Anyone familiar with DOSBox software?

Pumpkinslinger

I was sitting here the other night looking at all the old computer games I have that I can no longer play because newer operating systems won't allow them to work. I figured that someone, somewhere, must have a solution and quickly discovered DOSBox. It is a DOS emulator made for exactly my purpose. A couple reviews I found were positive. I haven't downloaded it yet, even though it is free. I was just wondering if any of you folks have used it.

slimjim

Pkslinger, looks like you are leading the way. I'd love to get my WWII Corsair flight simulator back up and running. Charge on.

Pumpkinslinger

Slim, I'll keep you posted!

gelandangan

If it is for game, you may want to try to use MAME mamedev.org/
They emulate old arcade game ROM on modern computers.
I have a great time playing Frogger with it.

DallanC · Site Admin Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 3572 Location: Utah

Yea I have and use DOSBOX quite a bit, even have a copy of it that works on Android phone (lol).

Its safe, fairly easy to use. I primarily use it with a single game currently, so I added a batch file on launch that just runs the game directly. But you can set up a simple dos menu to kick off any one of several games if you choose. Oldschool batchfile programming!

Once you get it installed you need to "mount" a directory as a virtual "C:\" drive. I do it as follows (run the DOSBox 0.74 Options.bat to set settings):

Quote::

[autoexec]
mount C C:\dosbox\games
C:

In my case, my game "Settlers" is in a subdirectory of C:\dosbox\games (ie: C:\dosbox\games\settlers\), so once C: gets mounted properly, the game is now within the virtual path: C:\dosbox\settlers\.

Because I'm lazy and I only run one game, I just have the config shown above in quotes, followed by:

Quote::

cd settlers
call serfcity.bat

That would mount C:\dosbox\games as my virtual C:\ drive, then it would change to the settlers subdirectory and call the bat file to launch the game. Technically, I could map the entire "C:\dosbox\games\settlers\" to be C:\ and then just launch serfcity.bat directly... but I'd have to undo that if I ever added a 2nd game.

-DallanC

DallanC · Site Admin Joined: Jan 18, 2005 Posts: 3572 Location: Utah

One more thing, some old games work fine in windows with some tweaks... without dosbox. I've got several that run fine with some special settings on the executable (color scheme, compatibility modes etc etc).

-DallanC

Pumpkinslinger

Thanks Dallan!

I've gotten started playing with it. Trying to remember all the old DOS stuff. I actually taught that stuff for a night class at the local community college but that was almost 25 years ago.

PaulS

Get your old dusty computer out and replace the outdated windows software with NewDOS. Then you can have a dos computer for all your old software and even use the printer when you want to.
You can even get on the internet with a couple different browsers.
There is support for long filenames and big hard drives too.
The software is free and comes bundled with related software.