Dosbox is the DOS emulator of choice for many enthusiasts who like to play the old DOS games like -Dave or -Skyroads. Dosbox is crossplatform, and works on Linux apart from BeOS and Mac OS X.

The wget command from the command line will work on the deb URL given above, but not on the RPM URL. An alternative is through the Add/Remove programs or Package/Software manager in your distribution.

Using the package manager is a wise option, as this takes care of the dependencies automatically, instead of you manually find¬ing the necessary libraries. Now start up Dosbox. Usually, it shows itself under the games menu. Now Dosbox works through tlle command line, so you will have to learn a few basic DOS commands to
operate Dosbox with ease.

md <directory name> : Makes a new directory
cd <directory name> : Changes the directory to the named directory
cd : Goes up one folder
exit: leave Dosbox
help: shows help
dir: list contents of a directory
dir/p: lists contents of a directory with a pause after every pagelength
cls: clears screen


Before you start playing games, you have to get a few DOS games. DOS games are available online from several web sites. Another good resource for DOS games is www.abandonia.com.This site has a lot of games that were once commercial games, but since then have been abandoned by the publishers, making them abandon ware. Don't think that all these games have a dated game play and bad VGA graphics. No't all of them are small either. GTA for example is over a hundred MB download. and is a perfectly fun old school game . . Once a game is downloaded. unpack it into a folder. Save all games in sub folders in a single folder. which will makes it easy to run these games from Dosbox.

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Now, when you start Dosbox. the default drive is Z:, which is just a drive that Dosbox uses to start off. You need to mount a virtual drive for you to emulate the games. To do this, type:

Mount c /home/username/games in the Dosbox terminal. Mount is the command to mount a specific drive. C is the drive letter, which can be anything from A to Y within dosbox. and the rest of the text is the path to your games folder. Instead of typing in the entire path. you can also type in Mount C ~/ games, if your home folder has a games folder.

The most common error in this step is that the folder does not exist. Note that Dosbox does not work with folders with spaces in them. and gives occasional errors with folders that have a long name (more than 8 characters). So rename a folder like 'My Games' to 'MyGames'. Also make sure you have not entered Mount C -/home/username/games, because - stands for /home/username. Another thing to check is that you have to get the capitalisations exactly right. So, if the folder name is MyGames, entering mygames will not work.

If you have entered the address properly, you should get a message like Drive C is mounted as local directory /home/username/games. Now type:
CD ddavevga

This changes the drive from Z: to the mounted C. The directory structure here is the same as the directories you can see in /home/username/games. To go to a specific game folder, type:
CD ddavevga

Now either type dave exe, or just dave .

That is it. You can now start playing the game.