Hi there! By using Arachne, Minuet or MicroWeb 2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Web_browsers_for_DOS
https://github.com/jhhoward/MicroWeb

Or, alternatively, by using a patched New Deal Office 2000 (source code for PC GEOS had been GPLed, I think. SDK is available).

It has an integrated browser and can do SSL.

However, your setting is too poor. You really want to have EMS.

Some 286 chipsets (Headland?) in PCem/86Box can support up to 8MB of RAM and provide EMS by a driver.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … al_office_2000/

Edit: You need a packet driver for the emulated NE2000, I think.
Something like NE2000.COM driver.

Edit: FrogFind and wiby are two nice search engines for vintage websites.
Weby finds vintage websites or rather sites compatible with old browsers.
FrogFing is a search engine that can be displayed by old browsers.

Lat but not least, there's NeoCities. It tries to be a modern GeoCities and bring back personal homepages as we knew them.

Quick update. I've taken some screenshots for you, for progressing step-by-step.
They show you how to get Arachne working in PCem v17.

My EM was a Super 7 FIC VA-503 (Pentium MMX 120) with 48MB of RAM and VIRGE/DX.
MS-DOS 6.22, QEMM, Helix, various drivers, DOSIDLE, S3VBE20 etc.

But the principle also works same with a 286.
Arachne exists in an 8086/80286 version, but there are also real 80286 builds.

It you're serious about using it, please use "Trigem 286M" machine type and load an EMS driver.
In addition to just himem.sys, I mean. Arachne supports EMS and XMS, I think.

If you're using an SVGA card not supported directly, please load an 16-Bit VESA driver, so Arachne can run in 800x600 16c and higher.
You can find some here -> Re: OAK OTI-037c - 800x600 mode ?

There's also an NE2000 driver inside of Arachne package, so no additional software needed.
Just make sure you're entering the correct TCP/IP settings.

Good luck! 😀

FIN_K89i wrote on 2025-01-12, 17:39:

hello i have a VM on PCem that i want to get online i have the machine setup to a commodore PC 30 III whit 8mh 286 processor EGA80x25 ms-dos 6.22 sound blaster 1.5 mouse whit driver end NE2000 for network i want to get it online end connect to protoweb proxy but i dont know how i have tried a tutorial but i wasn't able to connect maby some one can help me end also suggest me some cool web sites

Hi there! Wait, did you mean text-mode? A text-mode browser, like Lynx ? 😳
That makes sense then. I've assumed a regular browser, I'm such a dummy! 😁

Anyway, I've already taken some more screenshots with Arachne (286 build).
I've also emulated your Commodore PC30-III. With EGA and 16MB of RAM.

And I must say that EGA is really, really slow here. The screen tearing is huge, the re-draw slow.
I'd recommend to have at least 800x600 16c pixel resolution, otherwise even 90s websites are barely readable.

On a text-browser, that's different, of course.
That Minuet browser runs in 80x25 text-mode and uses colours.

Anyway, I've some screenshots with Arachne here.
Finding suitable websites (no SSL, no JPG/PNG) was tricky, so please excuse me if they're obscure.

Quick Update. Did some more tests with Minuet browser.
Phew! That was quite some work! Finding some websites and servers that are HTTP 1.x /HTML 1.x compliant! Took me hours! 😁

Tip! Forms for input don't work, neither do frames.
If you can't reach a website, browse its main site and use links to go to where you want to go to.

Oh, and use 256c colour depths, at least! Minuet won't render GIFs correctly with 16c.
Sometimes, they won't appear at all with just 16 colours.

Quick update. I tried MicroWeb 2.0, a web browser for PC/XTs..
I had to solve some issues, though.

a) The Commodore PC30-III doesn't have EMS,
but MircoWeb needs it so badly to render pages with graphics.
So I resorted to "Trigem 286M" @25 MHz, which has chipset EMS (up to 7 MB).

b) The MicroWeb 360K boot disk didn't work for me.
The network stack did complain etc. No idea why.
It also has the habbit to complain about space characters and
lines that are "too long" (in its config file).

c) IBM EGA emulation. The CTMOUSE supplied in MicroWeb 720k boot disk says it lost "EGA RIL" support.
So I replaced it with MOUSE by Microsoft from the 80s (6.24BZ).
Despite this, MicroWeb ran - but merely the scrollbar on the right side appeared, the rest was black.
I've tried to use both 640x200 16c and 640x350 16c modes (PCem set to ECD and 256KB of RAM for EGA).
So I had to use IBM VGA emulation and select EGA mode for MicroWeb.

I've also added MM.SYS (EMS driver) to the boot disk (now expanded to 1,44MB)
and added DEVIC=HIMEM.SYS and DOS=HIGH back. Himem.sys from Novell DOS was used.

Also added KEYB2.COM, a keyboard driver for my foreign keyboard.
And DC, a Norton Commander clone.

My thoughts so far:
PC/XT support is nice and well, but you can also overdo. 🙄
At some point, it's more reasonable to just fix the PC/XT platform. 😁
There are many ways to do it. Using an V20/V30 CPU and EMS card, adding an 286/386 CPU card..
Orchid Tiny Turbo 286, MS MACH 20 w/ add-on EMS board, Intel Inboard/386 etc.
Some have a switch and allow going back to original CPU (8088/V20).
(DOS needs DOS=HIGH, UMB so badly, for example!)

In retrospect, this MicroWeb experience is more limited to what I had been used to in 1996 when using Netscape Navigator.
All those vintage Tripod and GeoCities websites had used features not supported yet.
Like background pictures, frames, JPG/BMP pictures, MIDI playback and animated GIFs and texts.

MicroWeb as-is is a good start, really, and I value its current achievements,
but it needs some more time to catch up with, say, Amiga web browsers of the 90s. 😉
Or IBM WebExplorer from 1994/1995, hi.

Some remarks:
MicroWeb is apparently natively English, so it may not know about the concepts of "HTML Entitiy".
Here in Europe, before Unicode, we had used them to display umlauts and special characters.
They also worked without help of codepages, such as ISO 8859-1.
Mapping some of them to their CP437 equivalents might be worth a try.

I love it. I experimented with Arachne a few years ago, never tried any of the proxies but there are still a handful of websites that can be viewed natively with it.

I have 16MB ram set in PCEM. I might have to try those other web browsers you mentioned.

Norton Commander wrote on 2025-02-02, 17:45:

I love it. I experimented with Arachne a few years ago, never tried any of the proxies but there are still a handful of websites that can be viewed natively with it.

Hi there! Thanks for the screenshots! ^^
I second this, browsing the Web in Arachne is fun.

Perhaps we will one day get some sort of "NE2000 NIC with a proxy server on an ISA card" that does the SSL/HTTPS handling?
That would be neat! 😁 It would make the retro PCs more independent from external retro computing servers.

Or, alternatively, some sort of PC card that has no functioning ISA slot connector, but an BNC/RJ45 input for the network card and an output to RJ45.
So that a little patch cable from the NE2000/3com/Realtek card can go to the input of the internal "proxy server card".

Norton Commander wrote on 2025-02-02, 17:45:

I have 16MB ram set in PCEM. I might have to try those other web browsers you mentioned.

Glad to hear! Dillo for DOS has a Windows 95 like GUI, I think. Look for "Dillo 3.02b for DOS".
Also, a new release of Dillo was in the news just a few days ago.. 😁

At the moment, I'm trying to figure out how to make Skipper/WebMagick from GeoWorks Ensemble work.
It uses ODI ethernet connection, rather than a simple packet driver.

PS: What I like about Minuet is that it reminds me of the old DOS version of WinCIM, the CompuServe Information Manager.
That DOS version ran in text-mode, too, and had a GUI (or TUI) with mouse (?) support and menus.