but it might do a better job at giving 1990s software a comfortable environment.

I haven’t tried it, but apparently DosBox-X can run Windows 3.1…

https://dosbox-x.com/wiki/Guide%3AInstalling-Windows-3.1x

Actually, an old friend of mine works on long term archival of computing environments, and they still use a patched version of qemu 2.0 (iirc) for older systems for these reasons.

Emulators like PCem or 86box are what you want for these old systems, not virtual machines.

Try PCem. It provides emulation of enough processors, video cards, sound cards, network cards, and peripherals that something is bound to work.

Mainstream virtual machines only support a couple. In many cases, it's some virtual hardware spec that they created.

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