Making retro DOS gaming simple - the standalone DOSBox Pure Unleashed is out now

By Liam Dawe - 20 Oct 2025 at 10:29 am UTC

DOSBox Pure Unleashed is a standalone fork of the classic DOSBox to run DOS games on modern systems, based on the libretro core. Giving you an all-in-one fully featured way to easily play the classics on modern Linux, macOS and Windows.

It was originally announced quite a few years ago, but on October 18th the developer announced "DOSBox Pure Unleashed 1.0 Preview 3" which is the "first public release of DOSBox Pure Unleashed based on version 1.0 Preview 3 of the core".

With an impressive and long list of features, this really should make playing classic DOS games near painless on practically any system. Especially with the easy menu interface to load up games from all sorts of file types, the on-screen keyboard, automated controller mapping, save states, major audio support and much more.

Check out their video on it below:

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Really great to see this get a proper up to date release. However, it seems currently there may be some problems with the audio output on certain Linux distributions. Hopefully the issue can be tracked down and promptly fixed. Since it's all open source I imagine it won't take too long.

It's available via the GitHub or the itch.io page.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Tags: Native Linux, Emulation, Misc, New Release, Open Source, Retro

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About the author - Liam Dawe

I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked 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.
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1 comment

Leahi84 1 hour ago

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I wonder why the official dosbox takes so long to receive updates? It's been 6 years. Was it abandoned?

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