Play old DOS and Windows games on Android

How to run DOS emulator on Android so you could play old computer games on your Android phone or tablet?


Well, first of all you have to install that emulator. Playstore has a bunch of DosBox flavours, some paid, some free. I first wanted to install gDosBox, but the description says it is based on aDosBox, so lets install aDosBox. First run – everything seems fine. Enter command to open drive c:. Yes, with your fingers, on the keyboard, send the text command c: to the command prompt and press enter. That’s how things are done in DOS. Now enter dir to see the file list. By default, DosBox obviously mounts the root of internal SD-Card as drive c:. Well, let’s create a DOS folder and throw in some old DOS game, like Battle Bugs. By the way, I use Far Manager to work with files. Don’t be afraid of it, despite the old-fashioned look, which personally I greatly enjoy, two-panel file managers is the best thing that happened to personal computers in the last 25 years, and not those coloured pictures for faggots. After copying the game, go back to DosBox, change directory to Dos where our game is and launch the executable. I know that the name of the game executable is bugs.exe. Type it and press enter. The game launches, and I even was able to get to the screen where you have to enter some text from the printed manual to confirm you got a legal copy. Yes, that’s how copy protection was done back in the day: you could copy the game, but it will ask you for certain text from specific page in the printed manual, which you normally don’t even think of photocopying. Well, DOS games work fine in the emulator. But that’s DOS games, and Diablo needs Windows. Let’s try to run an old version of Windows in the emulator – download Windows 98 Lite image. Put the w98.img in the root of your internal SD-Card. Now we have to mount it somehow. This is where aDosBox keeps its configuration file. Go to this folder and make a backup copy of said file. Now completely remove the contents, replace them with this,

[sdl]
output=surface
priority=higher

[autoexec]
mount e /sdcard
e: imgmount c e:\win98.img -t hdd -fs fat
boot -l c

save and restart DosBox. If you done everything correctly, aDosBox will automatically boot Win98. After it boots, you may savor your nostalgia. That’s basically all you can do, as the system is barely usable, and to play games, you need to install shitload of drivers, DirectX, etc, and the speed will be even slower. Unplayable. After you’re done with nostalgia, you may remove the whole thing. The only DOS Emulator for Android to run a Windows game somewhat decent is DosBox Turbo. Turbo means it’s about 30% faster than normal DosBox. Unfortunately, DosBox Turbo is not free and you have to pay for it. Install and run. Seems working. Now we have to mount a Windows image and a game image, in this case Diablo. Download a special fast Win95 build and Diablo image. Copy it to the device root folder. In my case I have two files – w95.img which is Windows and d.img which is Diablo. This time we will not fiddle with the config file. But we still have to mount the images somehow, and thus we create a w95.bat file. In case you don’t know, batch files are command files, very similar to scripts. This is an example of such file.
@echo off
imgmount d c:\w95.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,16,600
imgmount e c:\HDD_2Gb.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,64,1023
BOOT -l c
Echo turns off commands display. The second line mounts the Win95 image file. Don’t change it. The third line mounts a 2Gb game image, specifying the drive geometry. Without going into detail, correct geometry values for popular image sizes are the following.
256MB image: -size 512,63,16,520
300MB image: -size 512,63,16,600
512MB image: -size 512,63,32,520
1GB image: -size 512,63,64,520
2GB image: -size 512,63,64,1023
As my Diablo d.img image file is 1 gb, I change the filename in the third line to d.img and the geometry values to that of a 1gb image. The last line starts Windows.
@echo off
imgmount d c:\w95.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,16,600
imgmount e c:\d.img -t hdd -fs fat -size 512,63,64,520
BOOT -l c
Copy this file to the same place where the w95 and game image files are. Go to DosBox Turbo. We must tweak it a little bit. To enter the menu, swipe the screen from top to bottom. In the settings, enable 3dfx and ISA PnP support, also change the processor, core and cycle values to those recommended by the windows or game image author. Restart DosBox. Now let’s try to run our batch file by entering win95.bat Aha! That was to test your eyes! Not only I entered the file name incorrectly – win95.bat instead of w95.bat, but also misplaced them. The output shows DosBox Turbo mounts Download subfolder as root of drive C:, not the root of the SD-Card. Well, let’s transfer the files from root to download and try again, entering correct batch name this time. The images are mounted and Windows starts to boot on your Android. It may popup a lot of windows requiring your attention, like setting up time and date and installing drivers, act accordingly, until Windows finally boots. Select your computer, select drive D: where we mounted Diablo, enter the game folder. Faggots worked in Microsoft as early as 1995, and for some unknown reason they decided to hide extensions for known file types. This leaves us with two seemingly identical entries in the file list, one of which is application executable, and the other is just an icon. Run the executable. Diablo is loading. Diablo loaded. Now I will try to show you how the game actually runs. I’ve got a relatively old Tegra3 tablet with FullHD screen. Let’s see. Yes, the sound has some lags – it can be fixed, but I’m too lazy to investigate. As for the game itself, keep in mind I use an Android screen capture utility which is a resource hog itself, but even with it the game runs fine. Without screen capture, the game speed is good. Fix the sound, and you can enjoy old good Diablo on your Android. There is also some kind of DosBox Turbo manager, but I didn’t even look at it. For me, it’s easier and faster to do everything manually, at least it develops you mentally, unlike those beautiful pictures for faggots. So go on and figure out how to fix the sound issues, use the manager or the virtual joystick yourself. Click the link in the description to find all the code shown in the video. Good luck.