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DOSBox Pure for RetroArch aims to make retro DOS gaming real easy

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Want to play old DOS games easily on whatever Linux machine you're using? RetroArch now has a new fork named DOSBox Pure and you can give it a test now.

There's various launchers out there and guides for running DOSBox but the simplicity offered by RetroArch for retro stuff is great. Having that same ease of use available for DOSBox sounds pretty fantastic to me. DOSBox Pure has a lot of nifty features too like loading from zip files, mounting from inside zip files, save states and rewinding, controller mapping, cheats support and quite a lot more. It's a nicely advanced fork of the original.

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Want to give it a go yourself? You can now, as the Libretro team announced that it's ready for public testing along with a version for desktops and also Raspberry Pi (Arm7) so you could do a little DOSBox gaming easily on your fancy RPi setup - something I will admit I need to now try out.

Installing the test build is a simple case of downloading the correct release build, and then extracting the two files into your cores folder. You can usually find that on Linux somewhere like "/.config/retroarch/cores/". After that it's available to load into RetroArch directly and you can test away.

DOSBox Pure itself can be found on GitHub.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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slaapliedje Dec 24, 2020
Quoting: ageresNice! I've just tried it with few games. It works great, has controller support, quick saves, etc. It allows to select an .exe in a .zip archive in case of there are several executables. Though there is an inconvenience that functional keys (e.g. F2 and F4 for saving/loading) may be used by games.

It's available in AUR as libretro-dosbox-pure-git.
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w1fYE-iRb2iv-7St5gYLw00i6y3N3H36
Guess what game this is.
Whoa, what game is that? (and who wrote on a 12mhz 286 in 1992?)
ageres Dec 24, 2020
Quoting: slaapliedjeWhoa, what game is that?
Prehistorik 2.
slaapliedje Dec 24, 2020
Quoting: ageres
Quoting: slaapliedjeWhoa, what game is that?
Prehistorik 2.
Nice! I will have to try it on my Atari PC4 (it is a 286@12)
Larian Dec 25, 2020
Quoting: agereshttps://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w1fYE-iRb2iv-7St5gYLw00i6y3N3H36
Guess what game this is.

Skyrim.
ugly Dec 26, 2020
Quoting: Larian
Quoting: agereshttps://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w1fYE-iRb2iv-7St5gYLw00i6y3N3H36
Guess what game this is.

Skyrim.
Since it's been released on almost everything, it's not totally unbelievable that Bethesda would eventually release Skyrim for DOS. But still not Linux.
slaapliedje Dec 27, 2020
Quoting: ugly
Quoting: Larian
Quoting: agereshttps://drive.google.com/uc?id=1w1fYE-iRb2iv-7St5gYLw00i6y3N3H36
Guess what game this is.

Skyrim.
Since it's been released on almost everything, it's not totally unbelievable that Bethesda would eventually release Skyrim for DOS. But still not Linux.
Haha, sad but true. Maybe we can get it ported to the Atari VCS. It technically runs Linux... but then most non-MS consoles run a form of BSD and yet Skyrim doesn't run on all BSDs...
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