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The Icon Bar: News and features: DOSBox on your ROSBox
 

DOSBox on your ROSBox

Posted by Jeffrey Lee on 12:45, 10/3/2004 | ,
 
Peter Naulls and Alan Buckley have been hard at work again, this time producing a lovely port of the 286/386 PC emulator DOSBox. One of the main aims of the DOSBox project was to enable old PC games to run on new PC hardware, and now that it has a RISC OS port we can run them too.

Although I have yet to try it myself (Having had enough trouble trying to get the native version running on a PC), feedback on the Unix Porting Project mailing list has been good - the RISC OS port supports mapping of any RISC OS filing system/directory to a DOS drive, and works in either windowed or full-screen modes. The only real problem is the speed (Or lack thereof), so I'd recommend using an Iyonix if you are planning on playing any action games.

DOSBox for RISC OS
The Unix Porting Project, under which the RISC OS port of DOSBox falls
The DOSBox website, and game compatability list
dosgames.com and dosgamesarchives.com, two of many websites offering old DOS games to download.

Source: Unix Porting Project
 

  DOSBox on your ROSBox
  (14:38 10/3/2004)
  Andrew Weston (17:13 10/3/2004)
    Guest (17:53 10/3/2004)
      Guest (13:14 11/3/2004)
        Guest (08:34 12/3/2004)
          Guest (19:25 15/3/2004)
 
Andrew Weston Message #87598, posted at 14:38, 10/3/2004
Unregistered user Worth trying Elite on!
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Andrew Weston Message #87599, posted at 17:13, 10/3/2004, in reply to message #87598
Unregistered user The worst part of course is having to face working out how to do it ;)
Anybody with any experience of DOS, please post hints here!
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #87600, posted at 17:53, 10/3/2004, in reply to message #87599
Unregistered user The speed of emulation is a little odd.
Running a game like DigDug which should run on the oldest of PCs the speed is about 1/4 of normal.
Yet running a game like Elite 2 Frontier which has much more demanding system requirements, it still manages about 1/4 speed (I'm guessing about the speed but they both seem to be as slow as each other).
Cheers!
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #87601, posted at 13:14, 11/3/2004, in reply to message #87600
Unregistered user Is there an easy way to get it running or have I got to go through the stack of documents that come with it?
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #87602, posted at 08:34, 12/3/2004, in reply to message #87601
Unregistered user The !Help file should give you a good idea of how to get it going, but a summary is:

Copy the game files to a RISC OS directory.
Run !DosBox.
Mount the directory in DosBox. e.g. Mount c /ADFS::HardDisc4/$/Games/DosGames/MyGame
(note you need to use slashes instead of dots and add an extra slash at the beginning)
Change to the newly mounted c drive. Type "C:"
Type the name of the game executable to run it.

You can also mount a directory above and then after typing "C:" type "cd MyGame" to get into the correct directory.
The other useful DOS command is "dir" that gives a list of the directory.

The !Help file also tells you how to set up an application directory to run a game directly in DosBox.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 
Guest Message #87603, posted at 19:25, 15/3/2004, in reply to message #87602
Unregistered user That's great, thanks.
It's a bit too slow on the RiscPC sadly though.
  ^[ Log in to reply ]
 

The Icon Bar: News and features: DOSBox on your ROSBox