How to Play Retro Games on Your Raspberry Pi with DOSBox?

Raspberry Pi Retro Games DOSbox: Many of you are aware that the Raspberry Pi can run Microsoft DOS games. In this article, we will help you to play DOS games on your Raspberry Pi with the DOSBox, an MS-DOS emulator.

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Installing DOSBox | Raspberry Pi Retro Games DOSbox

In this article, we will show you how to put games on your DOSBox emulator and how to play retro games on your Raspberry Pi. To play retro games on your Raspberry Pi, you should have an emulator. In this case, that is the DOSBox, which acts as MS-DOS within your machine and makes old MS-DOS games playable. So that you need to install DOSBox on your Raspberry Pi. You can do it within your Raspberry Pi’s operating system, you can do this by a simple command in the terminal.

Things required for installing the DOSBox | Raspberry Pi Retro Games DOSbox

The first thing you need for this project is your Raspberry Pi and its essential peripherals such as a screen, keyboard, mouse, and a microSD card.

DOSBox is an emulator, not an operating system. You should run it on your Raspberry Pi’s Raspbian Operating System. To know how to install Raspbian on your Raspberry Pi Please click here.

Install DOSBox

Installing DOSBox is very simple and the easiest part of this process. Just open the terminal and type the following command:

sudo apt-get install dosbox

Then you have to hit “y” for the confirmation of your choice.

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Make a folder for your games

Here you have to make a new folder within the home directory called dos-games. You can do this through the GUI or even in the command line with the following command:

mkdir ~/dos-games

How to configure DOSBox | Raspberry Pi Retro Games DOSbox

DOSBox works pretty well straight out of the box, but there are a few things that you have to change and improve the experience.

DOSBox works great out of the box, but there are a few things you can do to tweak and improve the experience.

Set up your controller

DOSBox automatically detects some controllers, but you can set your controller’s button values through the terminal with the command:

dosbox -startmapper

Change the config file

You can open the configuration file in the GUI or with the following command:

nano ~/.dosbox/dosbox-0.74.conf

Now you can change the technical settings, such as the screen size.

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Installing games on DOSBox

You can find ROMs for the DOSBox all over online. In a current standard for emulator ethics, you should own a physical copy of the game you are emulating.

To install the game you need to download the ROM, unzip the file, and move the file to the /dos-games folder. Then run DOSBox and type:

mount c ~/dos-games/yourgame

There “yourgame” is replaced by the folder name of the game you wish to install. All of the games’ files should be in this folder, and it needs to be a folder, not an .exe file. Now type c: in the DOSBox window.

Now you can simply type the name of the game you wish to play and it will run in your DOSBox.

Thank you for reading this post.