DOS

How to install MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox?

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MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox

In the last tutorial, we saw how to install MS DOS 1.25 on 86Box. We also introduce MS DOS 1.25 in that tutorial. If you want to know background information about MS DOS 1.25, I suggest you to read that tutorial. In this tutorial, we are going to use MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox. DOSBox already emulates DOS, but we can use it to install a different version of DOS also.

You need to download the following file to follow this tutorial:

MS DOS 1.25 was not sold as a retailed package. It was only available to OEMs. In this tutorial we use the Columbia Data Products OEM that works well on IBM PC clones.

Note
This tutorial includes screenshots taken using a SVN build of DOSBox. But, I have verified this tutorial to work on release version of DOSBox too. You can use either of them. Note that DOSBox-staging and DOSBox-X are different for DOSBox and don't work for this tutorial. For DOSBox-X see, how to install MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox-X. For DOSBox-Staging, see how to install MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox-Staging.

Creating the Virtual Machine

If you have not already installed DOSBox, you can visit out tutorial on how to do so on windows. On Linux, you can just install the dosbox package on your favourite distribution.

Create a folder where you will store all the files related to this tutorial. Extract the MS DOS 1.25 archive and open the extracted folder. Go to the images folder inside it and copy the file called CDPDOS.IMG to that folder.

Now copy the default DOSBox config file to this folder. You can see this page to know where the file exists on you system or you can download it from here. Rename it to something suitable such as msdos1.25.conf and open it in your favourite text editor.

Add the following line to the end of that file:

IMGMOUNT a CDPDOS.IMG -t floppy
boot -l a
Editing the DOSBox config file

Save and close the file. Open a terminal/command prompt and navigate to that folder. Now run DOSBox:

dosbox -conf msdos1.25.conf

On Windows, you may need to add the path to DOSBox before this command if you have not added it to the PATH environment variable. So the command would likely become:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\dosbox-0.74-3\dosbox.exe" -conf msdos1.25.conf

The DOSBox program will open and boot MS DOS 1.25:

MS DOS 1.25 on DOSBox

When asked for Date and time, just press enter. Do not enter anything. MS DOS 1.25 has problems with dates later than year 2000, so it is best to leave the default date set. You can enter the DIR command to see the list of files:

List of files in MS DOS 1.25

You can now close that window. Now we will create a script to launch the VM. On linux create a file called MSDOS1.25.sh with the following lines:

#!/bin/bash
dosbox -conf msdos1.25.conf

Then make the script executable by running the following command in terminal after navigating to that folder:

sudo chmod +x ./MSDOS1.25.sh

Then we can right click on that file and click on Run as Program to open the VM. Some DEs and distros may have other methods of running shell scripts.

On Windows, create a file called MSDOS1.25.bat in that folder with the following contents:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\dosbox-0.74-3\dosbox.exe" -conf msdos1.25.conf

Then double click on that file to launch the VM.

That's it. We used MS DOS 1.25 in DOSBox. Read the manual linked below to learn more about MS DOS 1.25. Also read the manuals which I posted with the IBM PC DOS 1.10 tutorial because they are more detailed and MS DOS and PC DOS are almost same at this stage.

Manuals

Related Pages

Credits

  • The DOSBox emulator is an open source project hosted on Sourceforge. Visit its website to know more.
  • The disk image used above was taken from WinWorld.

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