Hi Shakna, if you'd boot FreeDOS and Windows 3.1 directly, perhaps it would even be 4 seconds as you skip Linux booting and the DosBox latency.
I've been watching FreeDOS for this for a little while.
Unfortunately getting the particular program to install requires a little fudging as it tries to detect Win, and underlying DOS, and wants particular numbers to be present in the versions.
perhaps VERSION could fix this -http://help.fdos.org/en/hhstndrd/cnfigsys/version.htm
That is very interesting, I might try it out to see if it works.
Bugger.
The program tries to verify the integrity of MSDOS.SYS and VER.EXE with some sort of weak hash, as well as get the result of VER.
FreeDOS's VERSION gets me halfway though, now just to generate some dummy files when I work out the right hashing algo to use...
Thanks for the update! What about just copying those files over from MS-DOS?
Unfortunately that's not working right now... Guessing it does something else hacky to check that it truly is running on MSDOS and Win 3.1.
But it is on my list to investigate when I'm back to work.
Windows 7 is literally the last version of Windows without the Hybrid Boot Mode, so you're kind of punching down there. Maybe compare it to 8.1 Pro instead.
I still use a 3.1 machine for some software that got "upgraded" for more modern computers and became unuseably slow and feature-less compared to the old.
But, that machine has a lot of more modern hardware now. It's little more than a Linux kernel and DOSBox, so no true hardware access.
But it still boots, loads Windows, loads my programs to their last state, in less than 10 seconds.
By comparison, Windows 7's file manager takes longer on double the hardware.