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MS Works 2.0! (and how I did it)
August 18th, 2020
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I have come up with something brilliantly stupid so that I can access
Microsoft Works 2.0 via SSH (or mosh), I'm running it on top of MS-DOS
6.22 via qemu. Here's how I did it:

First I downloaded some prerequisites on my alpine VPS
apk add qemu-system-i386 qemu-ui-curses qemu-img
(note: they're community packages)

Then I downloaded a DOS of my choice, after debating between FreeDOS,
MS-DOS, and PC-DOS, I took the lame way out and grabbed an MS-DOS from

I created a 32MB hard disk image for the C: drive of MS-DOS:
qemu-img create -f qcow2 MSDOS622.qcow2 32M

Now I extract the 7z file containing MS-DOS and stuff the floppy images
somewhere, and then I boot them:
qemu-system-i386 -curses -HDA MSDOS622.qcow2 -m 1 -fda Disk1.img \
-boot a -rtc base=localtime

The -curses flag tells qemu to display the virtual PC's 80x25 text mode
as ncurses, -HDA points to your hard disk image, -m determines the
amount of RAM (MS Works requires a bit under 700kb), -fda points to your
floppy image, -boot determines which DOS drive letter to boot from
(typically a {floppy} or c {hard drive}), the -rtc option I give here
will match the emulated real time clock to the machine hosting qemu.

Booting from the MS-DOS disk one will immediately run the MS-DOS
installer, it's very straightforward, if it asks about your hardware,
just tell it that you have a good old fashioned IBM PC (PS/2) with an
IBM VGA card... When it wants to switch disks, hold the escape key and
hit 2, this will dump you into the qemu console, you'll type something
like this to change floppy images: "change floppy0 Disk2.img"
After the change command succeeds, hold escape again and hit 1, taking
you back to the MS-DOS installer... continue swapping disks until the
installer tells you to eject all disks, at that step go back to the qemu
console and type "eject floppy0".

At this point MS-DOS should be installed, lets get that MS Works going!
Setup for MS Works will be similar, use the QEMU console to change to
your MS Works floppy disk one, then flip back to MS-DOS and run setup,
when the installer asks, you again want regular VGA, and you want text
mode (graphics mode will not work under qemu -curses!)

I have not found a way to get the mouse working in qemu -curses, but
MS Works seems to work just fine with only the keyboard, hit alt + F to
get the menus at the top to pop up, use they keyboard arrows to select
and enter/return to activate a menu entry... If you want to close the
menu without selecting anything, just hit escape. All other keyboard
shortcuts are in the help menu at the top right (alt + h, alt + k).

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This phlog entry has been read 1996 times.

Comments have been left on this post:

This is great. On mouse support on ncurses based qemu, it may depend on
the terminal.
Posted Wed Aug 19 23:06:27 UTC 2020 by 92.176.105.30
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gr_uid=lJX2
Posted Mon Aug  7 09:03:06 UTC 2023 by 164.90.232.244
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