Notices

...but rather through bochs! Just a recompile of the debian arm port of bochs. Because Win98 works, any DOS-based windows should work (95, 3.x, ME), as well as plain dos, and several small Linux distros.

The good:

• It runs! - although this isn't a major surprise, since I did this on a Zaurus several years ago.
• Bluetooth keyboard presses are transferred through to win98. Can navigate menus using arrow keys, etc.
• Mouse can be connected, but is very skittish with the touchscreen. Maybe a bluetooth mouse? Maybe a bluetooth mouse connected to the virtual COM port in bochs?
• CD (ISO image) can be mounted, as can floppy images.

The untested:

• Networking - although it should be possible to set up some sort of outbound network on the device via kernel modules and routing/bridging. Bochs docs tell how to do it, but I haven't checked whether the kernel modules are available.
• Sound - no interest in slowing it down further!
• COM & Parallel ports - should work via a file just like on any other Linux.

The bad:

• SLOOOOWWWW! over 30 minutes to boot win98, with no apps installed. (See the statusbar clock in the screenshots below!) And this is the ARM port, so it should have some optimizations from upstream - compare this to about 1-1.5 minutes to boot on a core duo laptop.
• No virtual keyboard support.
• Uses 100% CPU - this could be solved by running dosidle, cpuidle or wqghlt inside win98.
• No Hildonization so don't minimize it or you'll have to kill it, leading to a lengthy scandisk the next time you try it!

This was just a test to see "what if". I'm not really interested in pursuing this, nor do I have skills to profile assembly code. In fact, I can't even get a proper package to build in the SDK at the moment, so I'm posting a 1.8MB tarball that has the bochs, bximage, and bxcommit binaries, the bios and vgabios files, a blank 512MB sparse disk, and the config file. Just untar it in on your PC, fdisk and format the disk, install an OS, and move the binaries, config file and BIOS images to your n800 home directory. The config file expects the disk to be /media/mmc1/c.img, adjust as needed. You'll need to install the OS on a laptop or desktop first, see the bochs documentation on how to connect a CD or ISO image. Takes about an hour to install on my laptop.

And finally, the obligatory screenshots.

Booting:


Running (menus opened via keyboard):


Video corruption as control panel loads!:


Edit: This needs libXpm4. I had to comment out the vbe extension line in the config file. You may want to change the cpu IPS value - I haven't tested it with other settings.

Awsome, I'm very interested in bochs on the N800, which dist is appropriate?

What do you mean which dist? Linux distro? Don't know for sure. DSL didn't boot for me, haven't tried puppy or feather yet.

But remember, this is SLOOOOOWWW! If you want to test, put bochs on your PC, install there, then move the config file and disk image over, start bochs, go get a sandwich, sit back and wait!

Maybe I am missing something in what you are saying.
After downloading bochs_2.3-2_arm.deb
copying to Flash and executing - Application manager reports
"Incompatible Application package"
I am not looking for Win98 - Just the processor emulation, with a version of Dos.

Yep, it's not an application package - as I said, I'm having trouble building the .deb packages at the moment - I'm new to this whole process! You can't install it via the application manager.

Anyway, just unpack the archive to your home directory (you'll need bzip2 & tar) or download to a PC and unpack, then transfer to n800. Don't forget that the bochs executable can't run from the memory cards, as they're mounted noexec. Everything else can be on a memory card, but you'll have to adjust paths in the config file.

Hope that helps.

Cool stuff gsagers! I love the oddball projects.

There is anyone trying to optimize and generate a .deb of this?
Is an interesting project.

I'll give it another try to generate a .deb. I think I have the kinks worked out of my vmware maemo appliance, so that I can generate a package. No further optimization, as I don't know assembly.

Still no luck on generating a .deb. dpkg-buildpackage fails on debhelper, saying 4 is the highest revision level supported (the scratchbox version, that is), and apparently bochs needs debhelper version 5.

this runs way better on dosbox instead of bochs