Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
One thing people have criticized about Linux for years is the lack of games. The truth is, there are ways to play hundreds, even thousands, of games, if your expectations are reasonable. No, you often can't play the latest and greatest rendition of “Halo” or “Call of Duty” or “Madden NFL Twenty-Whatever”, but there were literally thousands of PC games available in the DOS days, and the ones that were fun back then? – they're still fun now. The graphics may be dated, but many still have great gameplay and terrific stories, and are well worth your time. To run these older games, you will need to download and install DOSBox.
The easiest way to install DOSBox is via the command line. At a terminal screen, type in: sudo apt-get install dosbox type in your password when prompted, then let the install complete. You can also get DOSBox via Synaptic Package Manager, or by using the Ubuntu Software Center, as explained in more detail in Everyday Ubuntu column #2 (FCM#130). DOSBox looks pretty intimidating to the eyes of a GUI user these days, but it’s actually pretty simple to use. That said, the configuration and options available can get quite deep. However, for most DOS games and programs, only a small handful of commands and options are really essential.
We’ll start out our DOSBox experiment with one of the great games from the end of the ‘DOS Era’, one that offers an insane amount of gameplay, a truly gigantic gameworld, and graphics that WERE cutting edge at their time. It’s (drum roll) … DAGGERFALL! Daggerfall came out in 1995, right about the same time that Windows 95 started taking over the MS-DOS/PC world. It could be run in Windows 95, although it was often problematic to do so, and the game itself was originally bug-ridden and crash-prone. As time went on, and updates were made, the game became much more stable. It came in a genuinely eye-catching hologrammed box (I still have a couple of the original boxes somewhere), and promised hours of open-ended gameplay. It also had a central storyline, which the player was perfectly free to ignore, if so desired. Daggerfall does have some mature material in it, so it’s not ‘kid-friendly’, although it does have a kid-friendly mode. A great thing about Daggerfall, particularly for our current purpose, is that publisher Bethesda Softworks has made it FREE to download and play. Not a demo or shareware version, the whole game, posted on Bethesda’s webpage.
To start our adventure of installing and running Daggerfall on Linux, first go to Bethesda’s Daggerfall download page, at https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/daggerfall. Click the button that says ‘Download the full game’, and save it to a location on your local drive. Your browser will probably default to saving it in the Downloads folder under your Home directory, which should be fine. The file is a Zip archive (DFINSTALL.ZIP), which is an archive file format natively supported by Linux. Once the download is complete, use your File Manager to go to its location and double-click it. That should normally open the Archive Manager. You’ll see DFCD and DAGGER folders inside the Zip. You can extract to wherever you decide to save it either by clicking the Extract button at the top, or (my preferred method) drag and drop the two folders to an open folder in File Manager. You can ignore the PDF file for now, it’s for installation instructions that won’t apply to us. For convenience, we’re going to extract these 2 folders to a folder under our Home directory. Create a folder in Home called DOSGames. Remember for future reference, these folder names are case-sensitive in Linux. Extract or drag-and-drop the two folders. Now we’re ready to get into DOSBox and to actually set up and play the game.
Launch DOSBox from the Dash. You’ll be greeted with a Z: prompt. Unlike real DOS machines where the operating system almost always resided on the C: drive, DOSBox keeps it out of your way on the Z: drive. It’s also worth knowing that DOSBox does not run MS-DOS or PC-DOS by default, but the freeware alternative FREEDOS. Also, note the line at the beginning showing your emulated sound card configuration. It will normally default to SET=BLASTER A220 I7 D1 H5 T6. We’ll get into what this all means a little later. We’re first going to ‘mount’ our C: drive to allow us to run Daggerfall as though it were installed to a C: drive. Mounting is a process, familiar to old Linux hands, that used to be a lot more hands-on in older versions of Linux, but is now almost always handled in an automatic fashion. DOSBox, however, requires us to learn or resuscitate an old Linux command-line skill. Mounting a media drive makes it available to use under your Operating System. In the case of DOSBox, remember you are actually running a FREEDOS virtual machine in a window on your system. Let’s get started by typing in mount c ~/DOSGames -freesize 1024
This tells FREEDOS to make a C: drive from the folder DOSGames, under the Home directory (that’s what the ~ stands for, note that as it’s a handy shortcut for other Linux commands). Freesize is setting the amount of free memory emulated. You’ll need to install the game first before you can play it. Within DOSBox, type in cd DFCD and hit Enter. Now type in install and hit Enter. The game’s installation routine will start – go through the installation process until it completes. The game will want to know your sound card configuration. Remember the SET BLASTER line when DOSBox launched? The parameters represent your sound card settings in your DOSBox session. In the DOS days, we had to configure games to coincide with hardware/firmware settings for our sound cards. Most computers of the time did not have sound support beyond a basic PC speaker built in, and the standard for sound was set by Creative Labs with their original SoundBlaster add-in hardware card. Setting the SoundBlaster parameters was part of configuring DOS to support the card, usually done via a line in the file AUTOEXEC.BAT that was executed when a DOS machine was booted. Sound cards had an address (A220), and interrupt vector or IRQ (I7), a DMA channel (D1), and in some cases a high DMA channel (H5). T6 refers to the Type of card, here it is a 16-bit SoundBlaster.
In the case of Daggerfall, the game can’t run without the CD inserted in the CD-ROM drive, but we don’t have a physical Daggerfall CD, now do we? No problem, we just have to mount the DFCD folder as the D: drive. Type in: mount d ~/DOSGames/DFCD –t cdrom -ioctl –label Daggerfall This tells FREEDOS to make the DFCD folder into a D: drive, and to label it as ‘Daggerfall’. Without the Daggerfall label, the game program won’t find the emulated CD-ROM properly. A lot of games, fortunately, won’t require this (or even mounting a virtual CD-ROM at all, for that matter). Also, note the ‘Daggerfall’ label IS case-sensitive.
Now that the D drive is mounted up and the game has been installed, you can change to the game directory in DOSBox. It should default to installing under the folder dagger. Move to that folder: cd dagger and hit Enter. Now type in: fall.exe z.cfg and hit Enter. The game should now begin, and you are ready to set up a new character and to explore Daggerfall! If you’re installing to a laptop, like I did, it’s worth noting that you will probably need an external mouse, as it’s almost impossible to control the game on a touchpad. If you get killed by a giant rat right off the bat because you tried to play on the touchpad, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Other old DOS games that I own and have running under DOSBox include Wing Commander I and II, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Eye of the Beholder, Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession, Aces of the Pacific, Aces over Europe, Epic Pinball, Superhero League of Hoboken, TIE Fighter Spellcasting 101, SU-25 Stormovik, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, VGA Tetris, Subwar 2050, Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, NASCAR Racing, Biomenace, Jill of the Jungle, Commander Keen, Xargon, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, and X-Wing Fighter. That’s a pretty good variety of great games, and still a short list in comparison to all the games that were created to run under DOS. Most can be run without having to mount a CD drive, so they’re simpler to set up than Daggerfall was. Just mount your DOS games directory to C:, change to the desired directory with the DOS cd command, then run the game. Next month: Part 2 of Retro Gaming!