Huge thanks to Anker for sponsoring today's video! All right, I think we're all set. So let's put Windows 3.1 on this thing shall we? All right guys, well I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did be sure to [MJD Interrupts] No no no no no no! Ok, I'm not doing that to you guys again. Hello everybody and welcome back to another video! Now in today's episode, yes you read theÂ
title correctly we're going to be installing Windows 3.1 on my iPhone 11. Which as you can see is running MS-DOS. Well ok, it's an MS-DOS emulator, it's DOSBOX. And it's all thanks to a really awesome application called iDOS 2. Which unfortunately is not in the App Store anymore. And because of that, I think it's important for me to give
you a little backstory before we get to the main event. Which we will get to, don't worry. But let me just
give you a little bit of information about iDOS 2. So iDOS is actually nothing new, it's been around for over 10 years now. The application was first released back on October 26th, 2010. And it was live in the App Store for a whopping... 4 hours. Yeah. Until Apple said "uh wait a second" and
promptly yanked the application from the App Store. The main reason for that was, this
application utilized iTunes File Sharing. Which in itself is not a bad thing at all, it's actually a feature. But because of the nature of what iDOS was, this essentially
allowed people to run code that wasn't reviewed by Apple that code being DOS games and applications. In fact, some people even found out that the
application gave you access to view iOS's file system like, the file structure and everything.
It was only read access but still. Now I'm sure some of you are going "well okay just remove
iTunes file sharing and everything will be great right?" Well... yeah but... no not exactly. Because yes, you could remove iTunes file sharing.
The developer could remove that from the application But then you wouldn't be able to do anything with it because
you wouldn't be able to share any files with the emulator to be able to run DOS games or applications. So, the only thing you could do is stare
at the C prompt like we're doing right now. And that was no fun, right? But the developer had
a little bit of a work around, what the developer did in the next release which happened a couple months later on January 19th, 2011. That version of iDOSÂ removed iTunes File Sharing, but it
included a few shareware versions of some DOS games. To allow you to do something with it. And that was great but
Apple didn't like that either because they said to the developer that unless you own the rights to the games, or you develop the games yourself,
you can't publish them in this application even though they were shareware copies. So, that version of the app got taken down as well. And then the developer just finally caved in and
removed both of those features from the application and re-released it a little while later to where it was just
a DOS emulator that you couldn't really do anything with. And it remained in the App Store for a while in that state until... September 19th, 2020. When the developer decided to re-enable File
Sharing through an update which surprisingly... Got approved by Apple! So perhaps they changed their mind about this whole thing. Perhaps they were opening up a little bit
and allowing emulators to do this and everything was going to be great, right? Nope! Because less than a year later, after the developer
published an update to iDOS containing nothing but bug fixes. Apple sent over a really nice email that read: So, just like that we're back to square one. And this time around, the developerÂ
made it clear that removing file sharing was not on the table. It was something
that the developer was not going to do. So, the app was eventually removed. But luckily, the developer notified
everybody that this was going to happen and encouraged people to download it while they could, which I did. I paid $5.00 for this application and it was totally worth it because... we're using it to make this video today! Now, the inspiration for this video came in part from aÂ
couple of articles that got published a couple months ago where people were showing you how to install Windows 3.1 on an iPad. Specifically an iPad, but it could have been done on any
other iOS device that you could install this application on. And, I believe that that is how Apple heard about this. I mean of course, it was in the App Store. But I
guess it just kind of slipped through the cracks. And once it was getting all this press, once a bunch of
people were writing about it and downloading the app Apple kind of discovered what had happened and then sent the
developer that email and then pulled the application a little while later. But, all of those articles and all of those guides about
installing Windows 3.1 on an iPad or another iOS device they used image files, they just used floppy images. That's too easy. Who wants to do that, right? So today, we're upping the ante because
we're going to be using real installation media A real, genuine copy of Windows 3.1. Okay, technically 3.11 but who cares. It's Windows 3.1. And that poses another challenge... How the heck do we do that? Now I'm sure a ton of you are going "oh I saw this video from LGR where he
plugged in a USB floppy drive into his phone and everything worked great" right? Well, yeah. It worked great for him, he was using an Android phone. It turns out that using a USB floppy
drive on an iPhone is not possible. Now first of all, you have to get an adapter,
a dongle, right we're living that dongle life 2021. You gotta get one of these wonderful things:
a Lightning to USBÂ Camera Adapter. Now, there are third-party ones all over Amazon,
but your mileage may vary with those. This is the official Apple one and I went with
this one because I thought "oh it'd be simple" all you have to do is... we're just gonna unbox this here. We're gonna take our wonderful, overpriced,
(this thing's $30.00 for this stupid cable) Okay, you gotta plug this into your phone here. And then, we're going to plug the floppy drive into
the USB port, the female USB port here on the end. We get this notification that says: I tried using a powered USB hub.
I tried using a different USB floppy drive that I had. But the fact of the matter is, no matter what USB floppy drive you try... you're not going to get it to work with
this dongle right here and that's because This dongle does not support the USB
device class that floppy drives utilize. [quoting from manual]: "The Lightning to USB camera adapter is
compatible with USB cameras that support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) or mass storage class devices." Which, USB floppy drives are not mass storage class devices.
They have their own class. So that is, again, not supported with this adapter right here. So then I thought "okay maybe... it'll be supported with this one right here." This is Apple's Lightning to USB 3 Camera Adapter which costs, a beautiful... THIRTY NINE DOLLARS I mean, are you kidding me? $39.00 for this stupid thing? And the worst part, that just infuriates me, there's
no Apple stickers with this. I mean come on! Look at this, you get this nice box that's like, okay. You get this warranty thing, a one year limited warranty.
And you get the same instruction manual. No Apple stickers anywhere. And of course, it turns out, you open this up right here look what it says: [quoting from manual]: The Lighting to USB 3 Camera Adapter is compatible
with USB cameras that support Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) or... mass storage class devices. The same exact thing. So, you can use this one all day long with one of
these USB floppy drives and it's not gonna work either. Okay, well there is one really greatÂ
thing about this dongle right here. And that is the fact that you can charge your
phone while you have a USB device connected to it. And hey, why not charge your device three times
faster than what you would get with one of these by using Anker's Nano Pro. I'm sure most of you know who Anker is.
I certainly do because I've been using their products for years. Which is why I had no problem accepting
a sponsorship deal from them them. The Anker Nano Pro is their latest charger, and it's
packed with everything you need to get your devices charged up quickly and easily. A single USB-C port on the front means you'll instantly
be able to use it with a wide variety of devices. And with fast charging built in, you can expect them to charge up much quicker. By the time you're watching this, I'd have gotten
back from a trip i took out to California to capture some footage for a largeÂ
video project I'm working on. But past me is still packing for that trip, and you can
bet that one of these will end up in my travel bag. Something like this is a necessity for me. A compact wall wart... (yes, that's what you can call these things) that charges up your phone quickly. And the best part? It costs only $19.99. That's literally almost the same price as Apple's charger! you know, this one that doesn't have fast charging. And plus, these Anker ones come in colors. So... what more do you need to know? Click the link down below and pick up one for yourself today. And huge thanks to Anker for sponsoring this video
and for helping me to pay for all these stupid adapters. At this point, I had spent $60.00 on these stupid cables and, I said "I have absolutely no
way of getting this to work." That is until, until, I came across this pretty awesome video
from the YouTuber "Will It Work?" Where he demonstrated his iPhone being
able to read the contents of a floppy disk. And, he explained how he did it. What he did, was get... One of these right here! This my friends, is a Super Disk. No, not the Sony-Nintendo thing. This is actually a pretty neat piece of history,
because this right here is a super floppy format. Now, you probably know what the Zip drive is, right? The Zip drive, and the Zip Disks, that was a super floppy format. And that was easily the most successful outÂ
of all these formats, but there were other ones. And the Super Disk was another format, though
this was the drive but it read LS-120 disks. And they were very similar to Zip disks, they were a similarÂ
capacity: 120 MB (the Zip drive started at 100 MB.) So, it was a similar capacity. And, you know, compare that to a 1.44 MB high density floppy diskette... you could hold a lot more data on these
and that's why these were pretty popular. But the Super Disk, at least here in the USÂ
and North America, did not perform very well. But, it works great for our purposes because it turns outÂ
that not only can these devices read LS-120 disks... they can also read standard, high density floppy diskettes. Now you might say "okay, how on Earth does that help us?" Well these drives here, unlike the USB floppy
drives, utilize the USB mass storage device class. So that means that you can plug this into
one of these adapters and plug it into the iPhone and the iPhone is able to read the contents on the disk. We're basically tricking the iPhone here into thinking
that this is just a standard, regular old USB flash drive. When it is, in fact, reading the contents of a floppy diskette. Pretty cool, right? The only problem is, this one I bought for I think $60 off of eBay... You see that right there? That's not a USB port. Okay, so I thought "no problem, we can just use some Conversion Technology!" Ah yes, the Computer Clan. They're pretty great by
the way, I've collabed with Ken a few times. But anyways, yeah so this is an adapter that came
included with this drive right here which has a USB end. So, I thought "okay, we can just plug this in no problem" Okay, so let's plug it in here... Nothing happens. I can eject the disk i can put it back in... (which actually is not a good sign byÂ
the way and I'll explain why later on)Â Â but, I can do this all day. Nothing's going to showÂ
up, now we're in the Files app and when you have a USB drive connected through one of these
adapters it's supposed to show up in here. Let me grab a USB flash drive to show you what I mean. Got a USB flash drive here. Unplug it. Plug this in, make sure it's plugged in the right way. And watch what happens... Boom! There you go. "NO NAME" it shows up. So, that's not happening with this here. So IÂ
thought "okay what the heck's going on?" Well, then I tried to use this one here. I
thought perhaps, maybe this one would work. In fact, in the video from "Will It Work?" he used one of these. Well, it turns out that I had made a bit of an oversight. You have to get one of *these* Super DiskÂ
drives, which i also purchased off of eBay. And this right here specifically, is the model SD USB M3.Â
Meaning that it's got a USB Type B port on the back. So you don't have to use any adapters, because all youÂ
got to do is get one of these cables right here: USB-B to USB-A And there it is: MSWIN3112. Which is disk number 2 of this Windows 3.11 installation disk set. We can go over to iDOSÂ here and I've got a Bluetooth
keyboard just to make this a little bit easier for me. And we can- well, actually the first thing we have to do is go to- Let's rotate this back here. So you can tap
on the floppy disk drive icon here, and you want to go to folders. This is how you you mount stuff.
You could type out the command manually but it's a lot  easier just doing it through the graphical userÂ
interface. And right here you get the option to  choose what folder you want to mount so in thisÂ
case we're going to mount this folder right here. And now, you'll see it says that it's mounted as the D drive. So if we go to D here, and type "dir/w" we can see all the contents on the drive! Alright everybody, so i think it's just about
time to begin the installation process. So we've got our 6 floppy diskettes right there. And before we can get into actually installing
Windows 3.1, I do have to explain a couple of things.  One thing I noticed about this drive is it is
a bit finicky and it doesn't always seem to read the contents of whatever disk is in the drive.
I switched over to the Files app here because this is where as you saw earlier that iOS displaysÂ
the USB devices if there are any plugged in to it. So right here, under locations, if we put in theÂ
floppy disk we should theoretically see that come up. But the problem is that doesn't always happenas you're going to see here. So the drive starts to sound like it's reading, and i can already
tell that it's not. Now what I was saying earlier about on the other drive, the fact that we were ableÂ
to eject it when it was plugged into the phone,  the reason I said that was a bad thing is becauseÂ
that's not normally supposed to happen when you have the Super Disk
plugged in to an Apple device. When you use an external drive, for example, Apple's external DVD drive. Or even if you happen to have an older Mac with an internal DVD drive There's no button to eject the disk. You have to doÂ
it from within the operating system so you have to drag the disk icon on your desktop to the trash,Â
which will then turn into the eject icon, I mean I'm sure you guys know all that's not going to explain it. Well anyways, that's why this button doesn't work here because
the drive is expecting you to eject it from the software. The problem is... We can't do that. There is no eject option on iOS here. Whenever we want to eject the disk we can't just press this
here, we have to either use a paperclip and manually do it or just unplug the USB cable from the back
and then we're able to press the eject button. The other problem we're going to have is
with the way that iOS handles USB devices. And just like that, we've got it mounted. But
look very closely at what it says here it says: "Drive D is mounted as local directory..."
and then it lists the entire file path here. Now this is fine, but it poses a problem when
we go to change the disk in the drive because notice how it includes the name of the disk currently in the drive. So, when we go to change that and put in Disk 2,
which is called "MSWIN3112" instead of "MSWIN3111" it's not going to be able to find the files on it. Now the reason it's behaving this way is
because again, it's not treating this disk drive as a floppy disk drive or any other
drive that has removable storage. It's treating this as a regular USB hard drive. Because the disk is determining what the drive shows
up as on iOS, putting in Disk 2 is going to change the name of the drive in iOS, which means
that our mount is no longer going to work. So, a way around this that I've discovered
is to just have 6 different mounts So, we mount Disk 1 through 6 as individual drives And then as long as we make sure that the Super Disk
drive is reading the floppy disk, and that iOS can see the contents of that floppy disk in the file browser, we can
then go to that mount when we're in the Windows 3.1 Setup. Because the whole reason why this is a problem, is
because once we're in the setup we can't leave go back to DOSBOX here, change the mount, and go back into setup. Once we quit... we quit! And then that would make it impossible to complete the setup. So, we've mounted Disk 1 here. And now we're going to eject it. And let's see if we can just put in Disk 2, let's
see if I was right and this just doesn't read at all So we put in Disk 2... nope, I can already tell it's not reading it at all. [video pauses] All right guys, well there was originally a lot of
footage here that I decided to cut out and trust me you didn't miss much. Because it was basically just me trying to get this freaking Super
Disk drive to read the contents of these 6 floppy diskettes. And like i said earlier, this thing is on
the fritz, and it's really a stroke of luck if the drive decides to work and read the contentsÂ
of the disks. Because sometimes it doesn't. Most of the time it doesn't. Sometimes it does. And it was just getting really frustrating. So, I was thinking well, that other Super Disk driveÂ
that i have the, blue one, or at least the one with that blue plastic piece on the front. It doesn'tÂ
work with the iPhone but it works totally fine I mean, the drive itself reads a floppy disketteÂ
every single time, no problem at all, on one of my old Macs. So I was thinking i was looking atÂ
both of these things and I'm like well they're both the same size. I wonder if we could justÂ
take them apart and swap the actual drive itself/ And, that's exactly what I did. I took both ofÂ
them apart and sure enough they use the exact same drive, like the actual part itself. At least
they appear to they look extremely similar they have the same sticker on the front. Just, the oneÂ
that isn't working is newer because the one with the direct USB-B to USB-A, that drive is a newer variant.Â
So all I did was unplug the boards from the backs of both drives, and then take the board from theÂ
broken drive and connect it to the good drive and reassembled it back in the case.
And sure enough, it worked totally fine! We've got power... and the drive already sounds better. Oh yeah, that's working. Oh my gosh, okay, that made my life so much easier! The disc order is going to go: D, E, F, G, H, I. Right down the alphabet, isn't that nice. So okay, we're going to unplug. And I found you have to unplug power
as well, plug power back in. And then once it does its initial startup process here
and there's no more drive activity we can eject it. [disk ejecting] We're going to put back in Disk 1. [inserting disk] So we're in the D drive now and i can type "dir/w". Get a list of all of our files. And i can type "setup" And, it's reading off the drive. This is the moment of truth everybody. Oh my gosh, there it goes! "Welcome to Setup." So we're gonna press Enter we're gonna go with... Let's see here, let's just go with "Express Setup" that's fine. Oh you know what? I don't think Windows- yeah see it doesn't ask you to change the drive letter. So it says "insert Disk 2 into Drive D". Our only hope is for us to put in Disk
2 and just see if it can recognize it on the E drive, because that is
what it's mounted as in DOSBOX. So we'll put in Disk 2 here. This was a complete oversight on my part. I thought the whole time that it was going
to ask you like "oh please insert the disk" and it gives you, like, a file path that you can change. Go to files here. It's in. No, it wants it in drive D. So it's not going to work. I thought this entire time that I was going
to be able to pick a specific directory. You know what, I wonder, does custom setup- Oh wait a second! Oh you have to choose custom! So it copies the files from Disk 1, and
then it gives us this prompt that says: "where is Disk 2 located?" So, all we have to do is swap the disks out. Okay. Set Disk 1 aside, put Disk 2 in,
and connect it back up to the iPhone. If i can find the port here. There it is. And now we just wait for it to finish reading, and we type "E:\" That was it! All you had to do was pick Custom Setup. See, I knew i wasn't going crazy! I was like- I thought that was an option and
it was you just have to do custom setup. Yeah, it's been a little while since I've installed Windows 3.1. Okay, so now we do the same thing with Disk 3. So we'll unplug the data, unplug the power. Plug the power back in, wait for the drive to initialize. Pop out Disk2, put in Disk 3. Reconnect it to the iPhone. And now we do the F drive. And at this point, it should launch us
into the graphical setup. So here it is. And we're gonna type in "Michael"-
if i can spell properly. "Michael", there we go. [Timelapse Music] And oh yeah, that's right Disk 6 does not
get used in this case but there you go. We're going to- yeah make all modificationsÂ
for us that's fine. Okay we're just gonna skip the tutorial so that'll be "ALT+K"- or "ALT+S". "ALT+R" to reboot. Or we can just move the mouse over here and reboot. So we've restarted the app so all we should
have to do now is go to- "cd windows" "win" There we go! Oh my gosh guys. It's one thing getting Windows 3.1 installed on here,
but it's another thing using actual floppy diskettes. I just find this so hilarious. And we did it guys! We did it. We ran into a couple bumps in the road along the way as
you saw but I am so happy that we were able to do this successfully. So here we are. We're in Windows 3.1.
We can do whatever you want to do in Windows 3.1 Do you want to open up the file manager? You can do that. You can browse around- let's open up some- calendar. Let's get some calendar going. Let's open up- gosh what else do we want to do? Can you tell I'm really excited? You know what? let's open up- let's go to accessories here. And let's write us a- oh we're goingÂ
to go into Paintbrush as well So, I can write "Hello world! This document was
typed on Windows 3.11 on my iPhone 6s"- Or 6s- Yeah I'm thinking of the other video that I was just making. Let's go to Paintbrush here. And oh this will be hilarious. So okay, we're gonna select- You know what? We're gonna make some "super cool" art here man. This is just so- oh no that's not what I want to do- This is just so hilarious, like I just can't get over- I mean like I said, it's one thing running Windows 3.1 on your
iPhone, but it's another thing to install it from floppy diskettes. And you guys have seen- I mean this is really
bad, I have no idea what I'm really drawing here. I'm trying to kinda- because you can tap, I was just tapping down
twice which registered as a press and hold like that, there you go. You can also, if you go up here to this menu,Â
you can turn on the mouse buttons down here so  left and right, so you could if you want to like-Â
the pointer right here and grab this yellow and we can hold down the left, and then drag here,
so we can do that too. But there you have it guys I mean, I'm just so happy that we got this working.
This is just hilarious and i think it made for a  pretty great video so if you guys enjoyed it andÂ
if you want to see more like it- well maybe not quite like this one. But if you want more from me,
more videos in this style be sure to give this one a thumbs up and get subscribed down below. Turn onÂ
those notifications if you haven't already to get notified whenever i upload a new video which I doÂ
multiple times every single week on this channel. And as always guys, I want to thank you all so muchÂ
for watching and I'll see you in the next video! [Outro Music]
Well, congratulations: now you can use Windows 3.1 in the wrong aspect ratio on the micro-screen of a mobile gadget :-D
this might not be all that useful - but damn is it cool
It's entertaining guys, just enjoy the ride.
USB floppy drive and a virtual machine right? Uncommon but not really that impressive. Phones are just computers after all.
And i can't even get two of my iPhone 5s's iCloud lock removed. :'(
I love how the si as "retro" as the problem. Most people don't even remember all that came out during the transition from adb, parallel, serial and scsi to usb. The little quirks. Emulation understandably focuses around software so it's very enjoyable to see an emulation problem solved by a hardware bit of history trivia.
Warning sponsored content
I've done it on Android, using dosbox and to play "plumbers don't wear ties". :D It worked pretty well.