Configure DOSBox

  
     
   
     
  What you need  
     
  You need to have the latest version of DOSBox available @ http://dosbox.com.  
     
  You can use DOSBox on every machine above a 500 MHz CPU. But the faster your machine is, the better DOSBox will work.  
     
  You also need some DOS games. If you don't still have any old ones, you can get some legally at http://www.dosgamesarchive.com or http://www.dosgames.com.  
     
     
 

Configuration

  
 

If you use Microsoft Windows, you can execute the installer which will create the necessary shortcuts. On other system you'll probably know what to do. After that, DOSBox isn't ready yet:

You need a configuration file. On Microsoft Windows, there will be created one by the installer. You can open it via the start menu. On other systems you'll need to create one by yourself. In that case just run DOSBox and type in the following line:

config -writeconf /path/to/your/new/file.conf

After that you can close DOSBox by typing in exit.
 
     
   
     
 

After you opened the configuration file in your favorite editor, you'll notice a lot of settings separated into different sections. Most of them are already fine. You only should change a few things:

The [sdl] section:

fullscreen=true if you want DOSBox to start in fullscreen;
output=overlay if you got an accelerated graphic card (that's the case of modern systems), otherwise keep it at surface.

The [dosbox] section:

If your games abort in case of insufficient memory, increase the value at memsize. Keep in mind that this value is meant in MB and will be catched from your real memory, so don't set it too high. In most cases the default value works fine.
I recommend to set it to the highest such as "memsize=63" for best performance.
Don't forget to set captures= to the path, where you want to store your captured videos, screenshots and wave files, for example: captures=D:\mystuff\dosbox\captures\. Otherwise they will be stored nowhere.

The [cpu] section:

core=dynamic and cycles=max to get the best performance in most cases. If DOSBox runs badly with these settings, try to set core=auto instead. In case your game runs too fast or choppy, try a numeric cycles value like cycles=3000.

The [render] section:

If you got a slow PC, you can increase the speed by setting frameskip=1. DOSBox will skip a frame before drawing one. That means, you'll see 35 fps instead of 70 fps, but you get more CPU power for the plain emulation. This option only affects DOSBox itself, you don't influence the games' own framerate.

The [dos] section:

In case you use a non-US keyboard layout, which is often the case outside the USA, it makes sense to adjust the layout in DOSBox. To do this, just set the country code behind keyboardlayout, for example keyboardlayout=de for Germany. You can get a list of country codes at the DOSBox Wiki.

The [autoexec] section:

If you used DOS before, you'll probably remember the AUTOEXEC.BAT file. It included the commands which were started at boot time. In this section, every command will be executed when DOSBox starts – like the AUTOEXEC.BAT file did.