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.
