How to easily emulate 486 PCs and run DOS
This author first got their first PC back in 1994: a Dan 486 DX 33MHz with 4MB of RAM. It was much more powerful than the Amiga 500, and almost three times the price. The author’s journey with computers so far had been via Commodore machines, but this Dan 486 PC captured his heart. He got it home and launched MS-DOS, but he had no manual or user guide. He taught myself MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 by making lots of mistakes, including formatting his 120MB hard drive and having to reinstall everything, and by installing a CD ROM drive incorrectly and the machine refused to boot.
The mid-1990s was a crazy time for PCs. They were still beige boxes that held mysteries such as IDE, SCSI, lots of wires and dust. Linux Format is devoted to Linux, but for this journey down memory lane we’ll take a look at emulating a Windows 3.1 era PC. First via a simple program that will enable us to run DOS-era games in Ubuntu. Then we’ll learn a little BASIC with Microsoft’s Quick Basic. Finally we’ll create our own Windows 3.1 PC in a virtual machine.
Emulating a retro PC
The retro PC scene has users who want to simply run their old games in an emulator, and it which offers a quick hit of nostalgia with very little effort. To install on a Debian or Ubuntu machine, open a terminal and type the following:
