Knowledge Base

tl;dr

Dosbox-X dpkg is now available for Devuan Unstable.

Longer

The Dosbox-X community doesn't have a solid plan for building a dpkg of Dosbox-X. It's not a huge deal; they offer all sorts of packages! And thankfully, I even found the link to the COPR (Fedora RPM) package. Alas, I have abandoned Fedora GNU/Linux despite my love of SELinux (no joke). Systemd just is unncessary to proper computer operations. Anyway, I translated the nice and simple rpm spec into a dpkg build recipe!

The full story

I got the itch to work in Windows 98 again (yes, I said 98). Wine doesn't cut it, sometimes. So, I pulled out my old Windows 98 VM from last year. I had forgotten I never got the sound working. Also, the display refresh rate was just terrible. Sure, applications install in it, but forget about displaying video.

So, I investigated other options than qemu+spice. I read and followed the thorough demo of installing Windows 98 SE in vanilla Dosbox, but had no success. I very much enjoyed repeating this process 20+ years later. It even crashes and reboots more often than I remember! The setup never finished in vanilla Dosbox, so I had to move on.

So then I tried Dosbox-X! First of all, I wanted to build this application in a dpkg because I am not interested in Flatpak or other methods. I suppose I would have tolerated trying an AppImage but they didn't have one that I found. Anything that can be built in an rpm can be built in a dpkg (assuming of course the dependencies are available). Thankfully, there were no exotic dependencies, and writing a debian recipe was straightforward! The hardest part was some rather obtuse syntax of how to run the auto_configure statement, which is just a dpkg thing.

Stay tuned for more on this narrative about Windows 98 SE.