Xenix 286 on Qemu

I nearly forgot to mention this… But a friend had some issues with an ancient 486 box running Xenix 286 and made a disk image of it. The box finally died, and he lost his copy with some disk accident (double trouble!) but he did send me a copy to see if it’d work under Qemu… At the time it didn’t.

So while I was transferring his disk image back to him, and looking around on ebay for a 286 board, I figured I’d try Qemu 0.14 to see how badly it failed…

xenix 2.3.2 286 on Qemu 0.14

And…

xenix 2.3.2 286 on Qemu 0.14 pt2

It worked!

I can’t say I’ve thoughtfully tested it, but it seems pretty workable.. I have no idea about what editions work, and which do not… I have no idea if this version knows it’s on a 386 and uses a 386 friendly method to switch to protected mode, or what.. Then again it being Xenix, it won’t need to constantly pop between real & protected modes, unlike, say Windows 3.0 / windows 3.1 or OS/2 1.x ..

4 thoughts on “Xenix 286 on Qemu

  1. Hello, would you, please, share the exact QEMU options that have worked for you in this case? I’m having a hard time with OS/2 1.00 on QEMU 7.1.0 in FreeBSD 13.1 and I’d like to give it a shot on QEMU 0.14.1 before finally giving up. Thanks in advance.

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