Not much more or less than abandonware itself.
Read: it's not, but it's not likely to get anyone in trouble either.
If the owners of this piece of software have a problem with us hosting this specific package and let us know, we will remove it immediately.
We wouldn't bother hosting it if it was not the only real solution to running many old Windows games, particularly those that predate Windows 95. Backwards compatibility only goes so far.

I installed the Windows 3 archive using DosBox 0.74. It seems to work fine, except for the mouse, which seems to only want to point to the corners of the Windows 3 desktop. Any ideas? Thanks.

Update: It's probably worth mentioning that I'm running DosBox inside Windows XP Mode - Windows Virtual PC. The host system is Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. The mouse seems to work fine running DosBox directly from the Windows 7 host.

Why? There is no reason to do this.
Dosbox works fine directly on Win7-64.

Should you absolutely want to continue running an emulator inside a VM : disable joystick.
(dosbox -> manual)

Also:

Do you have a specific reason to run DOSBox in XP mode instead of directly? If yes, what is it?

Hello there and thank you for all of the help so far!

I was able to install windows 3.1 correctly using your file (thank you SO much for that!).

I can log into windows using DOSbox just fine and am able to play free cell and some other games that came with your files. However, how do I add more games to play into your files, so I can play it through your windows? I have the files ready to go but apparently MUST do so through windows, not just DOSbox.

Good morning (yep, morning here ....)

It's pretty simple:
Let me assume that you got the whole W3 stuff in .....\oldgames\
Simply put (unzip) the game's folder into it, something as:
....\oldgames\yourgame\
When launching W3 within dosbox you'll find ....\oldgames\yourgame\ as
c:\yourgame\ in W3

Keep in mind that many W3 games will need to be installed, usually it's done by running setup.exe from the game's folder (some are still using 'install.xxx', but most will use setup)

[optional]
A good idea is to backup your whole ...\oldgames\ folder where you have installed W3 before installing other stuff (games, whatever) into it, as in those days it happened that programmers would overwrite some sysfiles with older or not so compat versions, completely screwing up other games/softs in the process, ah those were the days..... if happens it's simply a matter of putting your backup back to solve eventual probs.

I'm getting an odd error... at least, I think it's an odd one. It's not one I've seen yet on the forums, anyway.

When booting 3.11, it gets to the following point:

Creative DOS Multimedia Architecture (v1.00)
CSP Physical-Level driver (v1.14) for Sound Blaster 16.
Copyright (C) Creative Technology Ltd., 1992-1994. All rights reserved.
Error CSPSYS1006: Could not detect the CSP.

Driver initiation failed.
Quitting program...

Creative DOS Multimedia Architecture (v1.00)
CTMMSYS Integration driver (v1.00)
Copyright (C) Creative Technology Ltd., 1993-1995. All rights Reserved.

[screen automatically clears]

The selected display driver does not support the installed graphics chip.

Run the Setup program to select the proper display driver for the graphics
chip installed.

Press a key to continue..._





If it's pertinent information, I've got an ATI Mobility Radeon 5650 graphics card. Any help would be appreciated.

Means you're not launching W3 (from the provided archive by Fifth) *(FYI: you can not 'boot' W3, it runs on top of Dos)* within the right emulated hardware, in other words: you ain't launching it through dosbox 0.74.

Reread carefully the instructions in the first post. And apply them.

Let's go through what have you done - step by step - before you received that error message.

I got the Windows 3.1 .rar from the first post, and extracted it to C:\oldapps. That's the folder I keep my abandonware in; each program in there has its own folder, but the 3.1 extraction is sitting in the main directory.

I open DOSbox 0.72, mount the oldapps folder to a virtual C drive, and give it the following command:

C:\windows.bat

It then proceeds to partially boot and display the error I posted above.