DOSbox– Emulator for running old DOS applications in Linux

Do you want to play the old DOS games or applications? I do and I believe that there are still lots of ex DOS users want to run their old applications.

It was my first opereting system and I think I used it at about 25 years ago if I’m not mistaken. I like to remember what I did before especially if I have good memories with it. Playing Digger, Test drive or Lemmings, typing with wordstar, database with Dbase III+, spreadsheet with Lotus 123 or Impress and some utility tools like PCTools or Locksmith. Put in the big floppy disc for booting and replaced it with another floppy disc with the program. Hard disc was very rare on that time. But, I tell you, you were very lucky if you have a PC on that time.

Well, that’s all the folk. Now, there is a emulator named DOSbox that can do that. For more details about the DOSbox emulator you can read it in wikipedia.org

The installation is very easy.

Make sure you are connected to the internet.

Open your linux terminal and type: sudo apt-get install dosbox.

Installation will start automatically.

Installation is done.

Now, you can try to run the dosbox. You can press Alt+F2 and type dosbox or through Applications > Games > DOSBox Emulator.

You will get the DOSbox splash screen.

Emulator is ready.

Now, you need a DOS program to try.
You can download the applications from www.dosgames.com/gameindex.php.

Select any program that you like and download it.

For this tutorial, I selected ‘lemming’ game.

Double clik the file to extract it.
Open the folder and press Ctrl+L to display your current location. You will need this location for ‘drive mounting’.

Before you can run any applications in Dosbox, you have to tell the Dosbox where you put your applications and connect it to a virtual drive. They call it ‘mounting’.

The syntax is: mount your_drive your_file_location.
You can set any drive that you like. I choose ‘C’ drive. My file location can be different with yours. It depend where you put your applications.

In this tutorial my location is: /home/taufanlubis/Desktop/taufanlubis/Documents/games/gamedos/lemmings.

You reduce typing your location using ‘~‘ character.

So, it become ~/Documents/games/gamedos/lemmings.

The syntax will be:

mount c ~/Documents/games/gamedos/lemmings

type: ‘c:‘ to switch to drive c.

Type: dir

To display the directory list.
In dos, you only can run a program with extension .COM, .EXE and .BAT.
As you see, there are 2 files with .EXE, CGALEMMI.EXE and VGALEMMI.EXE.
Since we don’t use an CGA monitor, type vgalemmi.exe to run the application.

It’s run. I key in the option and…….

…whoala…..
You can play again your old dos game.