My first exposure to computering™ was with an Amiga 500, closely followed by a 386 PC, which I used for a long time. Because of this, I have a soft spot for games like Flashback and Lost Vikings and for programs like Norton Commander.
Since all this can be used in DOS, and since that was the first operating system I learned to use, it’s time to replicate that experience.
Cool things I passed by
There are two projects that I checked out before building my own setup.
Dosbian is a full Debian based Linux distribution utilizing Dosbox for creating a full DOS environment.
Freedos is a complete, free, DOS-compatible operating system that can run on hardware, and they provide a lot of software for that OS, which can be optionally installed.
Both of these projects helped me a lot to create my own setup, but I didn’t want to use them directly. I wanted a setup that I can use on my normal laptop, which is running Debian 12 currently, and if I want, I can use it on a Raspberry Pi. This means a full distro and OS is not what I needed.
DOS(box)
Just to be clear if you’re interested in what DOS is:
DOS is a single-tasking, single-user operating system with a command line interface. It is designed to be an environment (for the Basic programming language and) to run programs easily.
The easy for everyone part is the key here. I don’t have any experience with Basic and currently I don’t want to go back to Turbo Pascal.
If you want a really good talk about DOS, check out this video: Why DOS Was (and Is) a Thing
But how can a mere mortal use DOS in 2024 (or in 2004 even)?
Dosbox is the answer. It’s an emulator program that emulates an IBM PC-compatible computer running a DOS operating system. It’s highly available and has a lot of interesting versions.
It is software that I’ve been using for 20 years, primarily for retro games and even for my first programming language in school (hello Turbo Pascal again, I won’t talk about you anymore, it’s not your time, go away and close the door!).
Installing Dosbox Staging
I chose to use Dosbox Staging because Dosbox, as far as I can tell, is not actively developed anymore.
Staging has another really good feature: it has CRT filters that don’t look like your dog’s vomit. They are really great, and I’m happy because I don’t have a CRT display.
Another reason I chose Dosbox Staging is that this fork seemed the best for spending my time in DOS. You see, Dosbox can be used as an environment for running old programs and games; you don’t need to use the DOS CLI. But that would go against the experience I aimed to achieve.
If you want to use Dosbox, you’re lucky; every distro and its grandmothers have it in their package repository. Dosbox Staging is another beast; the best way to use it is to download it and add the binary to your path.
So the time has come (again) to get Ansible out of my pocket and start the automation. I created a role that downloads and unzips Staging to /opt, then creates a symlink in /usr/local/bin pointing to the binary. If you think I chose the wrong folders, there is no need for a fistfight; please write a passionate letter about it, and we will keep it in the refrigerator.
For my efforts I got this:
No need to panic; it only needs a little configuration.
Dosbox configuration
For this project, I created a git repository. This repository holds the configuration files, the Ansible playbook, and most importantly, a folder called c. This represents the C: drive in DOS, and it’s where I put all the programs and games I want to run. It is symlinked to $HOME/dos/c. Keep this in mind.
The only thing I need from the configuration is to set up the autoexec section, which has the same function as the autoexec.bat in DOS.
If you don’t know what autoexec.bat is, please go back in time to 1998, visit my computer class, and ask me what happens if you delete it. I’ll show you every time. Basically, it will run on every startup. For example, there was a time when it was used to set up the DOS environment before starting Windows 95.
This is how the autoexec section looks like:
@echo off
mount c ~/dos/c
c:
This is a batch script that mounts the C: drive and changes to it. The @echo off is there to suppress the output of the commands. The mount command is used to mount a directory as a drive, in this case the C: drive. The c: command changes to the C: drive.
The mount command is specific to Dosbox; it’s not a DOS command, and its second argument is a Unix path. This can look confusing at first, but these built-in commands make handling emulation very easy.
The C: drive
The main directories will look like this:
.
├── BIN
├── GAMES
└── PROGS
This folder holds all the programs I want to run. For example, I wanted to use Dos Navigator (for that Norton Commander feel); all I needed to do was download the program and put it in this folder. That sounds like a good job for Ansible.
The following programs are in this folder:
- Edit (MS-DOS Editor)
- Dos Navigator (File Manager)
- Dos Shell (Another Manager)
- Vim 7 (Text Editor, because it’s funny)
- Dosfetch (System Information)
Really, writing batch scripts that don’t even support conditions with Vim in DOS is the highest level of computering™. Let me introduce you to RUNNER.BAT. If you pay attention, you will see it later as well.
BIN
Programs that I copied into the mounted drive in the C:\PROGS path are not available as commands. There is a PATH environment variable; I added the C:\BIN folder (sorry directory, you dork) to it in the autoexec config block.
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\BIN
This means what you think it means: every executable file will be available system-wide. There are no symbolic links in DOS, so I had to write batch files to start the programs.
C:\BIN\DS.BAT will start the Dos Shell program, and can be started with the ds command.
@echo off
C:\PROGS\DOSSHELL\DOSSHELL.EXE %1
And for bling-bling I added dosfetch to the autoexec section, check it out:
GAMES
This folder holds all the games I want to play. If running them needs some special configuration, I will write a batch file for them.
Lost Vikings, before the first run, needs to be configured, so I wrote a batch file for it.
@echo off
set setup_lock=setup.txt
if exist %setup_lock% goto exe_check
setup
echo "Setup complete" > %setup_lock%
:exe_check
runner VIKINGS.EXE "Lost Vikings"
Yes, still no conditions.
So the time came for reminiscing on Flashback, and finally playing through the first level. Just let me enter cd GAMES\FBACK and type fb, then…
