I checked, and Windows 98 SE Base V2 does not have the mouse and CD drivers on Exit to Dos.
Can you make one like this?
Thanks!
Cynde
Hi @Cynde_Moya, I can try to work on this. We should have the native DOS CDROM drivers from setting up the separate MS-DOS 6.22 base environment, and I think the mouse issue would be solved just by switching the hardware configuration to QEMU’s default PS/2 device rather than a USB tablet.
I’m curious - what’s the use case exactly? Is there a DOS app or game that’s not running under Win98’s DOS shell (Programs → MS-DOS Prompt, which as far as I can tell picks up objects in the CD-ROM drive fine), but also just running that game or program in a separate standalone MS-DOS environment is not possible or desired?
Hi Ethan
I do have some W98SE CDROM games that don’t work unless you exit to DOS and start them from there. The DOS shell within Windows won’t work. So I need DOS to have CDROM and Mouse driver.
I will have to check if they will work in a standalone DOS environment. Some of them work in DOSBox, so they must. Perhaps there is some driver error (i.e., I’m the driver) going on here, with my conceptual framework of how W98 and DOS work together. You suggest I look for DOS 6.22 and try the game out there? I will test that.
I have also been trying to make a boot disk for a different game, Flight of the Amazon Queen. This game uses a lot of conventional memory, and this boot disk is supposed to free up enough of that. I have tried a number of other twiddles of config.sys and autoexec.bat, to no avail, so I’m very glad to have found this boot disk listing. Perhaps it will work. I have found a workaround, as the game works in Windows XP. But I still want to solve the W98 problem.
Thanks Ethan!
Cynde
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huh, I truly just wasn’t aware there were cases of a game/program that required Windows but had to be started from DOS! I guess you could try it in the MS-DOS 6.22 environment and see what happens, but then, that environment doesn’t have Windows installed, so it doesn’t sound like that would work either.
I’ve never fully understood the relationship between Windows 9x and DOS either. Reading more about MS-DOS 7.1 now and it seems like it was almost more akin to a dual-boot situation, where a DOS installation was (invisibly) called up first and that booted the 32-bit kernel and ran Windows. I guess that would make sense that it lacked some basic drivers/functionality if its only real intended purpose was to call up Windows and its accompanying drivers. And the “MS-DOS Prompt” I believe is really just a shell to interact with Windows in a DOS-like way, so that also makes some sense that it doesn’t work because it’s not truly DOS, but there just seemed to be so much backwards-compatibility in Windows with DOS programs that I was curious.
In any case, I should also have some more time to fiddle with this today, so I will update you if I have any progress!
OK, I have a Win98 environment with CDROM and mouse working properly when you drop to DOS mode, but I realized sound won’t work because the audio drivers aren’t properly configured for this setup either. I see some tips for this scenario in Vogons though, so I’ll see if I can get that going…
@Cynde_Moya I’m stumped on the audio - if I try to install the DOS SoundBlaster drivers we have (I think the same ones available here), the install program recognizes that I’m running Windows 9x and refuses to install, even though I’ve dropped from Windows 98 into “Return to DOS”. Trying to hand-edit the C:\autoexec.bat settings to manually find the SoundBlaster card (using the hardware address settings copied from the Windows Device Manager menu) doesn’t seem to work. Either a different set of drivers is needed altogether or I am missing something about how to properly configure the Soundblaster card in such a setup so that it works in both Windows and DOS modes.
In any case I’ve published a “Windows 98 SE with DOS CD-ROM Drivers” environment that at least has the CDROM and mouse functionality you originally asked for. So you can experiment with that, and I would still be curious what happens just in a DOS-only environment!
Hi Ethan
I’m building a free-standing QEMU environment with Windows 95. I am having a similar problem, when I exit to DOS I discover that the keyboard and mouse are not working. What did you install in Windows 98 to make a Keyboard and mouse work after exiting to DOS?
Thanks!
Cynde
Hi @Cynde_Moya! I tracked back down the DOS CD-ROM driver I used, it was the “Oak Technologies Universal IDE CD-ROM Driver” offered on this page:
http://manmrk.net/tutorials/DOS/cdrom.htm
It is just a simple .exe that includes a setup program once loaded into the Win98 environment and run (from the DOS prompt) allowed CD-ROM access from the “Exit to DOS” prompt. Since it’s a “universal” driver and the page actually explicitly mentions Win95, seems like a good bet!
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ugh, so sorry, realizing I misread your whole question and you were looking for the mouse/keyboard driver, not the CD-ROM one. taking another look!
I went back through my notes and I believe that actually I did not install any special or new drivers to get mouse functionality working - that piece was solved in Windows 98 just by removing the -device usb-tablet pointing device from the environment’s emulator configuration (present in our default/usual Win98 SE base environment), this should make the environment fall back to the emulated PS/2 mouse and keyboard that QEMU uses by default if you use it without any other pointing/input device specified (see: QEMU User Documentation — QEMU documentation), and seemed to work fine even in DOS mode with Win98.
Is there a USB input device specified in your Windows 95 configuration?
Hi Ethan
There is no USB input device specified in my Windows 95 configuration.
The invocation for QEMU is different in the one auto-generated by EaaSI, and the one recommended in your lesson plan. What EaaSI had was:
-vga cirrus -smp 1 -net nic,model=rtl8139 -soundhw sb16 -m 64
while the one in your lesson plan Emulation and Virtualization Applications – Using Emulators to Resurrect Recovered Data
-m 256 -vga cirrus -soundhw sb16 -net nic,model=pcnet
I guess the only real difference is the -net nic switch.
I tried both of these, and still can’t get a keyboard and mouse to work upon Exit to DOS.
The instructions for getting a CDROM driver to work in DOS seems to work, at least in the DOS PROMPT while still in Windows, but upon Exit to DOS I can’t test it because the keyboard and mouse don’t work.
Very puzzling. Perhaps my error somewhere in the routine of installing the new environment. Thanks for your help.
Cynde
hmm, indeed, puzzling! as far as the emulated mouse + keyboard hardware, those two QEMU configurations should be the same (both the default PS/2 devices). so difficult to say but probably a difference somewhere in the drivers used and/or the installation media. if I think of something else concrete to try (maybe a particular driver) I’ll let you know
Hi Ethan
I went back to these instructions at http://manmrk.net/tutorials/DOS/cdrom.htm and with some fiddling around have been able to get the CD-ROM to work in Exit to DOS. Thanks for the suggestion, very helpful.
I’m still not sure what is going on with the keyboard and mouse. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. Restarting the computer, or restarting the emulator, seems to reset something and then I can type things into the DOS prompt again. Very strange.
Cynde
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