Category: Dosbox

Abandonware

LeMenu 3.1 (1988) – Installation on Dosbox

As the name suggests, LeMenu is a menu making package that includes a directory manager. Menus and sub-menus can be created, you can run Batch-files from the menu directly as if these were normal programs and even a basic activity log is kept. The menu itself supports up to 4 different levels and can hold 26 items each, an item for each letter of the alphabet, which gives the possibility of setting up more menu items than the largest collection of software running within Dosbox that I’ve ever seen.

Since it’s obviously MS-Dos based and can run batch files from the menu directly, makes it perfect for launching games and other applications from within Dosbox.

LeMenu needs to be installed on a hard disk, but this does not necessarily have to be the boot disk. Since it doesn’t need a lot of space, I’m using a standard 256MB disk image. Though LeMenu could easily be run from a 10MB or even 5MB disk, I like a little more space to install other software on. It really is moot as hard disk images can just as easily be mounted through the use of batch files and keeping programs and games on their own hard disks does make it easier to backup or make changes.

The installation on Dosbox: (I’m using the path c:\temp on my local hard disk for these steps)

  1. Create or download a hard disk image for Le Menu. You can download pre-made images from this link
  2. Download the 1.44MB floppy-disk installation image for Le Menu Version 3.1 and copy it to your install folder. You can find a 360kb floppy disk image of Le Menu version 3.0 here.
    1. Optional: Download MS-Dos version 3.31 floppy disk to later add optional MS-Dos functionality. If you’re only going to be using Le Menu for the launching of games and applications only, you do not need this. For other DOS functionality, this is needed.
  3. To make sure you always have the Le Menu drive attached to Dosbox, modify the dosbox.conf file and add the following to the bottom

    @imgmount f C:\temp\lemenu\lemenu.img
    @path=z:\;f:\lemenu;f:\;f:\games;
    @f:
    @cd lemenu
    @le menu

    Note: Depending on your host operating system, the location of the dosbox.conf file varies. If you’re unsure of where to find it, please check this article
  4. Start your Dosbox emulator. You can ignore the message that it’s unable to change to lemenu. It’s not installed yet
  5. Go to the F-drive by typing f: and press enter. We need to copy the file command.com from the z:\ drive which is automatically mounted when Dosbox is started by typing: f:\copy z:\command.com and press enter
  6. To connect the Le Menu install disk (and optionally the MS-Dos 3.31 disk), enter the following: (Assuming you’re using the c:\temp location) imgmount a c:\temp\install\LMflop.img c:\temp\install\dos3-1.img -t floppy
    You should get the message:
    Drive A is mounted as c:\temp\install\LMflop.img
  7. Go to the A-drive and start the installation by typing a:\install and press enter

The first screen tells you that you have to complete the installation (DUH!), but on the second screen you can change colours and the way LeMenu looks by pressing the C key. If you think the colours look fine, just press enter or the F1-key if you modified any.
The third screen is fairly important for the installation. The first line You can type in whatever you want. It will be displayed on the main screen and is only changeable by reinstalling Le Menu.
The second and third lines are the locations where you want Le Menu installed and where Dos boots from. Since we mounted the Le Menu drive as disk F, we will put the letter F in both the boxes.
The rest of the lines are optional.

After everything is entered, press the F1-key to save and continue. The installation will now copy the Le Menu files to the F-Drive. If you want to install the MS-Dos extras, switch floppy images with the CTRL-F4 keys when the install program asks for the optional floppies. If you choose not to, just continue the installation. When the installation is successful, reboot Dosbox by pressing the CTRL-ALT-Home buttons simultaneously.

Le Menu should now start when you start Dosbox and the result should look something like this:

LeMenu 3.1 by Bartel Software

Version 3.1 is curtesy of Silent700
Version 3.0 is curtesy of WarsawPact
Thanks guys for your time and effort to make sure this nostalgic piece of software is still available!

Dosbox

Windows ME on Dosbox ECE, even on Raspberry Pi4b

If you search the web you’ll find a lot statements that the installation of Windows Millennium or Windows ME on Dosbox is just not possible, that it will not work, that it will not even complete setup, no matter what.
I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t found differently. Nowadays it is indeed possible to run Windows ME on Dosbox and, even though it’s not supported, it is fairly stable. At least more stable than I expected and a lot more stable than Windows 98SE on the same environment.

Now the question is “Why? Why would anyone want to install an OS that was (and still is) considered the second most horrible operating system ever released by Microsoft? (The first most hated is Windows Vista) The answer to that is simple: Because people said it could not be done while there is no logical reason for this not to work. Also I never developed a bias against it as I didn’t use it at the time. I had a dual-boot Windows 98SE/Windows 2000 workstation and before I finally got around installing ME, Windows XP was launched.

Anyway, below a quick and dirty video of Dune 2000 on Windows Millennium running on a Raspberry Pi4b with Dosbian 1.5 install. One of these days I’ll modify this post with a how-to installing Windows ME on Dosbox.

Abandonware

Command & Conquer – Play in Dosbox

When Command & Conquer was released in 1995 and its companion with a different tone Command & Conquer: Red Alert in 1996, it was something of a revolution in the RTS game play. Of course Dune II had been released a few years before, also developed by Westwood studios, setting the tone for many RTS games that followed in the years to come. (This includes Warcraft, which eventually let to World of Warcraft, DOTA and many others that a lot of people still play daily nowadays)

Now that the remastered edition is announced for 2020, the 25th anniversary of the game, I got interested again in the original Dos game. Since the original is 2CD’s (GDI and NOD) and later an expansion was added named: Command & Conquer: The Covert Operations, I thought it was time to create a quick batch file to load which ever disk instead of having to type the commands in Dosbox every single time.
Batch files are the reason that I’m using non-standard commands and add-ons to Dosbox, so here the bat-file that I’ve written for C&C:

:menu
echo 1) C&C: GDI
echo 2) C&C: NOD
echo 3) C&C: Covert Operations
echo 4) Exit to Dos
choice /C:1234 /N Option:

if errorlevel = 1 goto GDI
if errorlevel = 2 goto NOD
if errorlevel = 3 goto COVERT
if errorlevel = 4 goto EXIT

:GDI
imgmount d “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD1.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD2.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-Cov.iso” -t cdrom
d:\C&C
goto menu

:NOD
imgmount d “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD2.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD1.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-Cov.iso” -t cdrom
d:\C&C
goto menu

:COVERT
imgmount d “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-Cov.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD1.iso” “c:\temp\dosbox\e\cd\C&C\C&C-CD2.iso” -t cdrom
d:\C&C
goto menu

:EXIT
exit

The CD’s can be cycled with CTRL-F4 if C&C asks for it.

Dosbox

My Dosbox setup

I’ve been a big fan of Dosbox ever since I found out about it in 2004. Dosbox has been around since 2002, I just didn’t find out about it until later. At the time virtualisation was still in its infancy and virtualising MS-Dos to play old games on was not that easy and fairly memory intensive. Also Windows XP did not run most of the MS-Dos games I wanted to play. For a few years now I’m mainly using Dosbox-X or Dosbox-ECE as these bring more features than the standard Dosbox. My base configuration has not changed significantly over the last 10 years.

For my normal utilities I’ve added a line to the dosbox.conf which mounts a normal folder located on my physical machine. The path I use is normally c:\temp\dosbox\e and I’m mounting this with:

@mount e "C:\Temp\Dosbox\E"

The reason I’m mounting a folder instead of an image is that this way I can very easily add and remove software and have this available with just a quick reboot (CTRL-ALT-Home) of Dosbox. The standard folder structure within the mounted e-drive is:

The directories cd, floppy and hdd keep .img files for the respective formats. The dos directory keeps a full copy of MS-Dos 5.0 with various additional little utilities added from FreeDos. The reason it’s MS-Dos 5.0 is that Dosbox reports its version as being 5.0.
One of the extra little utilities that is not included in Dos version 5.0 is “choice.com”. This handy little utility wasn’t included until Dos version 6 and is still available in Windows 95/98. Choice.com is basically indispensable for creating interactive batch files. I’m using the FreeDos version which is called “choice.exe”.

The full autoexec part of the dosbox.conf is:

[autoexec]
@echo off
@mount e “C:\temp\Dosbox\E”
@e:
@path=z:\;e:\;e:\dos;e:\cd;e:\floppy;e:\hdd;

The reason I’m putting all these folders in the path is that I keep my batch-files with the images.