

Scaler choice is largely a matter of personal taste, so use the Video menu options to try a few. To get proper aspect ratio correction and reasonable graphical fidelity at 1280×720, you should set the output to opengl, aspect to true, and select a scaler up to interpolate low-res graphics. Leave the fullscreen setting as false, as you can enable and disable fullscreen mode using DOSBox‑X’s menus or the F12+F keyboard shortcut fullresolution should be left as ‘desktop’.
MAKE DOSBOX FULL SCREEN SOFTWARE
The default config is already well optimised to run DOS software on most systems, but we should make a few adjustments to improve performance on Raspberry Pi’s hardware. In the following steps, we’ll create a config file optimised for playing late-era DOS games on Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB or 8GB RAM. Note that your custom config files need only include lines that vary from the defaults.
MAKE DOSBOX FULL SCREEN INSTALL
We’ll take advantage of that later to help install Windows 3.11. As well as editing your main DOSBox-X config, you can launch DOSBox-X with a specific config file – useful if you wish to easily switch between different OS setups – using the following command-line switch: dosbox-x -conf nf
MAKE DOSBOX FULL SCREEN DOWNLOAD
This is handy, since DOSBox‑X’s configuration has more options than that of vanilla DOSBox.įor this tutorial, we’ve created some config files that you can download from The MagPi GitHub page. The file we’ve just made can be found in /home/pi/.config/dosbox-x and, at time of writing, is named dosbox-x-0.83.3.conf.Īs well as being human-readable and conveniently editable in a text editor, you can modify this long and extensively commented file from within DOSBox-X using the configuration GUI in the main menu. Restart DOSBox-X and tell it to generate a config file that we can later modify in a text editor, based on the program’s default settings and then exit. Type exit to quit and ensure that the config directory, which we’ll need in the next step, is created properly. You can’t paste commands into it from the clipboard, but there are some modern convenience features: tab auto-completes, you can scroll through your command history using the up arrow, and you can add startup commands to a config file. In a Terminal, enter the following: sudo apt install automake libncurses-dev nasm libsdl-net1.2-dev libpcap-dev libfluidsynth-dev ffmpeg libavdevice58 libavformat-* libswscale-* libavcodec-*ĭOSBox-X should open at its Z: prompt. Running your entire GUI at a lower resolution will lighten the load of rendering and upscaling for the emulation and have no adverse effect on games from an era when 800×600 was the norm. Right-click on your display – most likely marked HDMI-1 – and from the Resolution menu, select 1280×720. On the desktop, open the main menu, go to Preferences and select Screen Configuration. Tweak your graphicsĪssuming you’re using a standard 1920×1080 display with your Raspberry Pi, you’ll find some more demanding DOS software struggling at full resolution, particularly if you have DOSBox-X configured to use OpenGL and aspect ratio correction. conf files for specific programs to better match their requirements and automatically run commands. While our generic config file should handle most DOS software well on Raspberry Pi, you can also create separate. This tutorial and our template config files presume you’ll keep everything in a /home/pi/dos/ directory, so be sure to change any paths if you’re using a different username or dos directory names.

The floppy and cd directories will house disk images which we’ll be able to switch between in DOSBox-X. Let’s create the directory structure that we’ll use to house the software we’ll run through DOSBox-X: mkdir -p dos/ It also has a sophisticated graphical interface to help you manage tasks such as configuration and virtual disk-swapping.ĭOS emulation: you’ll need Create your DOS directories Forked from the original DOSBox emulator, DOSBox-X has more precise hardware emulation, supports a wider range of software, and can effectively run more DOS-related operating systems (up to Windows ME).
