Tag Archives: DOSBox

Quick Mount in DOSBox under Linux

DOSBox is incredibly handy to run old games. In “DOSBox for Dummies“, I covered basic usage, as well as how to write a Windows batch file to automate some of the more repetitive operations (such as mounting). I also explained how to extend this to games requiring a CD in “Running Games Requiring a CD in DOSBox“.

If your games are all under the same folder, you might want to consider automatically mounting your DOS games folder using a dosbox.conf file. Otherwise, you can resort to scripting via batch files (Windows) or shell scripts (Linux).

For those one-off situations where you just want to try out a game quickly without setting anything up, regardless of where it resides on the filesystem, you can run the following (in Linux) from the folder where your game is:

dosbox -c "mount c $(pwd)" -c "C:"

This is the same method I used in previous articles to pass commands to DOSBox. The only difference is that here I’m taking advantage of command substitution in bash (as seen in “Scripting Backups with bash on Linux“) to pass in the current directory via the pwd command. That way, no matter where your game folder is on the filesystem, DOSBox will start in the right location. Then, all you’ll need to do is invoke the right executable.

Happy retro gaming!

Running Games Requiring a CD in DOSBox

Back in 2009, I had written DOSBox for Dummies, a short and simple article explaining how to get old games running in DOSBox, and how to write a batch file so you don’t have to do this every time. A typical batch file might look something like this:

dosbox -c "mount c C:\prophet" -c "C:" -c "prophet"

That will often be good enough. But if your game needs to access resources on CD, such as Ravenloft: Stone Prophet in this case, then that’s not quite going to work:

dosbox-no-cd

To allow the game to access the CD, you’ll need an extra command to mount the CD drive:

-c "mount d D:\ -t cdrom"

The whole thing looks something like this:

dosbox -c "mount c C:\prophet" -c "mount d D:\ -t cdrom" -c "C:" -c "prophet"

That’s much better:

dosbox-ravenloft-stone-prophet

If you don’t want to pop in your CD every time you want to play, just copy the CD onto your hard disk, and mount that folder instead:

dosbox -c "mount c C:\prophet" -c "mount d C:\STONE_V1.0 -t cdrom" -c "C:" -c "prophet"

That works just as well.