Les Pounder lives in the past – he loves old computers and can remember a time when Snickers were Marathons.
MS-DOS is where this writer cut his teeth with PCs. Before that it was the Commodore 64 and Amiga. He felt at home at the command prompt, and it explains why he loves Linux so much. What if we want to relive the heady days of DOS prompts, IRQ configuration and batch scripts?
Dosbian 2.5 is the latest version of the popular DOS emulation distro and the first to support the Raspberry Pi 5. We can run Dosbian on any model of Raspberry Pi 3, 4, 400 and 5. Under the hood we are running Debian Bookworm, the same as the official Raspberry Pi OS. On top of that is a version of DOS that we can use to run our old games and apps. We’re not limited to just DOS; we can comfortably emulate up to Windows 98.
Dosbian has three versions of the x86 DOSBox emulator. The default is DOSBox, but there is an alternative in DOSBoxece, which is older but runs DOS games better. Lastly there is DOSBox-staging, the most modern version, which runs most games. For those of us that grew up on Lucasfilm Games and point-and-click adventures, ScummVM is included, Scumm (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) being the system used to create those games.
Flashing Dosbian to a microSD card, we booted up our Raspberry Pi 5 and were instantly greeted by the DOS prompt. Ah, good memories! From here we can try out the included shareware games, found in the Games directory. We spent a while ‘testing’ Doom to ensure that it worked correctly. All was good.
How can we get our own games in Dosbian? Luckily, we have a Linux OS under the hood. Mounting a USB drive full of games was easy and from there we used the mount command inside of Dosbian to match the USB device under Linux to a drive letter for DOS. We also had Star Wars X-Wing on CD-ROM, a game we poured many hours into as teenagers. Using imgmount, we mounted the ISO as a drive, ran the installer and were soon fighting Imperials – after we remembered how to control the X-Wing. Initially we forgot to run the installer, running the game without sound. The installer checked our virtual soundcard, configured the IRQ/DMA and so on, and w
