Knowledge Base

When I want to play an old-school DOS game, I use the emulator DOSBox. I discovered that DOSBox has its own icon and uses its title in the window, and not the name of the game running inside. I now have a solution to change the icon and title that I want. First of all, I make my .desktop file call my shell script.

$ cat ~/.local/share/applications/st25.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Star Trek 25th Anniversary
Comment=1993 DOS computer game
Keywords=Game;Star Trek;
Exec=/usr/share/st25/st25.sh
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=/usr/share/st25/st25.png
Categories=Game;AdventureGame;

The shell script calls dosbox with the custom batch file (from the olden days of non-free operating systems)

$ cat /usr/share/st25/st25.sh
#!/bin/sh
# Star Trek: 25th Anniversary game
GAMEDIR=/usr/share/st25
ICONFILE="${GAMEDIR}/st25.png"
cd "${GAMEDIR}"
dosbox ST25.BAT &
sleep 1
tid="$( xwininfo -root -children -all | grep -iE "dosbox.*STARTREK" | awk '{print $1}' )"
echo "modifying id ${tid}"
xseticon -id "${tid}" "${ICONFILE}"
xdotool set_window --name "STARTREK" "${tid}"
xdotool search --name "STARTREK" set_window --classname "STARTREK" --class "STARTREK" windowunmap windowmap

The above shell script is where the magic happens. The main emulator is executed and placed in the background. After a short delay, some X tools are used to find the specific application's window ID. A custom application named xseticon (available in my Fedora copr) written by Paul Evans is used to change the icon used by the window. The more easily available xdotool (probably already bundled by your distro) can change the window name. Additionally, xdotool can hide and re-show the window, to make the window manager and panel recognize the new icon and name! And just for completeness's sake, here is the batch file.

$ cat /usr/share/st25/ST25.BAT
REM ST25.BAT
REM Star Trek: 25th Anniversary game

MOUNT C /usr/share/st25
C:
STARTREK.EXE
exit

Conclusion

This is my preferred way to run a DOS-based application: desktop file, shell script, batch file. Yes, it spawns the extra process with the shell script, but I want to be able to call an application from the command line easily. How do you make your DOS programs accessible to users on cli or the desktop?

References

For a complete list of Internet resources used to build this process, see my other post, X11 change application titlebar and icon in window manager panel.