PlayOnLinux DOSBox support HOWTO

(Taken from https://www.playonlinux.com/en/topic-8747-Ultima_123_GOGcom_Edition.html, "Friday 11 May 2012 at 10:43" message)

To use the PlayOnLinux DOSBox support for a virtual drive,

• First, you must use some "Wine version" with DOSBox support for your virtual disk, latest is currently 1.6.2-dos_support_0.6;

• DOSBox will get default settings from this support. To override some, you'll need to create a $WINEPREFIX/playonlinux_dos.cfg file; Lines must have the format:

sectionname_settingname=value

For example

dosbox_memsize=16

See DOSBox 0.74 documentation for valid section and setting names.

Remark 1: this file will be sourced, so be sure to single quote values that could be interpreted by Bash; Example

cpu_cycles='max 95% limit 33000'

Remark 2: there's a new set of functions POL_Config_DosPrefixRead / POL_Config_DosPrefixWrite / POL_Config_DosPrefixDelete to manage those files, but they only exist since POL 4.0.18, so if you use them you'll also need to add POL_RequiredVersion "4.0.18" just after POL_SetupWindow_Init.

• The C: drive will be mapped to the virtual disk root, and by default the support will try to map the same drives as the Wine environment. If you don't want the latter, just C: mapping, you can add the pseudo-setting

manual_mount=true

• If there's an autoexec.bat file at the root of your virtual disk, it will be interpreted at the beginning of each DOSBox session in this virtual disk. It's the recommended place to put mount and imgmount statements.

• That should be enough to create working shortcuts on exe files in this virtual disk; The support can tell apart MS-DOS from Windows executables and start DOSBox when necessary.

• You should also be able to create shortcuts on MS-DOS batch (bat) files if they start with an @ECHO OFF line so they're recognized as such (by the "file" command actually). You'll also probably want an EXIT statement at the end of batch files so the DOSBox window closes itself after program exit (unless debug mode is enabled for the shortcut).

• If you have specific needs, like starting MS-DOS com files, or set shortcut-specific initializations, you can create extra batch files and make shortcut out of them.

That's mostly all there is to it. The fact that C: drive is always mapped to the root of the virtual disk sometimes requires some arrangements during installation, like moving some files around back into the root directory of the virtual disk. The Linux-to-DOSBox path translation ("shortizing") in the support is not perfect; Another reason for further arrangements are subdirectories with similar prefix side-by-side, you may also have to give them standard MS-DOS names (8+3 characters) to work around this problem.