Yes Virginia, you can run Windows XP on your Android device. What once took cutting edge hardware to boot, can now work on your typical Android smartphone. Don’t get too excited though, this will not replace your desktop pc any time soon. The emulation speed is unbearably slow, and you lack any sort of network connectivity. So how does this work?
One word, Bochs. Bochs is an app that can emulate practically any 32 bit operating system. Bochs was designed to run legacy operating systems such as Windows DOS and Windows 3, definitely not Windows XP. Generally anything higher than Windows 95 becomes a hit or miss as far as usability. The bottom line is that you’re about to perform something that might not work on your device, and if it does, it has no practically use to it. Are you excited yet?
Okay now that the introduction is out of the way, let’s get down to business. Of course, you will first need to have a Windows XP iso file. Now, if you’re crafty enough, you can use a program called Windows builder to decrease it to 100MB in size. This is what I did to get. I am not going to cover that here because it will take too long, but just know that it is also an option. We are going to use Qemu manager to install Windows XP.
Bochs will run on Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or BeOS. Flat disk images bximage.exe tool for making new disk images CHANGES.txt what. Hard disk image called Windows 95 B (2031-16-63) into the FreeBSD file system. MacBochs with Windows 98se. Bochs is an open source PC emulation project. One of its goals is portability, and as a result it is available for a wide range of operating systems, including Mac OS X.
Unlike virtual box, Qemu is able to better handle raw image files that we can transfer to Bochs on Android. So here’s how to run Windows XP on Android.
What You Will Need:. Windows XP ISO.
Step 1: Installing Windows XP to Disk Image Open up Qemu manager and create a new virtual machine. Name it whatever you like and click next. Allocate it however much ram that you’re willing to spare. This is only for your pc and has nothing to do with the amount of ram 0n your Android device. Finally, select the option, do not use a virtual disk image. Click finish. Next go to the drives tab and select hard drive 0.
Then locate the blank disk image that you downloaded. You might need to make sure that all files are selected in order to see it. Next, select CD ROM and locate your Windows XP ISO file. Finally, select the green arrow to start the VM. From this point, just go through the process of installing Windows XP like you would on any normal computer. Step 2: Transferring After the installation completes, extract the SDL zip.
Transfer the blank disk image (that is no longer “blank” because you just installed Windows XP to it) and put it inside the SDL folder. Rename the blank disk image to c. Then open up the bochsrc text file. Where you see the word “c.img” change it to just “c”. Save and close it.
Then transfer that folder to the root of the internal memory (or sdcard) on your Android device. Step 3: Booting on Android Install the boch apk to your Android device. Then launch it. It should detect the Windows XP image and boot right into Windows XP.
Remember, this is going to be slow! You might have to wait as much as 10 minutes until you actually get to the Windows XP desktop screen.
Sponsoring website: Lines that begin with the # symbol are comments or 'commented out' data lines. This is essentially what you would see if you looked inside the bochsrc.bxrc file that I've made up for you. It's important for you to understand how to change lines that I've highlighted with a BLUE color (so you can change things like how Bochs boots up: with the floppy or from a hard drive image, and what type of floppy diskette or size etc. Of hard drive. Depending upon how much memory you have available, you might want to change that setting too; it's at 32Meg right now): ######################################################################## # bochsrc.txt file for DLX Linux disk image (with 'tomsrtbt' book disk)! ######################################################################## # You may now use double quotes around pathnames, in case # your pathname includes spaces. # # MEGS # how much memory the emulated machine will have.
# # set this to the default number of Megabytes of memory you want # to emulate. You may also pass the '-megs xyz' option to bochs # # The default is 32MB, most OS's won't need more than that. # reset it to 16 MB if you have only 64 MB on your system. # #megs: 256 #megs: 128 #megs: 64 megs: 32 #megs: 16 #megs: 8 # # ROMIMAGE: # You now need to load a ROM BIOS into F0000-FFFFF.
Most of the BIOS # 'hooks' have been replaced with real BIOS support in Bochs now. # Normally, you can use the precompiled BIOS named: BIOS-bochs-latest. # # # VGAROMIMAGE # You now need to load a VGA ROM BIOS into C0000. # # filenames of ROM images used: romimage: file=./BIOS-bochs-latest, address=0xf0000 vgaromimage:./VGABIOS-elpin-2.40 # # FLOPPY DISKS: # Point this to pathname of floppy image file or device. # # You can set the initial status of the media to 'ejected' or 'inserted'.
# floppya: 288=path, status=ejected (2.88M 3.5' floppy) # floppya: 144=path, status=inserted (1.44M 3.5' floppy) # floppya: 12=path, status=ejected (1.2M 5.25' floppy) # floppya: 720k=path, status=inserted (720K 3.5' floppy) # floppya: 360k=path, status=inserted (360K 5.25' floppy) # # The path should be the name of a disk image file. On unix, you can use # a raw device name such as /dev/fd0 on Linux. On WinNT and Win2k, use # drive letters such as a: or b: as the path.
Raw floppy access is not # supported on Windows 95 and 98.