I LOVE this site!!! Wish I had found it a long time ago!

Anyway, I have quite a few old games that I actually bought when they were new (yes, I'm old... :bleh: ). My husband has a Linux machine with a 3.5 disk drive and most of the games have 3.5 disks (I do have some with 5.25, but I am not going to even try to find a drive for them right now).

Last night we were trying to see about playing these old games using DosBox for Linux.

We can't seem to get it to work right.

Can anyone give me a step by step guide to do this? These games have multiple disks... I have quite a few, but the two I have brought in from the garage are: The Island of Dr. Brain (bought that for my son before he was old enough and then it got stuck in a box and forgotten...so it's never even been played!!), and Freddy Pharkus (can't wait to play that one again!)

HELP?

Thanks!!!

Don8life
"Recycle yourself, be an organ donor"

If you're installing them in DosBOX, you might come across a few errors- I'm not too terribly sure. However, if you try mounting the drives you're using to install the game (for example, A: and C:) you ought to be fine, unless some strange write to disk error pops up.

Have you already tried that? If so, I'm afraid that you need to run either a quick windows or dos shell at the startup from a CD or some such thing. I'd have to research it a bit to figure that all out.

Hope I helped!

Cheers,

Fae

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(don8life @ Mar 24 2007, 02:12 PM) [snapback]284799[/snapback]</div>I haven't used dosbox for linux as I only run windows at present , but what exactly did you do to try and install them and what happened? what errors did you get etc.

with windows it is pretty easy to install and run games most of the time but as linux uses a different file system and I have not used it much I might not be able to work out whats wrong but I will try :)

Without knowing what you have exactly done and what specifically is the problem, we cannot help you.
Until you post more detailed information about your problem, I can only refer you to this FAQ.

Please post a more detailed description of your problem including any and all error messages you encountered.

Also, describe where exactly did you unpack the games and what commands have you entered in DosBox (exact syntax, please; it's important).

If you have made any modifications to your DosBox.conf, please post a copy of its contents.

PS. If I were you, I'd use a floppy imaging program of some sort (don't know any for Linux, sorry) to backup the disks into disk images. DosBox also happens to support using floppy images instead of real floppies.

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(the_fifth_horseman @ Mar 26 2007, 01:03 PM) [snapback]285032[/snapback]</div>Uh, that reminds me of the old backup program that came with ms-dos... ^_^ I did backups of all the nice games... security reasons, you know? :whistling:

i know there s "wine" in linux, which emulates windows. maybe you can try running windows version via that one?

I didn't. Just don't remind me how pissed off I was when I found out that my original Battle Isle and Lords of the Realm disks don't work anymore measly three years after I bought them!

Really really old games were played right from the floppies back at the day, but I guess you're talking about installing the games from the floppies into the hard drive. Anyway try:

Or the Linux equivalent, you'll know better than me, for example something back in my mind tells me that the '\' should be a '/', and I don't really know whether the floppy drive's letter is A in Linux as in DOS/Win, or whether drives are designated with letters at all in Linux, actually I don't think so. DOSBox's readme will tell you how to mount drives.

After that you only have to write the commands you'd write in DOS. Most likely you'll want access to the hard drive, you'll have to mount at least one directory in it as a virtual hard drive in DOSBox, for example «mount c c:\dosgames» or again rather its Linux equivalent. Again the DOSBox wiki and readme (within download/installation) explain everything.