Category: Geeks r Us
hello everyone,
I've seen several posts regarding this on the board:
I want to use a virtual machine on my computer. I want to install Windows 98 or 3.1 in the machine because I miss those operating systems soooo much. (don't ask, I just loved 98 and 3.1 a lot)
I've tried virtual box and other solutions, but JAWS acts up - it slows down when I use the machine and start it.
Is there, currently, any way that a completley visually impaired person could use a virtual machine? Any ay to get speech in one?
-Tomi
Tomi, the only product that is worthwile getting is Vmware workstation, works flawlessly with JAWS.
yes but would you have speech at all whilst installing your operating system? (that is, any way for me to hear my windows 3.1/98 install?)
I second VMware. As far as speech goes, I don't think so, as when your in the virtual machine, your jaws is outside of it, meaning, if I've got this right in my head here, that jaws has no idea what is going on inside that machine. Think of it as if you don't have any system on your computer, and your installing one now. You wouldn't have speech when you put the CD into the drive, well unless you were using the mac or linux CDS.
yeah... that's the sad part of it. Well then, is there any type of... speech software I could use in dos on the virtual machine? And if I'm understanding this right, my CPU doesn't have to support Intel virtualization technology though I'm hearing that it's useful to have your CPU have that.
Besides those questions, here are a few others which I just popped up with... Thanks so much for reading/responding to them. :)
1. Can I make the virtual machine create a sound-blaster compatible soundcard? If so, I know there is some sort of sb16 screen reader for dos that could use a soundblaster card???
2. If I did create a soundblaster compatible card, would I still have to do the whole set irq=5 dma=7 configuration (I can vaguely recall this process in dos, but I remember when I had to set all that back in the days)
3. Any chance of this ever working on a netbook? I plan to create my machine on my regular laptop at first, though, but am curious if a netbook would be able to handle it... Just something light like dos and win 3.1
Thanks :) I'm gonna go investigate VmWare now then :)
From my personal diaries:
Dear digital diary,
A bit of an update as far as my progress on this whole virtual machine and windows 3.1 adventure:
-I've installed VMware player successfully. Gave it a run with a Ubuntu iso file, but nothing would load (though I heard my external drive loading the iso file, so I knew it was booting). I created the virtual machine with Linux as the option, and subsequently was presented with a username option/password. I entered these in, though now I wonder if that might be why it didn't boot or have sound.
I decided to try Ubuntu first because I know that it can have sound out of the box, and would allow me to use the virtual machine without many hastles.
Ok, then after that failure, I got my MS-dos 6.22 iso mounted in another disk. For this one, I chose other>ms-dos as the option. I started the machine, and based on having used this iso file before to install Windows 98 on my desktop, I knew that I'd be at the prompt after it booted. So I began typing fdisk to open up Fdisk and partition the drive with a primary dos partition.
It just beeped at me. Beeped and beeped. So I got mad at it and smashed the virtual machine to virtual heaven - A.K.a. deleted it off my hard drive.
Right now, I'm looking for a windows 3.1 screen reader. I've found outspoken at
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/alva/outspoken/outspoken_for_win31x.htm
which I was surprised to see - considering that the website is still up and the software is beyond outdated in today's world.
I have also located a Klango forum at
http://klango.net/forum/list.php?tid=67731&page=1
where they talk of the Keynote gold speech engine, though virtual machines are mentioned. I also sent a message on that forum asking if anyone could share their experiences/provide me any assistance with regards to getting this to work.
I'm now looking for text assist. It appears that mindmaker (the corporation who made it eventually after Creative abandoned text assist) is now defunct. Curiously, it leads to a Hungarian website, which I understand, stating that the KFt (LTD) company is still in development. Kind of sad.
Text assist and outspoken work together. That means that if I get outspoken and text assist, I could use win 3.1 with the virtual machine's soundcard. I won't go out there and buy a hardware synth, mainly because (1) this laptop has no parallel ports (to be honest, I haven't seen a modern laptop with one) (2) they cost much money, and (3) even if I decided to get one, they are no longer really manufactured, so I'd have to get them second-hand or even third-hand. Simply put, today's world is not windows 3.1 friendly.
But I'm not giving hope up on this at all. I want to run Windows 3.1 in a virtual machine both on my netbook and laptop by the start of 2010. I know this is crazy, a lot of people don't get why I want 3.1: Well it's simple. I miss workgroups. I miss the simplicity which win 3.1 had. The low ram usage. Most of all, I miss those days when there weren't so many choices, headaches, and weird licensing schemes for software - when people were more bonded together than they are today.
Ok, for me it's time to look for text assist... Maybe archive.org might have the site archived? I don't think they store files though..
All the best,
Tomi
---
Interesting to say the least. Keep us informed on your progress if you get there. Your statement tht to days world is not friendly is a true one. Stuff changes, mostly for the better, but it is sometimes fun to play with olderprograms, and such. You just need some glasses. *smile*
Peace.
a few more updates -excited!
After a bit of snooping here and there, I have discovered the following:
Mindmaker.com sank down to the depths of the sea on or after December 7, 2007. Archive.org's last date is that.
-Text assist costed $29. It had no trial. Since the company is now poof, I wonder if anyone would have a copy of text assist and who could be willing to share this. It's an old old program anyway.
-I've looked through 15 google search results and found a dos driver for soundblaster16, as well as other drivers which were compressed into a zip file.
Ok. I don't exactly know how I managed to get MS-dos installed on the virtual machine. I got an iso file from a torrent of Ms-dos 6.22 (ms-dos is abandonware, so if anyone wants a link to that I can provide it), and once the VM booted, I hit f3 twice to exit the setup, since obviously you have no partitions at first on the machine. So I typed in fdisk, hit enter, and hit 1, enter, 1, enter, enter to create a primary partition. (remember, my virtual machine is only 1 gig, no need for fat32).
I then restarted the machine. Now, in the past, I'd repeat the sequence of fdisk 1, 1, enter, and I'd be beeped at. I got short beeps, not the long ones setup gives when you didn't quit it. But somehow, I hit enter a few times, and heard my hard drive work for a few seconds. Then, I got a long beep again, and the VM restarted.
I'm guessing this is a good sign! It must mean that I've installed Ms-dos fine!
My next step is to get cd-drives supported so I could use this win 3.1 disk I have. Because I'm totally blind, I can't use edit autoexec.bat / config.sys to get the soundblaster/cdrom driver working.
So my other solution:
To use a program called
Vm disk mount utility
and manually edit the autoexec.bat files, +copy newer files to the disk so I can save myself the trouble of having to copy the .sys files. All in all, I could simply mount the disk, make changes to it within Windows 7 which of course has JAWS running with, unmount it, and proceed with getting 3.1 working!
I still need text assist though...
Resources:
Vmware's documentation on Ms-dos and vmware + Win 3.1
Zamba's VMWare page, which has the driver package I used to get the sb16 /cd-rom drivers from
a few more updates! At this point I'm taking a break from all this...
I got virtual Machine diskmount, and mounted the dos .vmdk file, after backing it up in numerous places
So I got to work. I extracted the soundcard/cdrom drivers into the disk, tried installing it..
I won't go through steps I took, but I first gave up after the install program seemed to go in a cycle for the soundcard ( I knew this because When I kept hitting enter, the hard-drive made small sounds indicating that it was doing something, but kept repeating it. also, entering type io.sys did not produce the beep it should have when you read a binary file with type.
So I restored my image and looked online. Found that I need to add
sound.virtualDev = "sb16"
to make the virtual soundcard emulate as soundblaster 16.
I tried reinstalling the program, but this time the setup program didn't run, even after I recopied the sb16 installation files. I knew this because when I typed cd sb16 , hit enter, and typed install and hit enter, nothing loaded. Also, typing type io.sys produced the expected beep, indicating that I was at the prompt.
I'm back with my basic MS-dos installation. For anyone who wants it,
This archive has all the files you'll need to run it if you wish
, and it should run on any hardware. This is my original install of ms-dos, with the config changed to emulate a soundblaster 16 driver. It is computer dependent and anyone should be able to run it if they wish.
I'll get back to this later tonight :) I really want to figure out why files I copy onto the virtual disk don't seem to stick, or what's happening that I can't run the soundblaster installer. Meanwhile, no news on where I can get text assist... :(
done for the day! :)
well. I suppose here is part of the finish line :)
After not being able to install soundblaster drivers and win 3.1, I proceeded to look for a virtual vmware disk image file of 3.1.
I did eventually manage to find an image :) Which actually worked. Accept that it also had no sound support - as of now I haven't looked into enabling it. However I do have a 3.1 install on msdos 6.22 now in vmware!
I also came across a Windows 98SE vx file, also downloaded that and found to my surprise that it worked!
I then mounted this windows 98 vmdk file using the diskmount utility, copied a downloaded jaws 7.10 on there, dismounted, and ran the virtual windows 98 fine!
I installed JAWS.
A couple of observations, at least with Windows 98 in a virtual environment:
1. JAWS does lag half a second upon keyboard presses.
2. Something odd is up with the video chaining, because tree views and the winver dialog isn't read properly. I'm pretty sure this has to do with perhaps how Virtual Machine renders my graphics card.
3. I looked in the device manager of win 98. I guess I'm emulating a Pentium II machine, heh. Wow.
3. Sound and all work great! :)
4. I also transferred the VM to my netbook (remember this has a 1.66 GHz Atom CPU) and it ran fine on that, besides the warning I got that my CPU might not work as expected because it has a lower feature set than what is set. I heeded those warnings and Win98 worked fine, with about the same sluggishness as it did on the core duo CPU.
I want to get Windows 95 now... Maybe it won't be as sluggish? I've also not abandoned hope for getting 3.1 running, but you know there's a world's difference between 95 and 3.1: With windows 95, Jaws 6.1 I believe is the last release to have support. I could also use progman in Windows 95, I suppose... So my next task for tomorrow: Getting windows 95 in a virtual environment. Be that from a download virtual image or my own creation :)
All the best to everyone,
Tomi
For VMware, you can specify what kind of specs you want your virtual machine to have.