How to install DOSBox?

Legacy Installer

Mar 8, 2023 • 2 min read

DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems - primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games is widespread, with it being used in commercial re-releases of those games as well.

Installing

Linux

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If you have not already installed a Linux distribution, see our tutorials on how to install Kubuntu, a beginner-friendly distro.

On most Linux distributions, you will want to install DOSBox from Flathub. First, you need to enable Flatpak and Flathub support on your distribution. See this page to know how to do so. If you are following VirtualHub Setup tutorials from the beginning, we covered enabling Flatpak and Flathub support in Kubuntu in the post titled "What to do after installing Kubuntu?".

After you have enabled Flathub support, you can run the following command to install DOSBox:

flatpak install flathub com.dosbox.DOSBox

To run DOSBox, we need to run the following command:

flatpak run com.dosbox.DOSBox

Let's make it simpler to use. If you are using Bash (the default shell on most Linux distros) or are not sure which shell you are using, run:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following line to the end of the file:

alias dosbox="flatpak run com.dosbox.DOSBox"

And then press Ctrl+Alt+O to save the file and Ctrl+Alt+X to exit nano.

Now close your terminal and open it again. Now you can simply run dosbox to start it.

If you don't like flathub for any reason, you can also install DOSBox from Ubuntu repositories:

sudo apt install dosbox

It is also available in repositories of almost all major distributions except Fedora.

Windows

You can download DOSBox for Windows from its official page (Local Copy). Run the installer and complete all the steps to install DOSBox.

Documentation

You can read the official DOSBox manual here. There is more information on the DOSBox wiki.

Credits

DOSBox is an open source software made possible by its awesome developers. You can visit its website to know more.

Video tutorial

Do you want to follow the tutorial by watching a video? We will post a video on our youtube channel soon.

Archives of this tutorial are available on Wayback Machine.

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