DOSBox on your Raspberry Pi

DOSBox is today one of the standard programs of most Linux distributions. So it is also a matter of fact, that this DOS emulator is also available for your Raspberry Pi. The installation is quite easy.

Installation

We use our prefered packet manager to install the latest version of DOSBox:

sudo apt-get install dosbox

Now we have everything that we need to launch our old DOS program, but it is a good idea to preconfigure your DOSBox installation.

Configuration

You can find your DOSBox configuration file in a hidden directory inside your home folder. The configuration file is named with the current version number of the DOXBox:

cd /home/pi/.dosbox
vi dosbox-0.74.conf

With an editor we can change the configuration. The configuration file is good documented. I work with a german keyboard layout, so I change this:

keyboardlayout=gr

It is strange, but here gr stands for german and not de like normal language shortcuts…
The next thing to configure is to automatically mount a directory as C: drive. For this we create a new directory in our home directory:

mkdir /home/pi/dosgames

You can automatically mount this directory as C: during startup with this line of code::

MOUNT C ~/dosgames

Now we can copy all our DOS games into that folder. You can create mor directories and mount it as other drives!