I have a lot of old DOS games which I like to have set up as app icons on Mac OS X. I found DOSBox surprisingly good, especially if you run games in full screen (Alt+Enter, or set fullscreen=true in ~/Library/Preferences/DOSBox 0.73 Preferences).
The way I have set up my games is this:
1) I copied the whole dir hierarchy of my DOS Games into one location, let's call it localMacDir (underneath it looks like dosgames/someGame, dosgames/someOtherGame, etc.)
2) At the end of the DOSBox preferences file, I added the lines
mount C localMacDir
C:
...these two lines mount that local dir as the DOS drive letter C: and switch to it every time DOSBox is started
3) I created a simple .app structure for each game, where the "app" itself is a simple script - that way each game can have its own .app, its own nice icon, and I can play them by simply clicking the .app rather than typing in commands.
For example, for Dynablaster, my DynaBlaster.app contains 4 files (the bold bits are all you need to change for each different .app):
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/MacOS/DynaBlaster ...runs the game and exits afterwards, the script doesn't even need a .sh extension
#!/bin/bash
/Applications/DOSBox.app/Contents/MacOS/DOSBox -c "cd\dosgames\dynablst" -c "dyna" -c "exit"
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/Resources/favicon.icns ...a nice icon for the game
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/Info.plist
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>DynaBlaster</string>
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>favicon.icns</string>
<key>CFBundleDisplayName</key>
<string>Dyna Blaster</string>
<key>CFBundleName</key>
<string>Dyna Blaster</string>
<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
<string>APPL</string>
</dict>
</plist>
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/PkgInfo
APPL????
This seems to work beautifully, so I thought sharing it may be useful to someone else, but keen to hear any suggestions for improvements!
The way I have set up my games is this:
1) I copied the whole dir hierarchy of my DOS Games into one location, let's call it localMacDir (underneath it looks like dosgames/someGame, dosgames/someOtherGame, etc.)
2) At the end of the DOSBox preferences file, I added the lines
mount C localMacDir
C:
...these two lines mount that local dir as the DOS drive letter C: and switch to it every time DOSBox is started
3) I created a simple .app structure for each game, where the "app" itself is a simple script - that way each game can have its own .app, its own nice icon, and I can play them by simply clicking the .app rather than typing in commands.
For example, for Dynablaster, my DynaBlaster.app contains 4 files (the bold bits are all you need to change for each different .app):
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/MacOS/DynaBlaster ...runs the game and exits afterwards, the script doesn't even need a .sh extension
#!/bin/bash
/Applications/DOSBox.app/Contents/MacOS/DOSBox -c "cd\dosgames\dynablst" -c "dyna" -c "exit"
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/Resources/favicon.icns ...a nice icon for the game
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/Info.plist
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>CFBundleDevelopmentRegion</key>
<string>English</string>
<key>CFBundleExecutable</key>
<string>DynaBlaster</string>
<key>CFBundleIconFile</key>
<string>favicon.icns</string>
<key>CFBundleDisplayName</key>
<string>Dyna Blaster</string>
<key>CFBundleName</key>
<string>Dyna Blaster</string>
<key>CFBundlePackageType</key>
<string>APPL</string>
</dict>
</plist>
* DynaBlaster.app/Contents/PkgInfo
APPL????
This seems to work beautifully, so I thought sharing it may be useful to someone else, but keen to hear any suggestions for improvements!
Last edited:
