DOSBox Staging Guide (Linux)

 DOSBox Staging is an emulator forked from the original DOSBox, but with the aim of introducing modern features such as support for multiple monitors. You can see a more complete list on the website. Unless you're running a very old setup, Staging is the obvious choice for a DOS emulator. This guide will introduce you to the basics of setup and use.

Installation: Acquire the program from the website and install it. Launch it and input the following command:

config -wcd

This will create a default configuration file, which we will need later. Where exactly the file is created will depend on your OS.

Basics: For now, return to DOSBox Staging. To use DOSBox effectively, you need to understand mount commands. These commands tell the program to treat a directory on your computer as if it were a HDD, a CD-Drive or so forth. The structure of these commands is command|virtual drive letter|real directory path. For example:

mount c "/home/jamie-aln/DOS/"

This command would mount "/home/jamie-aln/DOS/" as the root of a virtual Drive C. Any DOS software you ran after this point, when looking for hard drives, would see this as Drive C. The quotes included around the directory are only necessary when dealing with spaces, or filenames with more than 8 characters, which DOS was not designed to support. To tell DOSBox to treat a directory like a CD, simply append -t cdrom to the end of the command. For more details, see the wiki.

Try mounting a virtual drive now, and then access it with this command:

c:

As anyone familiar with DOS would know, this is the standard way of changing drives in DOS. In fact, many DOS commands will work. To navigate between folders in DOS, the first command you need is cd (short for "change directory"). Additionally, you will need dir and dir /w to actually see the files inside a folder. dir will provide files in a list, and denotes folders will the <DIR> tag, while dir /w presents files in a tabled view, and wraps directories in square brackets. Once you've mounted your virtual drive and accessed it as shown above, try moving into a sub-directory, like below:

Z:\>mount c "/home/jamie-aln/DOS/"
Drive C is mounted as local directory /home/jamie-aln/DOS
Z:\>c:
C:\>dir /w
Volume in drive C is CDRIVE
Directory of C:\
[SUMMON]
C:\>cd SUMMON
C:\SUMMON>

To execute a file, just type the filename.

That covers the basics of using DOSBox.

Configuration and auto-exec: Remember that configuration file you made? Time to find it. This file is your default configuration, which DOSbox-Staging will load each time it starts. It is possible to create game-specific files, which we will get to next. Take a moment to look over the options available, and remember that you can delete and recreate this file if you need to, so no need to stress about messing it up.

When ready, scroll right to the bottom of the file, to where it says [auto-exec]. Anything written below this will be inputted into the program automatically on launch. Repeat the mount commands you did earlier into this file, and then restart DOSBox-Staging and see if they work.

But what if a game requires a very specific set of options to work? Or what if you wanted to create a shortcut that just starts a specific game straight away? For this, we need custom configuration files. To start, simply copy your default conf file and rename it to something relevant. Keep it in the same directory as the default file.

For this guide, I created dosboxmm3.conf, which starts Might & Magic III. Proceed as you did last time, configuring any options as needed, then input the necessary mount commands at the bottom of the file. Additionally, you will need to add commands to actually start the game. To run an executable file, you just need to input the filename:

[autoexec]
# Lines in this section will be run at startup.
# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

mount c "/home/jamie-aln/DOS/"
c:
cd MM3
MM3.COM

Next, create your shortcut. Any executable text file or launcher should work, provided the following command is run. I typically make a shell script like this:

flatpak run io.github.dosbox-staging -conf "dosboxmm3.conf" -no-console -c exit

With any luck, you've just created a shortcut that starts DOSBox Staging with a specific configuration file.

GOG games: Chances are, if you're a casual fan of DOS games then you're using an install provided by GOG.com. You can modify these installs to use DOSBox Staging, as I've covered on this blog already.

Conclusion: The only goal with this guide is to introduce DOSBox, and more specifically its Staging fork, to more people, and make it more accessible. This incredible software is vital in preventing these old games from being lost to us, so it's important to make it understandable.