I’ve always liked the blue character-based menu interface look used in installers for DOS as well as several other operating systems. It’s the first thing you see when you boot up from the DOS install floppy. Retrocomputing geeks will recognize this screenshot fairly well. WinImage proved to be quite useful in this regard. So I chose to just bite the bullet and seek out Windows alternatives to said Mac utilities. This proved to be more frustrating than helpful (I can never figure out FreeDOS for some reason whenever I install it in VirtualBox it always seems to uninstall itself after every reboot). But I no longer had access to the utilities I had been using on my Mac to convert directories to floppy images, so I created a second, auxiliary VirtualBox VM running FreeDOS so I could import software into the VM more easily. It wasn’t my first time using this version of DOS, so I knew my way around the system fairly well. When I finally did decide to get VirtualBox for Windows, I started the same way I had previously: by installing DOS. I just hadn’t really been doing anything with VMs recently, so I felt no need to install it. Since my two Macbooks both broke during the first half of last year, and I decided to use the $200 my mom agreed to give me because I was broke to buy myself a Thinkpad rather than to get the Macs repaired (best decision I ever made), I was without VirtualBox for a couple months as I was first getting acclimated to the new computing environment. I just thought I’d share some of my recent exploits with this program, as well as some sweet screenshots (retrocomputing porn) taken with the VirtualBox screen capture utility. VirtualBox is a great way to bring DOS and other old x86-based operating systems back from the dead and enjoy them on modern computers.

One of my primary means of doing this has always been VirtualBox. Anyone who checks out my old blog will quickly find out that I have a long history of being obsessed with retrocomputing and messing around with old hardware and software.

Virtualbox windows 3.1