Running OS/2 1.x on VirtualBOX Intel vs AMD

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Well I know this is a limited topic, and my testing is anything but .. thorough.

But for some strange reason I’ve been trying to run OS/2 1.1 under VirtualBOX on Windows, and OS/2 crashes in under a minute all the freaking time.  It really is quite annoying.  Now I wonder if it is because my Windows PC has an 8 core AMD Processor?

Now when I run VirtualBOX (all the same latest version) under OS X, Intel it works fine!

OS/2 1.1 under VirtalBOX Mono EGA mode

Now what I don’t get is that under OS X with Intel Xeon CPUs I’ve been running for over an hour now, without issue!

As for settings, remember to add a floppy controller, remove the IDE CDROM, and remove the sound & networking!  I’m using 8MB of ram, but the glorious 80286 could go up to 16MB of RAM… Even though its virtual address space was 1GB!

I don’t know if anyone has any real insight into this whole AMD vs Intel thing, but from this super minimal testing it seems to me the Intel CPU is the way to go.

Also I don’t know why OS/2 decided to go with some greenscreen EGA.. It is kind of neat in a throwback kind of way, but nonetheless very odd.  I’d have preferred colour EGA but I guess you can’t win them all.

5 thoughts on “Running OS/2 1.x on VirtualBOX Intel vs AMD”

    • thats what I had thought at first, so I disabled all of that stuff, and the AMD still crashes out like crazy (Vbox complains, but I think its more so needed for OS/2 2.0++)

      Or maybe the Intel-VT stuff just works?

  2. Well I went ahead and installed Microsoft OS/2 1.21 but this time I accidentally selected the Solaris 10 5/09 and earlier profile… and guess what, after disabling all the CPU ‘optimizations’ (PAE/NX, VT-x/AMD-V, Nested Paging) it not only has been running for 10 minutes (a new world record!) but it is MUCH FASTER… With the AMD-V you can watch it paint a CMD window in painful detail, without it, its much faster, although nothing like a real computer… But it’s progress!

    • I got it by accident, I’ve never been able to reproduce it.. so naturally I saved a copy of it!

      It’s Microsoft OS/2 1.1

      MS OS/2 Base Operating System
      Standard Edition 1.10 Component ID 560109201
      XR000000

      the devinfo in config.sys mentions EGA so I guess this is mono EGA? I can’t even get windows/386 3.0 to load CGA right to compare dosboxes/vs os/2 boxes…

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