Config Dosbox

[Alayna Rother]

Atpresent, DOSBox running on a high-end machine will roughly bethe equivalent of a Pentium I PC. DOSBox can be configured to run a wide range of DOS games, from CGA/Tandy/PCjr classics up to games from the Quake era.

Type INTRO in DOSBox for a quick tour.

It is essential that you get familiar with the idea of mounting, DOSBox does not automatically make any drive (or a part of it) accessible to the emulation. See the FAQ entry "How to start?" as well as the description of the MOUNT command (section 4: "Internal Programs"). If you have your game on a cdrom you may try this guide: =8933

At the beginning you've got a Z:\> instead of a C:\> at the prompt. You have to make your directories available as drives in DOSBox by using the "mount" command. For example, in Windows "mount C D:\GAMES" will give you a C drive in DOSBox which points to your Windows D:\GAMES directory (that was created before). In Linux, "mount c /home/username" will give you a C drive in DOSBox which points to /home/username in Linux. To change to the drive mounted like above, type "C:". If everything went fine, DOSBox will display the prompt "C:\>".

In the DOSBox configuration file is an [autoexec] section. The commands present there are run when DOSBox starts, so you can use this section for the mounting. Look at Section 13: The configuration (options) file

Press alt-enter. Alternatively: Edit the configuration file of DOSBox and change the option fullscreen=false to fullscreen=true. If fullscreen looks wrong in your opinion: Play with the options: fullresolution, output and aspect in the configuration file of DOSBox. To get back from fullscreen mode: Press alt-enter again.

This is can be a problem on Windows 10, if you have display scaling set to a value above 100%. Windows in that case will resize the screen on top of dosbox resizing the screen, which can happen for the output: ddraw, opengl, openglnb, overlay. You can disable this Windows behaviour by enabling a specific compatibility setting:

- Right-click the DOSBox icon and select "Properties".

- Go to the "Compatibility" tab.

- Click on "Change high DPI settings".

- Tick "Override high DPI scaling behaviour" and set it to "Application".

- Apply the changes by clicking on "OK".

Unfortunately, this compatibility option causes some side effects in windowed mode, and in this case you will need to change the resolution in the config/Options file for windowresolution (e.g. 1024x768).

Be sure to mount the CD-ROM with -t cdrom switch, this will enable the MSCDEX interface required by DOS games to interface with CD-ROMs. Also try adding the correct label (-label LABEL) to the mount command, where LABEL is the CD-label (volume ID) of the CD-ROM. Under Windows you can specify -ioctl, -aspi or -noioctl. Look at the description of the mount command in Section 4: "Internal programs" for their meaning and the additional audio-CD related options -ioctl_dx, -ioctl_mci, -ioctl_dio. Try creating a CD-ROM image (preferably CUE/BIN pair) and use the DOSBox's internal IMGMOUNT tool to mount the image (the CUE sheet). This enables very good low-level CD-ROM support on any operating system.

Usually, DOSBox detects when a game uses mouse control. When you click on the screen it should get locked (confined to the DOSBox window) and work. With certain games, the DOSBox mouse detection doesn't work. In that case you will have to lock the mouse manually by pressing CTRL-F10.

Be sure that the sound is correctly configured in the game. This might be done during the installation or with a setup/setsound utility that accompanies the game. First see if an autodetection option is provided. If there is none try selecting Soundblaster or Soundblaster 16 with the default settings being "address=220 irq=7 dma=1" (sometimes highdma=5). You might also want to select Sound Canvas/SCC/MPU-401/General MIDI/Wave Blaster at "address=330 IRQ=2" as music device. The parameters of the emulated sound cards can be changed in the DOSBox configuration file.

If you still don't get any sound set the core to normal in DOSBox configuration and use some lower fixed cycles value (like cycles=2000). Also

assure that your host operating sound does provide sound. In certain cases it might be useful to use a different emulated sound device

like a soundblaster pro (sbtype=sbpro1 in the DOSBox configuration file) or the gravis ultrasound (gus=true).

You may be using too much CPU power to keep DOSBox running at the current speed. You can lower the cycles, skip frames, reduce the sampling rate of the respective sound device, increase the prebuffer. See section 13: "The configuration (options) file"

If you are using cycles=max or =auto, then make sure that there is no background processes interfering! (especially if they access the harddisk) Also look at Section 10. "How to speed up/slow down DOSBox"

This can happen in various cases, like your host keyboard layout does not have a matching DOS layout representation (or it was not correctly detected), or the key mapping is wrong.

Some possible fixes:

Note that if the host layout can not be identified, or keyboardlayout is set to none in the DOSBox configuration file, the standard US layout is used. In this configuration try the keys around "enter" for the key \ (backslash), and for the key : (colon) use shift and the keys between "enter" and "L".

This may happen if Windows thinks that you have more than one keyboard connected to your PC when you use some remote control devices. To verity this problem run cmd.exe, navigate to DOSBox program folder and type:

Lower the priority setting in the DOSBox configuration file, for example set "priority=normal,normal". You might also want to try lowering the cycles (use a fixed cycle amount to start with, like cycles=10000).

See if it still happens if you disable the joystick emulation, set joysticktype=none in the [joystick] section of your DOSBox configuration file. Maybe also try unplugging any joystick/gamepad. If you want to use the joystick in the game, try setting timed=false and be sure to calibrate the joystick (both in your OS as well as in the game or the game's setup program).

First of all, try to find a port of the game. Those will offer a better experience. To fix the graphics problem that occurs in DOSBox on higher resolutions: Open the configuration file of DOSBox and search for:

DOSBox can not harm your computer more than any other resource demanding program. Increasing the cycles does not overclock your real CPU. Setting the cycles too high has a negative performance effect on the software running inside DOSBox.

[-conf congfigfilelocation] [-lang languagefilelocation]

[-machine machine type] [-noconsole] [-startmapper] [-noautoexec]

[-securemode] [-scaler scaler -forcescaler scaler] [-version]

[-socket socket]

Runs the specified command before running "name". Multiple commands can be specified. Each command should start with "-c" though. A command can be: an Internal Program, a DOS command or an executable on a mounted drive.

Setup DOSBox to emulate a specific type of machine. Valid choices are:

hercules, cga, ega, pcjr, tandy, svga_s3 (default) as well as the additional svga chipsets listed in the DOSBox configuration file.

svga_s3 enables vesa emulation as well.

For some special vga effects the machinetype vgaonly can be used, note that this disables svga capabilities and might be slower due to the higher emulation precision.

The machinetype affects the video card and the available sound cards.

A rather unusual example, just to demonstrate what you can do (Windows): dosbox D:\folder\file.exe -c "MOUNT Y H:\MyFolder" This mounts D:\folder as C:\ and runs file.exe. Before it does that, it will first mount H:\MyFolder as the Y drive. In Windows, you can also drag directories/files onto the DOSBox executable.

Sets the name of the drive to "drivelabel". Needed on some systems if the CD-ROM label isn't read correctly (useful when a program can't find its CD-ROM). If you don't specify a label and no lowlevel support is selected (that is omitting the -usecd # and/or -aspi parameters, or specifying -noioctl):

Forces use of ioctl commands. Only valid if mounting a CD-ROM under a Windows OS which support them (Win2000/XP/NT). The various choices only differ in the way CD audio is handled, preferably -ioctl_dio is used (lowest workload), but this might not work on all systems, so -ioctl_dx (or -ioctl_mci) can be used.

Valid on all systems, under windows the -noioctl switch has to be present to make use of the -usecd switch. Enables to select the drive that should be used by SDL. Use this if the wrong or no CD-ROM drive is mounted while using the SDL CD-ROM interface. "number" can be found by "MOUNT -cd".

Basically MOUNT allows you to connect real hardware to DOSBox's emulated PC. So MOUNT C C:\GAMES tells DOSBox to use your C:\GAMES directory as drive C: in DOSBox. MOUNT C E:\SomeFolder tells DOSBox to use your E:\SomeFolder directory as drive C: in DOSBox.

Mounting your entire C drive with MOUNT C C:\ is NOT recommended! The same is true for mounting the root of any other drive, except for CD-ROMs (due to their read-only nature). Otherwise if you or DOSBox make a mistake you may lose all your files. Also never mount a "Windows" or "Program Files" folders or their subfolders in Windows Vista/7 as DOSBox may not work correctly, or will stop working correctly later. It is recommended to keep all your dos applications/games in a simple folder (for example c:\dosgames) and mount that.

You should always install your game inside DOSBox. So if you have the game on CD you always (even after installation!) have to mount both: folder as a harddisk drive and a CD-ROM.

HardDisk should always be mounted as c

CD-ROM should always be mounted as d

Floppy should always be mounted as a (or b)

Display the current DOSBox version and reported DOS version (parameterless usage). Change the reported DOS version with the "set" parameter, for example: "VER set 6 22" to have DOSBox report DOS 6.22 as version number.

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