Want to run DOSBox?

No matter if you have a collection of classic computer games, a recent revival of interest in some of the ones you played as a kid, or a new interest due to reviews you’ve been seeing (such as the recent Night Hunter Game Quickie); you’ve probably at one point or another thought about emulating DOS. 

Emulating DOS and the games for it is not as straight forward as emulating NES games though. The NES just required you to put in a cartridge and press power so of course the emulators just needs you to open the proper ROM file, but DOS was a prompt based computer OS and requires those same prompts as well as the proper video and sound settings for each game. These things can be a little intimidating at first. But never fear! It isn’t as hard as you might think. 

First we’ll start with the quick and easiest approach for those that don’t want or don’t care to have a full DOS experience.  Let’s check out how to use DOSBox with a custom UI aka User Interface or Graphical Interface or FrontEnd (whatever you want to call it). 

While there are a number of choices for a UI I’m going to go over using D-Fend Reloaded since I find it to be very clean and easy to use and it is the one I use on a daily basis. 

Download D-Fend Reloaded 

First we of course need to start with installing a game/getting D-Fend to recognize it. To do this for a Freeware or Shareware game you have downloaded all you need to do is drag and drop the ZIP file of your game into D-Fend. It will them unzip the folders and place them accordingly. If D-Fend automatically recognizes the game, you’re done and you’ll see it pop up. But sometimes you’ll get a little box pop up and you’ll need to do a little more work. First select the option to pick a pre-made set up and see if your game is in the drop down list. If it is, now you’re done, if it isn’t you’ll just need to select the installation file and game file. These are pretty obvious most of the time and D-Fend limits your choices to the proper .bat or .exe files. For most older games you’ll just have the one .bat file to pick, later games will also have an .exe install file which will be called install.exe (shocking). If you’re really unsure do a google search or just experiment. 

Now if you actually own the game the method is different but just as painless. First put the media in the CD Rom or Disk drive (if you still have one of those), and then click on Profile. Then select Install From Source Media and then use the drop down menu at the top of the new window to pick where your source media is located. From here you’ll just need to follow the instructions to install as the appear on the screen. D-Fend should place all the files in the proper folders so you’ll find the game in your menu once the install is finished. 

Of course now you can just double click on the game and begin playing! Or can you? Well yeah you can, but you may want to do more. You can right click on the game and then click Edit. Here you’ll have a big list of options to change. If you’re unsure I’d leave most of these alone but I have a few I’d suggest messing with before playing your game. First click on DOSBox Settings and unclick Close DOSBox when program closes. This helps with some games that require a prompt to run (so the game launches but then closes waiting for a prompt) and just allows you to end a game but still use DOSBox. Then go to Graphics and unselect Start in Full Screen. Some games run better in a windowed mode and you can always go full screen if you want. If you know what CPU speed your game needs select CPU and set that now but D-Fend may already have the proper speed selected or Auto will work fine. 

Also! You can run DOSBox on its own via D-Fend Reloaded. So you can technically have the best of both worlds but with a nice UI for organizing your games. You can also of course use all the key commands while playing the games so familiarize your self with those. 

Key Commands!

Now if you want a more authentic DOS experience you can just run DOSBox without a UI and learn all the prompts. While I could go through that I’ll leave this to the wonderful Sarah aka Pushing Up Roses. 

Visit her site! pushinguproses.com 

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