UTM frontend for QEMU on M1 MacBook Pro: Creating a VM and installing Windows 98 (part 2 – MSCDEX driver issue resolved)

A while back I was playing with UTM to setup an x86 VM on my M1 MacBook to install Windows 98 from an iso. I got as far as booting and starting the install but then ran into issue with the MSCDEX driver on subsequent boots during the install where it would no longer see the virtual CDROM drive and so could not complete the install:

From some additional playing around, it seems there is a major difference in the virtualized x86 PC hardware between this x86 2009 option which has the CDROM driver issue:

and this older 1996 version which does work and the install will complete successfully:

A couple of additional findings:

  • if you don’t disable the USB input support, when you get to this screen in the install you will not have a mouse pointer:

In the Input settings disable USB input (the default is USB3.0 support) and this will give you a mouse:

Success!

UTM frontend for QEMU for M1 Apple Silicon: Installing Windows 95

QEMU is an emulator for a wide range of machine architectures. I’ve played with QEMU on MacOS before to install and run Solaris on SPARC. It turns out there a QEMU build for Apple silicon M1, and there’s also a gui frontend to help with the configuration of various machines, called UTM.

Is there any CPU architecture that QEMU does not emulate? This is pretty amazing:

Let’s take a go at emulating an x86 32bit and install Windows 95. I added 3 drives, floppy (to boot from install disk image), a CD-ROM (for the install ISO) and a 4GB drive to install to:

Here’s where you add the disk images, and a summary of the other settings:

On first boot I got this error:

Doing some searching online it’s not immediately obvious if this is a configuration issue or a bug in UTM. One of the comments here does mention that the hdd disk image needs to be first (even though the dialog says the listed order is the boot order). I added the disks in this order and this seems to work:

While in the settings I also notice if you check the ‘advanced’ checkbox there’s options to turn of UEFI boot as that wouldn’t have been on PCs of this era, and changed the CPU to a 486:

Adding a blank 4GB disk image, a Windows 95 boot floppy image, the iso image for install cdrom, and then starting up, we can boot to a DOS prompt and start fdisk to format the blank disk image:

This works for the first time, but after you’ve formatted the blank disk image, booting a subsequent time fails with a ‘no operating system’ error. To get around this (because it won’t start unless the hd image is first), press Escape as soon as you get the BIOS screen and then you can select the boot device. In this case pick the floppy drive.

And now we’re away:

Select 1 for the NEC cdrom driver. At this point the cd iso should be on d: and c: should be your hdd disk image. If you try and run d:\setup.exe you’ll be reminded that fdisk doesn’t format your disk, you you need to format c: as well before you can install, otherwise you’ll see:

Rerun d:\setup.exe after format completes and now scandisk starts up:

Windows 95 setup is running – yes you can install x86 based OSes under UTM/QEMU on Apple Silicon!

Remember Active Desktop?

Revisiting SunPCI driver install on Solaris 10

I’ve posted before on installing the SunPCI drivers on Solaris 10 but skipped a few steps. Sites to download the drivers are limited, but if you Google for the exact file name, you can find some locations, search for SUNWspci3.tar.Z

Unzip the file with:

uncompress *.Z

The untar with:

tar xf SUNWspci_13.tar

The SunPCI card in my Ultra60 is a 1.3 card, not 3, so be careful which package you download. Available options seem to be SUNWspci_13, SUNWspci2, SUNWspci3

Once you’ve untar’ed, run in the same folder:

pkgadd -d .

(not as I said before to cd into the untar’d folder). At this point you should be able to follow the rest of the steps in the previous post.

I’m reinstalling and setting up Solaris 10 on this box since I spent some time installing FreeBSD and then Solaris 8, and decided Solaris 10 was actually the better option, so I’m going that to that again (Solaris 8 I couldn’t get to install).

At some point I must have mounted a shared drive on my NAS to copy files to/from this box, so I’ll also take a look at getting that going again (I don’t think I took any notes), I could have used ftp. Will see what works.

TenFourFox FPR32 will be the last release (Firefox for G4 and G5 Power Macs)

Sad to read today that the upcoming FPR32 release of TenFourFox, a browser built to run on older PowerPC G4 and G5 Macs, will no longer be developed.

I run TenFourFox on both a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver 2002 and a Power Mac G5, and have enjoyed having this option of a current browser that still runs and is able to access most modern websites on these older machines. Given that TenFourFox is developed and maintained by a single developer for free, it’s really nothing but outstanding that we’ve been able to enjoy having the option of running a modern browser on these aging machines.