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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9 comments

Leahi84 9 hours 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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Tevur 7 hours ago

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Right, the original DOSBox will no longer be actively developed.
It's good as it is, but if you want something better, something more modern or plainly something other you can get one of the forks like DOSBox Staging or this shiny new DOSBox Pure.

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legluondunet 6 hours ago

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I'm impressed by 3DFX emulation Dosbox-Pure can perform on Windows 98! stability and velocity.
And you can even scaling 3dfx rendering.

This emulator break a wall in 3DFX emulation on W9x.

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Caldathras 6 hours ago

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Reading through the itch.io page was fascinating. It would seem that DOSBox Pure is much more than a DOS emulator. It would appear to be a VM as well. It states that you can install early versions of Windows in it (3.x, 95 & 98 were mentioned). And, as @legluondunet pointed out above, it also has 3DFX emulation. It can run games from within ZIP and ISO files as well. Impressive.

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vertigo 4 hours ago

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Running games and ISOs from within zip files is the biggest feature for me. I wonder if you could just drag and drop eXoDOS game zips with pure unleashed? If that worked AND it mounted the game ISO in the zip then it'd be an A+++ fork.

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Calinou 2 hours ago

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It states that you can install early versions of Windows in it (3.x, 95 & 98 were mentioned)

This is possible because Windows ran on top of DOS until 98/Me. It's only with Windows NT/2000 that the dependency on DOS was dropped, which is why DOS mode was also removed in that version.

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d3Xt3r 2 hours ago

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@Caldathras I wouldn't call it a VM. Even the original DOSBox supported running Windows btw, and this was mainly possible because old versions of Windows were all based on DOS, so it's not much of a stretch to emulate the extra hardware bits needed to run Windows.

I also wouldn't call it a VM in the modern sense as you can't just boot any random x86 disk image (like how you can do so in VirtualBox), nor does it make use of any type 1 hypervisor acceleration (Hyper-V in Windows, KVM on Linux).

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Purple Library Guy 60 minutes ago

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I have a couple of games that with luck would really benefit from this. Definitely interested.

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Linux_Rocks 11 minutes ago

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C:\GAMES\FUN.EXE

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