Installing, running and working with 9x virtual PCs under 98/ME systems with QEMU made very easy.

Highly recommended for poor service packs creators and testers alike as it's all free.

Just follow the few easy steps and in a few hours you'll be running not only a fast and responsive (on recent hardware) but also a very usefull 9x emulation under your 9x OS.

QEMU is very easy to setup and use use with the help of Qemu Manager and a few other free GUI tools :

* Installing Win98SE/ME

1) Get QEMU for Windows itself : http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~kazuw/qemu-win/q...7.2-windows.zip

2) Get the Qemu Manager : http://www.davereyn.co.uk/qem/qman20.zip

3) Unpack all that somewhere.

4) Run Qemu manager and locate QEMU with it.

5) Create a bootable ISO image of the install CD of the OS you want to emulate. There is a CD buttom on Qemu Manager taskbar who launches a wizard to just do that but I found it not to work on my system. So :

6) Download cdrtools : http://www.sbox.tugraz.at/home/t/tplank/cd...1-win32-bin.zip

7) Download CD DVD to ISO : http://www.paehl-info.de/cdr/cddvdiso.zip

8) Extract them in the same directory and run cddvdiso.exe to create your CD image. All options unchecked works fine.

9) Create a new virtual machine in Qemu Manager by clicking on the first button on the toolbar.

10) Create a virtual drive. Save your virtual machine.

11) Go in the newly created virtual machine options and select to boot on CD. Browse to your CD image. Leave all other options as default. Save your config.

12) Start your virtual machine by clicking on the green start button on the taskbar. Run Setup.

* Installing Win95

For Win95 you'll need also to create a boot floppy image as the Win95 install CDs are not bootable (at least the ones I have got, Win 95 upgrade and Win95B).

1) If needed, download the correct boot floppy image self extractor : http://www.shaneo.com/bootdisks/

2) Write it to a floppy disk.

3) Download the free Floppy Image. Extract an uncompressed image of the boot floppy with it and set it as floppy drive in Qemu Manager. Boot on it.

4) Use fdisk and format from the virtual boot floppy to prepare the virtual hard-disk. Then run setup from the virtual CD-Rom.

* Importing and exporting files from guest OS to host OS :

1) By using FTP, it is theoretically possible to exchange files between the two OSes while the emulation is running. Upload to FTP from either OS and download in the other. I have not tried that yet but I see no reason why it shouldn't work. Bound to be slow and requiring you rent some online FTP space. Using RapidShare or Yousendit or Megaupload should also work.

2) By opening the hard disk images while the emulation is not running and exporting files from it. One single tool to do that under Win9x : DiskExplorer. Disk images must be uncompressed (Raw) for it to work. Select "wmware plain disk" in the drop list that appears after selecting the disk image. This soft is supposed to import files as well but I found this not to work on my system (Maybe I have overlooked something). Exporting files works fine.

3) To import files, a virtual CD ISO image can be used. Here is an easy GUI tool to create such an image from a folder without having to burn it on CD first : FolderIso. Select your folder, create your ISO image in one click and then set it up as CD-ROM for your virtual machine through Qemu Manager. Then copy files from the virtual CD to the desktop inside the emulation.

* Disk image format choice and conversion

There are three different formats that can be created and used by QEMU : 1) RAW uncompressed which is the only format that allows for files to be extracted from an image; 2) Qcow, QEMU's own compressed format; and 3) Vmdk (Vmware 3/4 format).

I have tried Raw and Qcow and also converted them to each other, the only operation that did require me to use a command line tool. (A fresh install of WinME on a 1.8 GB virtual disk weighs 1.8 GB in raw format but only around 450 MB in Qcow.) To convert, copy qemu-img.exe from the Qemu folder to the folder where there is the image you want to convert and create a batch file (text file saved with a .bat extension) :

To convert from qcow to raw (example) :


To convert from qcow to raw (example) :


It'll take a few minutes (not many)

* First Impressions :

I am simply amazed of booting a WinMe guest in less than 20 seconds in QEMU running on a WinME host that takes one minute to boot. Otherwise it is pretty impressive and fast. Runs like a 500Mhz machine on a 2Ghz one. Don't expect though to play videos or sound or 3D smoothly as you cannot benefit from any harware acceleration. I would recommend one single tweak immediately after setup to fully appreciate the speed. It is to set up the menu reaction speed to a low value (1 ms in the example below) by editing the registry :


Then logoff or reboot your virtual machine.

I hope you'll enjoy all that as much as I do.

QEMU on Windows : http://www.h7.dion.ne.jp/~qemu-win/
The QEMU Forum : http://www.dad-answers.com/qemu-forum/index.php
FreeOsZoo : http://www.oszoo.org/
QEMU on Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU

Starting from step 2, you could also do the following, which is much easier and less time-consuming:
2) Download Virtual Floppy drive, write the bootdisk image to the virtual floppy drive. This will create an image file for you.

3) Set virtual floppy drive as floppy drive in Qemu manager, or floppy disk image.

I find this solution might be a bit better, as it is essentially transferring the image from the executable directly back into a raw data image file. This way, you can still access the file as if it was a floppy drive... I dunno, it's just another option.

Hi Jimmsta,

Thanks for the tip but it seems that Virtual Floppy Drive works only with NT systems and it also seems it does not handle compressed floppy images anyway.

Thanks for this installation guide. However QEMU manager is not at its link, instead QEMU menu is working QEMUmenu

there is a newer version of qemu y'know, but all and all, it's a good tutorial

can someone refresh these links? I'm interested in trying this out, but repeated virii from my personal search for this has me asking for u to...

mebbe I'm just too dense to find a 'good' source, eh?

Here are the few latest changes:

Latest version of Qemu: http://www.h6.dion.ne.jp/~kazuw/qemu-win/q...8.2-windows.zip
Qemu Manager: http://www.davereyn.co.uk/qem/qman30.zip
Quickstart guide for Windows users: http://kidsquid.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/QuickStartGuide
Detailed Documentation: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html

I only NOW started using Qemu, and love it. It's great for making virtual machines that you can dump out to real drives and use as diagnostic OS drops (Win9x only). Saves me from having to get approval to wipe a customer's system over and over again, just to prove a faulty mobo and such...

Pre-compiled last cdrtools Win32 port (Cygwin):
http://www.sbox.tugraz.at/home/t/tplank/

Elder "special" cdrtools Win32 port (MinGW):
http://www.bcdwb.de/downloads/cdrtools.htm

jaclaz

Phew, thanks. Otherwise i would have kept on trying to compile unsuccessfully, not even near it.

Are there any good "How to compile" tutorials available on net?

Short (and rude) answer: NO.

Long (and polite) answer: Yes there are a lot of good and not so good tutorials, unfortunately compiling an app is something really difficult by itself, and doing so with cygwin or MinGW libraries is even more so.
To add some complications to it, cdrecord is a VERY complex Source, so that you really should begin with much simpler apps.
Just have a look at this (very old) reference to have an idea of the nightmare it sometimes is:
http://www.delorie.com/howto/cygwin/mno-cygwin-howto.html

I really don't want to put you down, but to be able to successfully compile a source with Cygwin, a tutorial is not really enough you unfortunately need a rather vast knowledge of both the linux and Win32 worlds, besides experience in programming .....

just search on google for "compile cygwin howto" or "compile cygwin tutorial" (without quotes) and you will find lots of tutorials, most aimed to a particular program, but that nonetheless give also "general" instructions.

Good luck , I was never able to overcome the steep path to learning how to do that, properly configure the system, have all the dependencies and libraries in the right places, etc., maybe just because I didn't try hard enough, but I know people that do that like drinking a glass of water, I guess that here is a sort of Catch 22 in this matter


jaclaz

Thanks for the updated links... snagging them now...

From the difficulty related to these things it is very evident why Microsoft and all other software developers charge so much for there software.