HardWii

Basically once DOSBox got released for the Wii that’s all I’ve been playing with lately. After playing some Commander Keen and getting an old Dos app that’s near and dear to my heart to run, I decided to tackle Windows. Windows 3.11 was easy because it can be natively run in DOSBox and after I realized the Wii only seems to support EGA*, it was a snap. Windows 95 was not a snap do to the fact it needs DOS 6.X or higher and doesn’t officially support EGA. I was finally able to get it to work but it was incredibly unstable and so slow that Windows is basically unusable.

Tools;
SD Card
Copy of Windows 3.1 or 3.11
Copy of Windows 95 Upgrade CD
Dos 6.22 Boot Image
EGA Drivers
PSPCrazy’s W95.img build (I only use this build for booting and file structure, not for the Win95. Also this is not a direct link to the image)
DosBox for the PC and Wii
WinImage

Links;
YouTube of PSPCrazy’s build
My Full Wii Win95

Info;
DOSBox Forum
DOSBox Wiki
WiiBrew DOSBox Wiki
GBATemp DOSBox discussion – The site recently started an emulation section, nice.

Videos;

Part 1

Part 2

Process;

Disclaimer I learned DOSBox last week and my methods maybe the long way to do them. Also I know it’s cheating to use PSPCrazy’s build for its file structure, oh well. If you blow soemthign up it’s your fault.

Part 1
The first step is to take your windows 3.X floppies and dump them all into a directory. Put this director into your DOSBox folder on your SD Card. Boot into DOSBox through your HBC or BannerBomb, your DosBox folder will ether be C or D (C is DosBox in the App folder and D is DosBox in the root of the SD card). Using the CD command go into the directory with your Windows 3.X files and type “setup”. During the setup process you will be prompted to choose Normal or Custom installation, choose Custom. When you get to a screen that shows your preferences for keyboard, video, etc change the Video to EGA. This is the number one reason for the black screen at bootup; the Wii doesn’t seem to like VGA. Now continue with the install process and eventually the install will complete. It will most likely ask you to reboot, just hit the home boot and then load DosBox again. Now you should have a Windows directory on which ever drive you told it to install too. Go into the directory and type “win”. Windows 3.11 should come up with out any issue. Note, the screen may display a red hue which is due to the EGA driver. The odd thing about this red hue is that it didn’t show up every time I booted, some times Windows would be the proper color. That completes Part 1.

Part 2
Download WinImage and use this program to open PSPCrazy’s Win95.img build. We are going to increase the Size of this img file so it can fit out Win95 CD, EGA drivers, and our Windows directory. Once you have the image open go to Image -> Change Format -> Select Custom Image Format. Change the Total number of sectors to reflect the new image size you want. I used 918211 (460MB). Click ok and it will increase the image size. Now that the image size is increased delete the original Windows folder from the image and then drag and drop your Windows folder from your SD card, the Win95 CD folder and the EGA311.EXE driver file into the image. Now Your Image is ready for DOSBox and that completes part 2.

Part 3
In this section we will use DOSBox on your PC. Boot your pc version of DOSBox and mount which ever directory has your w95.img file (IE: mount d c:\dosbox). I like to mount this directory as D as we will eventually be mounting the image as C. Now change directories to your D drive and mount your image so it can be visible when we boot our DOS 6.22 disk. The image mount command looks like this “imgmount 2 w95.img –size 512,63,16,914 –t hdd –fs none”, remember I’m basing mine of a 460MB image so your last number could be different depending on the size of your drive. Once you’ve entered in this command now boot your DOS 6.22 boot disk. This command looks like “boot msboot.img”. This should boot you to the A:. Now navigate to your Windows directory. We will be launching the Windows 95 install through Windows 3.X with the following command “win c:\win95\win95\setup.exe /im /id /is /iq /in”. Your command may look direct depending on were you placed the Win95 setup.exe. The reason I’m using the “/im /id /is /iq /in “modifiers is DOSBox never seemed to run through the complete Win95 install without error, so I’ve removed any type of checks that could cause an error. Windows 3.X will start and install go into the Windows 95 install. You can just go through this install normally, when it asks you to reboot click the home button and launch DOSBox again. Now mount your DOSBox directory again and this time mount your image file as the C drive, “imgmount c w95.img”. Boot the newly mounted C drive with this command, “boot –l c”. The Windows 95 install will continue. You may be asked to reboot, just follow the previous steps to do this and eventually you will be at the Desktop of Windows 95. From the looks of your desktop you would assume your video driver is still EGA, but actually it’s a VGA driver in EGA Mode. As stated previously VGA isn’t going to work on the Wii. The first step to fix this is to shutdown Windows with the option to reboot into MSDOS mode. In DOS navigate to where you placed the EGA311.exe driver and type EGA311; this will unpack the EGA driver. Now type “Win” to boot back into Windows. Go into the Control Panel and then click on Add New Hardware. Choose to add a Display Adapter and then click Have Disk. Browse to where you unpacked your EGA311 driver and select the OEM ini file. Your only Choice will be EGA, so select it and click OK. Windows will then ask you to reboot, select no. Close out of the Control Panel and right click on My Computer and go to Properties. Select the hardware tab and click the plus next to Display Adapters. You should see your EGA and VGA drivers. Right Click the VGA and choose to uninstall it. Once it’s uninstalled reboot. Follow the Same process as before to mount and boot your C drive. You may be asked to reboot one more time, do it if it asks you too. You should now be in Windows 95 with only an EGA Display Adapter. This completes part 3

Part 4
This part is the random part where DOSBox on the Wii does what ever the hell it wants to which in my case was most of the time boot Windows 95, but a few of the time’s throwing VXD errors or just freezing. Move the image you’ve created in the last part from your PC to your DOSBox folder in the root of your SD card. Boot into DOSBox on your Wii and then un-mount your c drive, “mount –u c”. Now mount your image as your c drive, “imgmount c w95.img“and boot it, “boot –l c”. In theory you should now boot into Windows 95. What I’ve seen is that for some reason even though Windows says it’s now ready to shut off, it doesn’t like DOSBox’ shutdown and will give you a “Do you want to launch Safe Mode” error, just choose to launch normally. Now after 12 or so minutes you should be enjoying Windows 95… Painfully slow Windows 95. Really really slow Windows 95. As long as you can move the mouse it’s still working, so don’t think it’s now, it’s just that slow.

Final Thoughts;
I set out to run Windows 95 and I did. It runs so slow it’s useless right now, but maybe in the future DOSBox for the Wii will speed up and with that so will Windows. I did try to use the PSP build with the EGA drivers first and I had no luck with it, MPREXE errors which deleteing the .pwl file did not fix. I’d like to thank PSPCrazy for the PSP Win95 build I used as the base for my Wii build, The creators of DOSBox because it’s a good program, and the porters of the Wii build of DOSBox as I’ve been waiting a while for someone smarter the me to bring it over. Also I apologize as I’m sure I broke a few 100 grammar rules in doing this write up and for the fact I kind of glossed over the use of DOS and WinImage commands, but I’m sure you guys can figure out the small things.

-Ften

*Some people have claimed to get the VGA drivers working, but have offered no explanation how they got them working besides “it just worked by default”. I imagine there could be something in the DOSBox config you could change to enable this, but all my changes to the config still resulted in display errors on the Wii. I’ll keep you updated as I’ve asked both users what steps they’ve used to accomplish this.

Tags: Modification, News

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 3:51 am and is filed under Modification, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.