How to use DOSBox to play old PC video games

Original date: June 28, 2009 6:34 PM by sonnik

If you're like me, you have a box full of old PC CD Roms of games from the early to mid 90's. These games were probably written with DOS in mind; the Windows operating systems of the day were not game oriented. In Windows 95 and Windows 98, you had the options of bypassing Windows at bootup, creating a PIF file, creating a boot disk, or exiting out of Windows altogether. While cumbersome, these options worked.

As Windows has matured, its support for games improved - but not for these older DOS based games. In fact, with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and now Window 7 - these games are pretty much unplayable, at least directly. If you've been tempted to dig into some classics from your PC gaming collection, you may want to look at DOSBox.

DOSBox bosts near perfect compatibility for at least hundreds of familiar DOS Games. Games from the id Software library like Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake are compatible. But there's nothing to stop you from playing games from the mid 80's on, including floppy disl based games from the IBM PC vs. Apple vs. Commodore vs. Atari days. Be sure to browse repositories around the Web that include these antiquated games, also known as Abandondware.

From DOSBox's FAQ:

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, joystick, modem, etc., necessary for running many old MS-DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any MS-DOS or PC-DOS (referred to commonly as "DOS") application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early development.

DOSBox offers support for Windows, and various Linux distributions. The setup for Windows is pretty intuitive, so I'll focus this article on Linux. In this case I'm using Fedora 11. DOSBox is not hosted in any of the well-known repositories for Fedora, but you may find an RPM package for installation. Unfortunately, the RPM packages I found had a dependency on some other library from some other package. So rather than get caught in "RPM Hell" I opted to compile from source (tar.gz). This was actually pretty painless for me. Compilation on your system may error for missing libraries, in which case you'll have to check your "configure" errors to find out what standard library/development packages you'll have to download from yum.

Once the tarball is downloaded, it's the standard untar, configure, and compile...

tar -xzvf dosbox*gz
cd dosbox-0.xx
./configure
make
sudo make install

Of course, you'll need to adjust the directory name for the correct version of that tar.gz that you've downloaded. If your regular linux user isn't in the sudoersfile, you'll need to issue the make install command under the root account by other means.

Before you fire up your freshly-compiled dosbox you'll probably want to create a directory somwhere to install your old DOS games. Write down this directory path, you'll need it later! Note, that if you download some type of package (such as a RAR, 7Z, or tar.gz) that was never really used in the DOS days, you'll probably want to decompress it on the native Linux side - as you may not have access to a DOS-based application that can do this decompression in the DOSBox emulation side. Also, note that some games (such as Wolfenstein 3D, as shown in the video below) also ran a further decompression and installation through an install program.

To start DOSbox, simply type...

dosbox &

Note that your input devices may be "hijacked" until you type

exit

into your DOSBox window. Be sure to check out the man page for Dosbox...

man dosbox

There are quite a few options for further customization (fullscreen, screen captures). There are plently of options for emulating a CD-ROM, should the application require it. While the embedded video doesn't quite capture this, the games will obviously run much more efficiently than you remember them. Sound and graphics are emulated (generally) without issue.

Leave a comment