this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Is it possible to boot a disk image in DOSbox from the host OS terminal, or by double-clicking the disk image? (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'd like to just casually boot straight into a game sometimes, or at least a mounted floppy. I don't want to type commands is DOSbox for casual situations like this.

I'm focussing on games that can run straight from the floppy drive. Thanks!

Edit: I tried variations of this command in the macOS terminal:

/Applications/DOSBox\ Staging.app/Contents/MacOS/dosbox -c "imgmount a '/Users/io/Downloads/Prince.img' -t floppy" -c "a:" -c "dir /p"

The idea is that it would open DOSbox in the A: location, run dir /p. I should see prince.exe listed. Unfortunately what actually happens is I'm given a listing of Z: instead. When I try to switch to A:, I'm told that it needs to be mounted first. But I thought my terminal command takes care of that.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

Appreciate the link! According to this I have to create a custom config file. Do I need one of those for each game?

open -a DOSBox --args -conf path/to/your-config.conf
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

You don't have to. It was to show how to use custom arguments. You can load a different config for different games if you'd like, but for your first example it should probably be:

open -a /Location/Of/dosbox -c "imgmount a '/Users/io/Downloads/Prince.img' -t floppy" -c "a:" -c "dir /p"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 days ago

For totally generic games that boot straight off the floppy disk, the default config tends to work just fine. Like I said in my other comment though, I used a temporary config file, based on the default config, but I would append the boot image filename/path to the [AUTOEXEC] section at the end of the temporary dosbox.conf file.

It might be easier for you for now to make individual config files for each game, but it should be possible like I said to make a generic script to boot basically any PC floppy disk image directly.

I'll see later whatever I have around.