![]() My intent here is just to automatically mount the C drive using the specified location for my DOS applications every time I start DOSbox. I don’t need to relive the DOS experience on the old hardware as much as I want to pick up and play the old games from time to time and I want to make it as painless for me as possible. I want to recreate the basic DOS experience that I “enjoyed” for launching particular games that were enormously fun. That thing is automatically mounting the folder location for all my DOS based applications. Thankfully the default config file is incredibly well documented, better than any sites out there I found, so I am just going to explain how I did a thing. The HowĪlthough I know that there are launchers out there for such things, I wanted to understand how to actually use DOSBox properly with the config file. At the very bottom of the default config is where you can automate some magic. The portion of the config I am most excited is the “” section. If you need some changes for a particular application and know your early x86 based hardware, it’s real easy to make tweaks. The beautiful thing about this default config is that it is basically good for most use cases. Any site that tells you to look in the “.dosbox” folder is out of date. The first trick is to find where the DOSBox config file is sitting. DOS isn’t really for productivity, it’s just a platform to launch the games of days past. ![]() I decided that I wanted to auto mount a particular directory with my games on it. I am far too lazy to do all that work just to play a few minutes of a game to get that hit of nostalgia I was craving. Just like it is 1991 all over, popping in that 5¼ inch floppy into the family 286 you can play a game for the short time before you are told that it’s a school night and you can’t stay up late again because you are unbearable in the morning when you don’t get enough sleep… The Goal Next change the directory into the location of the game you desire to play. List the contents by typing “ls” or the DOS native command “dir”. ![]() To navigate to the C drive is super easy C: You may be storing your DOS applications elsewhere so be conscientious of that. To explain this, I am mounting as the “C Drive” the location on my home folder specified. I mounted a specific directory in my home folder with my appropriate wares. The first step is to mount the location of your DOS goodies. If you don’t, it’s still pretty simple, so long as you have a good grasp of file systems. If you have some familiarity with DOS from times past, this will be pretty simple. I highly recommend reading through the Intro to familiarize yourself with how to use DOSBox. When you run this, you will be presented a familiar DOS prompt from days past. Just a quick search in your menu and you will see “DOSBox-Staging” available. It looks like the last commit on DOSBox was in June of 2019.ĭOSBox isn’t a large application and is ready to be use in short order. It’s not a rewrite, but a continuation and improvement on the existing DOSBox codebase. sudo zypper install dosboxĪs an important note, in openSUSE Tumbleweed, the installation of DOSBox installs DOSBox Staging which, according to the project page this is an attempt to revitalize DOSBox’s development process. I can’t speak for any distributions outside of openSUSE, but I imagine it is pretty similar. The installation should be straight forward in most distributions. Multiple stops at various sites with various issues told me it was time to take notes and make a little blathering about it. Hard to find solid information regarding Linux so I did a bit of digging. ![]() As I was playing with DOSBox, I couldn’t help but think how much I was enjoying the experience and started thinking, “Can I easily integrate these games in my openSUSE Tumbleweed, Plasma Desktop experience?” The Basics I got the “hankering” to play some old DOS games, specifically Oregon Trail and Sim Ant for some unknown reason, perhaps it was head injury induced, I can’t say for sure. Games like Descent and Doom have been ported to Linux so there is no benefit in running the DOS version. That said, I do have many happy memories of playing DOS based games like Space Quest, Police Quest, Simant and many others. I much preferred Commodore 64 because it was far more colorful, later the Amiga, because it was far better in sound and graphics and I got my first x86 based system in the Windows 98 years where I only used DOS to do gaming. I was never really into DOS all that much in my early computer years. DOSBox is an excellent DOS environment that you can enjoy on modern Linux systems. ![]()
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