What would be the fastest OS-"emulator", like vmware, under linux.
Is wabi still existing ? other ways, boch program, ... ?

oriented fast for old OS, like win3.1 , or nt, or 95 ..?
thanks !

Some people say qemu/virtual-box is faster, other say vmware... I didn't notice much. I personally prefer virtualbox.
Unless you're able to use something like Xen (which I think isn't an option for DOS) I don't think there will be any great difference in speed.

I tried dosemu and it is very fast, faster as vmware I would say, if I recall. dosemu can only 3.1, but i am not sure. dosemu has advantage :
NO CPU taken
VMWARE is cycling the CPU like hell

You can't compare emulators with virtual machines. If dosemu can everything you need, go for it. I haven't used vmware in quite some time, but I didn't have much trouble using it. Now in virtualbox I can run a couple of programs and my cpu won't even leave powersave mode (3100+ sempron)... Of course I'm not doing anything cpu intensive, and I have 350mb ram reserved for the virtual machine.
I'm very happy with the performence.

The fastest I have used is only for Win95/98/ME, and requires a kernel patch (which is getting harder), and that is the old Win4Lin 9x.
I ran Win98 as a VM on my old Duron 850, and it ran at *completely native* speed (all other VM's were unusable).

Finding it and getting patches might be hard or impossible, though.

Can we install windows 95 with Dosemu ?

what is the max. file size for : ?

which is 481 MB only !

If win4lin is the fastest : let ' s try
ftp://ftp.vbridges.com/pub/releases/...pro/index.html

I think that depends on the operating system.
Somewhere around 2 gig?... Maybe 4. But why would you want Fat16?

--edit--

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/118335/

I'm not a fan of Win4Lin Pro- it's the old Win4Lin 5 (or 9x), which only runs the Windows 95/95/ME versions that is very fast- far faster than anything else I've tried (though I now am using VMWare server with WinXP).

in xdosemu with fat16 you can install win3.1, but I d prefer win95. xdosemu looks terribly fast. But win3.1 stops installing after floppy disk2. (I am sure of my disks, they are originals)

"VMWare server with WinXP" should be terribly slow or not that fast, no ?
did you check your CPU in the background ? That'd be maybe better of dual booting, no ? (for me that was too slow with the opens. one) Amd 2000GHZ

I have a 1.8ghz amd, and as I said, I had no problems. But all I used was Dreamweaver and some poker clients. For a couple of reasons I prefer virtualbox now... but not because of the performence.

You have to give a virtual machine enough memory. I remember the vmware default was critically low... You should have at least 700mb of ram, and give at very least 256mb to win xp. Any kind of normal useage that doesn't involve processor intensive programs runs at very near native speed on my pc.

What exactly do you want to do with dos/win3.1 that could slow down a VM? Because I can't think of anything. Those were the 486 days!

That doesn't explain why you choose fat16 over fat32...

Nevermind... I would suggest you stop wasting so much time and energy trying to figure out which one is faster, and just get virtual-box and set it up. It will be fast enough, trust me.

I just upgraded from an 850 Duron/512mb to an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (with VM support) and 2 gb memory, so VMWare/WinXP is adequate (I trimmed WinXP to make it a bit lean- I only need it for a single application).
On the Duron 850 I tried VMWare and Parallels, but they were *way* too slow to be usable- Win4Lin 9x worked fine.

I tried virtualbox, but I am encountering big problem. The X is crashing and no key can make it work after. The tty6 where is runnign X is not happy. I ll have to remmove the package. Let's see what's happening. Pitty that the virtual box is buggy. (debian etch)
I looked indeeed speedy.

I use MS Windows XP on VMware 6.0, on a P4 3.2 GHz 1 GB ram, and it's as fast as an XP box.