2022-06-01
I was following the Qemu guide for Windows 95 and was greeted with
the error qemu-system-i386: -localtime: invalid option. Conceivably this
relates to the version of Qemu I am using (7.0.0) rather than whichever version
that documentation was written for (the fact this is the first version of a
major release suggests that might be correct).
I got the image to boot by changing the -localtime option to rtc base=localtime instead. The OS boots and seems to run fine, though it does spit
out some other warnings. The full command I used to run the VM was:
qemu-system-i386 \
-netdev user,id=mynet0 \
-device ne2k_isa,netdev=mynet0 \
-hda win95.qcow2 \
-soundhw sb16 \
-m 64 \
-cpu pentium \
-vga cirrus \
-rtc base=localtime \
-fda disk01.img \
-cdrom Win95_OSR25.iso \
-boot a \
-soundhw pcspk
Where disk01.img is a Windows 95 boot floppy and
Win95_OSR25.iso is the OSR 2.5 release of Windows 95 - both from
WinWorldPC.