I don't have access to a win9x right now, but if you do a search, edit.com is nowhere to be seen?

Get to the root of C:\, then;
dir /s edit.com

And it should also be on the Windows 98 CD-ROM I think.

Or was it in the edb.cab ... 🤔

Windows 98 includes the utility edit.com. It’s a text editor that runs in the command line and is based on MS-DOS. It was included in many Windows versions up to Windows XP.

Turboblack wrote on 2024-10-18, 17:19:

Windows 98 includes the utility edit.com. It’s a text editor that runs in the command line and is based on MS-DOS. It was included in many Windows versions up to Windows XP.

For some reason it's not there. I've done a search for it in the entire drive including windows and windows system folders.

I also have a legit Windows 98 SE boot floppy, but it's not on there either.

You're doing something quite wrong then. It's in the C:\windows\command path.

In case of the boot floppy, it's inside the EBD.CAB file.

For the CD, a copy is inside WIN98_25.CAB. There's another inside EBD.CAB which itself is inside BASE4.CAB.

The file dos7help.zip which is available in various locations contains the editor. Type QBED instead of EDIT to run it.

(This is actually an updated and expanded version of the DOSHELP program included with later DOS versions.)

ETA: There's also EDLIN of course, haha

Off topic, but what virtualization software are people using nowadays for DOS 6.22, Windows 9x, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, and old Linux distros?

All of these ran well in Virtual PC 2007 but that won't work in Windows 10.

Easy, you can emulate a box that can cover all those at once with 86box.

Errius wrote on 2024-10-18, 20:23:

Off topic, but what virtualization software are people using nowadays for DOS 6.22, Windows 9x, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, and old Linux distros?

All of these ran well in Virtual PC 2007 but that won't work in Windows 10.

Good question. Not sure, since I'm still using VPC on older Windows for that purpose (I did boycott Windows 10).

That being said, I heard that SoftGPU is being used to run Windows 98SE on Virtual Box.

SoftGPU: OpenGL + DirectX + Glide driver for Windows 95/98/Me

The downside is that SoftGPU needs a recent version of Virtualbox (v7 upwards).
That's a problem, because new versions (v6.1 onwards, I think) have dropped 3D acceleration for XP (v6.0.24 is most recent here).
So you can't have Windows 98SE and Windows XP anymore.

Another alternative might be Bochs or Qemu, with an accelerator backend.
There used to be kQemu, for example. But that's a while ago.

zb10948 wrote on 2024-10-19, 00:54:

Easy, you can emulate a box that can cover all those at once with 86box.

Yes. That's good for playing games (sigh). But if I wanted to run old OSes for programming or for running utilities, then it's not so great.
86Box and PCem top out at a Pentium II somewhere.

Virtual PC 2007 was much more serious and useable for productivity software.
You could use all the modern x86 proccessor features, because the real CPU was being passed through.
Or use a printer, serial and parallel port. Or have drag&drop, seamless mouse support and folder sharing.
The original Mac versions (emulators) of Virtual PC did even support USB pass-through for Windows 9x! 😃

I like using LE the Laplink5 editor it's a bit smaller than Edit and doesn't need the qbasic files. Not sure if there's a link I can drop here though.

VFAT error is usually an indication of HDD corruption or bad HW config, I doubt it's something fixable in system.ini , unless it started to occur after installing some really bad driver. I've seen this error when using some incompatible storage on the machine (e.g. some CF cards...etc).

I tried running Virtual PC 2007 in Windows 8.1 in Hyper-V but the host machine went berserk.

I have MS-DOS 6.22/Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 98se running in PCEM, both with network support. When I have time I would like to rebuild the Win98 PC in 86box because I need a 100Mbit NIC (PCEM only has 10Mbit support). Speaking of, can any recommend a good 100Mbit NIC built-into 86box that has Win98 drivers?

Errius wrote on 2024-10-18, 20:09:

ETA: There's also EDLIN of course, haha

Windows 9x doesn't include EDLIN.

FreeDOS has an editor, too. Though it's a bit ugly. Like most things from FreeDOS. 😝

Jo22 wrote on 2024-10-19, 01:52:

Virtual PC 2007 was much more serious and useable for productivity software. You could use all the modern x86 proccessor feature […]
Show full quote

Virtual PC 2007 was much more serious and useable for productivity software.
You could use all the modern x86 proccessor features, because the real CPU was being passed through.
Or use a printer, serial and parallel port. Or have drag&drop, seamless mouse support and folder sharing.
The original Mac versions (emulators) of Virtual PC did even support USB pass-through for Windows 9x! 😃

VPC is a hypervisor, 86box is an emulator.
If you're willing to discard multimedia capabities, just use Virtualbox for any of OSes listed

zb10948 wrote on 2024-10-19, 21:07:

VPC is a hypervisor, 86box is an emulator.
If you're willing to discard multimedia capabities, just use Virtualbox for any of OSes listed

That's right, but.. an hypervisor is also half an emulator in most cases.
Things like the motherboard, the sound card, and peripherals and video has to be emulated.
Virtual PC 7 on Macintosh was a full emulator with an x86 emulation core.

The only exception from this rule are hypervisors that emulate an modified guesr OS.
AndLinux for Windows 2000/XP is such a thing. It runs a virtualized Linux kernal on top of Windows NT, without emulating any PC hardware.

Programs like Qemu were full emulators, too, but had an optional accelerator module that used the native host CPU to speed up things.

Same could be used for 86Box, in theory.
The dynamic recompiler (dynarec) is already being used for CPUs from 80486 onwards (optional on 486, required on 586 and up).
Going a step further and use an virtualization back-end wouldn't be that hard. AMD-V and Intel-VT are available to assist this. CPUs support them for 20 years now.

Another example is Insignia SoftPC on Macintosh. It had been used as a basis to create SoftWindows later on.
Microsoft found it very good and licensed it, apparently.
The x86 emulation core of SoftPC had been used in the RISC versions of Windows NT 3.5x and NT4 (Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC).

There, it was the basis for NTVDM, the DOS virtual machine. It's purpose was to run DOS applications and Windows on Windows (WoW).
Regular x86 CISC version of NT had used the native CPU and its V86 mode for same purpose.

Edit: Also interesting, there was Windows Virtual PC, too. It's a mangled version of VPC 2007/VPC7 that runs Windows XP on Windows 7 ("XP-mode").
That copy of XP had been used to run old applications and hardware (such as USB scanners and printers).
The concept was similar to the Classic Environment on Mac OS X, which ran a copy of Mac OS 9.2 in a sandbox.

Edit: But back to original topic, EDIT should be easy to find.
It's available in any 32-Bit edition of Windows, I think.

The best text editor for DOS is of course Vim: https://www.vim.org/download.php#pc

To answer the original question, I looked in my win98se computer and Edit is there, in C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND folder.

You need QBASIC.EXE, QBASIC.HLP, and EDIT.COM to make a working package.

I'd attach it here, but I know this site is really strict about stuff, so I won't.