Thursday, December 9, 2010

How to install Windows 3.1 on Symbian

Did you know that you can have old Windows versions on your Symbian S60 smartphone? It's using the DosBOX emulator ported to Symbian in order to do that, so it's just like an application, no need to replace the operating system (I don't even think that's possible).

So here's how to do it:
First, download this: http://www.filefront.com/17626717/WIN31-Symbian.zip
I made it zip, so you can download it directly from the phone. Unpack it somewhere.

  1. There's everything you need to install in the folder "install". Install every app in the correct order. Also, set your date to Jully 2008 before installing 4 - SDL-1.2.13-s60-2.3.4_armv5, or you will get an expired certificate error. Also, set your date to August 2009 before installing 8 - dosbox.
  2. Copy all of the contents of  the folder "memory card" to your phones memory card.
That's it!


Also:

  • If your phone has a normal screen (eg. Nokia N95), copy Data\WIN3\Orientation\normal\dosbox.conf to e:\Data\ on your phone, where e:\ is your memory card.
  • If your phone has a landscape screen (eg. Nokia e63), copy Data\WIN3\Orientation\landscape\dosbox.conf to e:\Data\ on your phone, where e:\ is your memory card.
  • In order to change the resolution from 640x480 to 320x240 in Windows 3.1, you need to change the drivers. I made this simple:  copy Data\WIN3\SMALLRES\system.ini to e:\Dos\C\WINDOWS\ in order to set the resolution to 320x240. If you want to revert back to 640x480, just copy system.ini from Data\WIN3\normalres in the same folder. It's already set to 640x480 so you don't need to do any changes. Also, Calmira screws up in 320x240, so I don't recommend it.