this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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MS-DOS gaming

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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 4 days ago* (last edited 4 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 4 days ago (1 children)

Thank you very much! My memory of these files is coming back seeing your syntax, although this is more advanced than anything I wrote in my DOS days. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I wrote that back in my Windows XP days, so keep that in mind when looking at my BootImg.bat script. I had it writing the template and temporary config scripts directly to the Program Files folder like a dummy, I should have used the %TEMP% folder instead.

And of course you'll still have to translate, adapt and overcome to get the same sort of thing working on a Mac.

Good luck fellow stranger, let me know how it goes!

Edit: Don't mind the registry file too much, it's not only proprietary to Windows, it also depends on WinImage being installed and also the default program to open IMA/IMG files. But the command itself was solid.