I have to admit, DosBox is a magical tool. It transports you back into time. Different times, they weren’t better, but things certainly changed. If you happen to be a longtime computer (Personal Computer to be precise) user, you might remember the old days, when playing advanced games involved messy configuration and hours of experimentation to get games to run correctly on your particalur piece of hardware. And then Windows 95 came, and most games just stopped working entirely.
Let me tell you, that’s one thing I certainly don’t want to go back to. And you don’t have to. DosBox is a handy little tool that emulates all those “good old” DOS pecularities. And it does this surprisingly well. Obviously, you need a computer that’s a hundred times more powerful than the one you originally played the game on. But don’t worry, most computers these days will suffice for even the most advanced 3D game of the heydays.
The trouble though, for those who have never had the joy of working in DOS or who have never seen a command line (try it out: windows key+r for run and enter “cmd” as command), is that a prompt is a great source of mystery. This is what your basic prompt looks like (you might need to click through to get the idea):
But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Here’s the entire tutorial of how to get that game you’ve always wanted to play, working on your machine. This tutorial is Windows centric, but DosBox runs on pretty much any operating system, so it should be useful for every one.
1. Get and install DOSBox
This is the easy party, go to the DOSBox download site and pick your flavor. Once the file is downloaded, install the program. In the case of Windows, you’ll have yourself an executable that can be double clicked to get the installation started.
2. Basic setup (don’t worry it’s not rocket science)
Depending on the exact game you want to run, you might have it somewhere in a directory (make sure it is extracted) or it might be on a CD-ROM. Put the disc in your drive and make a note of the drive letter. If the game is somewhere on your harddrive, make a note of the entire directory name (so, starting with the drive letter, and all the way up)
One more thing you probably want to do, is create a directory, which will be used to store game files, such as savegames, configurations, etc. This will be mapped to a virtual C drive later (don’t worry about it right now), so I like to create a dir somewhere called “cdrive” or “c”. Make a note of its full path, too.
As an example, I will show you how to run the original 6 CD version of Wing Commander IV. The game is on a CD in drive I, DosBox is installed on drive H and I’ve created a directory inside the DosBox installation:
(note that there is already a directory “WC4″ created on a previous run of the application, the first time, the dir will be empty)
3. Start DOSBox
If the installation did go right, this will be the easiest step. Find DosBox in the menu and execute it. You should see the startup screen:
Possibly, a second screen will have opened, depending on the startup option you choose (noconsole version or not). At any time, you can switch between full-screen and windowed mode by pressing alt-enter. Keep the screen windowed for now, but once a game is running, you probably want to switch.
4. Mount the drives
Dosbox creates a virtual file system. A file system, like the thing you see in explorer, but one that only exists within dosbox. By default, there is only a Z drive present, which is used for starting dosbox and which has some tools present. Don’t worry about those for now.
The first thing we need to do now, is let dosbox know, which drives and directories we want to use. Let’s create 2 virtual drives. One C drive, which points to the our empty directory. And a D drive, which holds the game.
Type in the following to mount the C drive:
mount C <your C directory>
Replace <your C directory> with the directory you created in step 2. In my case that would be:
mount C H:_gamesDOSBox-0.72cdrive
You should receive a message that the directory was mounted. One important note: if you have a directory that contains a space, you should put quotes around it. Eg:
mount C "C:My documentsMy C drive"
Now use the same command as before to mount the D drive. For instance:
mount D "E:mygame"
There are some tricks you might need to get the game running, but those are for another post. For instance, if you want to make the program believe that drive D is a CD-ROM drive, you should add “-t cdrom”. Eg:
mount D "E:mygame" -t cdrom
This will probably be enough for most games, but if it’s not, try the “intro” command. Also take a look at the dosbox website if the game is supported and if you need special options. And you can always ask me, I like a challenge.
5. Start the game
This is the trickiest part, because every game is different. In case of Wing Commander IV, I just had to switch to the D drive:
D:
And execute the game (WC4 in this case). If you don’t know the exact command, try to look in the manual, or execute “dir”. This will produce a list of files. At least one will end in “.exe”, “.com” or “.bat”. Try to type in that name, press return and see what happens. One of those should launch the game.
If you can’t figure it out, ask me. I’ll post a little more about the subject, so it would be nice to have some direction.
Oldskool dreams
Or how to use DosBox to feel young again.
I have to admit, DosBox is a magical tool. It transports you back into time. Different times, they weren’t better, but things certainly changed. If you happen to be a longtime computer (Personal Computer to be precise) user, you might remember the old days, when playing advanced games involved messy configuration and hours of experimentation to get games to run correctly on your particalur piece of hardware. And then Windows 95 came, and most games just stopped working entirely.
Let me tell you, that’s one thing I certainly don’t want to go back to. And you don’t have to. DosBox is a handy little tool that emulates all those “good old” DOS pecularities. And it does this surprisingly well. Obviously, you need a computer that’s a hundred times more powerful than the one you originally played the game on. But don’t worry, most computers these days will suffice for even the most advanced 3D game of the heydays.
The trouble though, for those who have never had the joy of working in DOS or who have never seen a command line (try it out: windows key+r for run and enter “cmd” as command), is that a prompt is a great source of mystery. This is what your basic prompt looks like (you might need to click through to get the idea):
But lets not get ahead of ourselves. Here’s the entire tutorial of how to get that game you’ve always wanted to play, working on your machine. This tutorial is Windows centric, but DosBox runs on pretty much any operating system, so it should be useful for every one.
1. Get and install DOSBox
This is the easy party, go to the DOSBox download site and pick your flavor. Once the file is downloaded, install the program. In the case of Windows, you’ll have yourself an executable that can be double clicked to get the installation started.
2. Basic setup (don’t worry it’s not rocket science)
Depending on the exact game you want to run, you might have it somewhere in a directory (make sure it is extracted) or it might be on a CD-ROM. Put the disc in your drive and make a note of the drive letter. If the game is somewhere on your harddrive, make a note of the entire directory name (so, starting with the drive letter, and all the way up)
One more thing you probably want to do, is create a directory, which will be used to store game files, such as savegames, configurations, etc. This will be mapped to a virtual C drive later (don’t worry about it right now), so I like to create a dir somewhere called “cdrive” or “c”. Make a note of its full path, too.
As an example, I will show you how to run the original 6 CD version of Wing Commander IV. The game is on a CD in drive I, DosBox is installed on drive H and I’ve created a directory inside the DosBox installation:
(note that there is already a directory “WC4″ created on a previous run of the application, the first time, the dir will be empty)
3. Start DOSBox
If the installation did go right, this will be the easiest step. Find DosBox in the menu and execute it. You should see the startup screen:
Possibly, a second screen will have opened, depending on the startup option you choose (noconsole version or not). At any time, you can switch between full-screen and windowed mode by pressing alt-enter. Keep the screen windowed for now, but once a game is running, you probably want to switch.
4. Mount the drives
Dosbox creates a virtual file system. A file system, like the thing you see in explorer, but one that only exists within dosbox. By default, there is only a Z drive present, which is used for starting dosbox and which has some tools present. Don’t worry about those for now.
The first thing we need to do now, is let dosbox know, which drives and directories we want to use. Let’s create 2 virtual drives. One C drive, which points to the our empty directory. And a D drive, which holds the game.
Type in the following to mount the C drive:
Replace <your C directory> with the directory you created in step 2. In my case that would be:
You should receive a message that the directory was mounted. One important note: if you have a directory that contains a space, you should put quotes around it. Eg:
Now use the same command as before to mount the D drive. For instance:
There are some tricks you might need to get the game running, but those are for another post. For instance, if you want to make the program believe that drive D is a CD-ROM drive, you should add “-t cdrom”. Eg:
This will probably be enough for most games, but if it’s not, try the “intro” command. Also take a look at the dosbox website if the game is supported and if you need special options. And you can always ask me, I like a challenge.
5. Start the game
This is the trickiest part, because every game is different. In case of Wing Commander IV, I just had to switch to the D drive:
And execute the game (WC4 in this case). If you don’t know the exact command, try to look in the manual, or execute “dir”. This will produce a list of files. At least one will end in “.exe”, “.com” or “.bat”. Try to type in that name, press return and see what happens. One of those should launch the game.
If you can’t figure it out, ask me. I’ll post a little more about the subject, so it would be nice to have some direction.
Enjoy the game!