Knowledge Base

Preserving for the future: Shell scripts, AoC, and more

Math Blaster 3 in Windows 98 in Dosbox-X

Continuing from last time, I successfully installed Windows 98 SE in Dosbox-X following the very useful official guide. Then I got Math Blaster 3rd Grade running!

While this game installed and started in Wine, it would malfunction usually on screen changes between scenes or menu entries.

So, once I had the working Windows 98 environment, I found my iso and attached it with IMGMOUNT and booted. Then it was easy to install the game, and everything worked!

According to the instructions, you mount a CD drive from an ISO file by running equivalent commands, or adding them to this section of the conf file:

[autoexec]
IMGMOUNT C hdd.img
IMGMOUNT F "/mnt/public/CDROMs/Games/Math Blaster/Math_Blaster_3.iso"
BOOT C:

My mistake of having a space in the directory name does provide a good example of how to quote a filesystem path with spaces for dosbox-x.

Bonus

Here's my launch script that adds the icon to the window manager titlebar:

#!/bin/sh
cd "$( dirname "$( readlink -f "${0}" )" )"
dosbox-x -conf win98.conf &
# and set icon
test -f win98.png && which xwininfo 1>/dev/null 2>&1 && which xseticon 1>/dev/null 2>&1 && {
   sleep 1 # give it time to appear
   # search based on window class "dosbox-x"
   tid="$( xwininfo -root -children -all | awk '/"dosbox-x")/{print $1}' )"
   xseticon -id "${tid}" win98.png
}
# and then reconnect to dosbox-x child process so this script ends when dosbox-x ends
fg %1

Errata

It's this Math Blaster 3rd grade:

Which is not to be confused with the older (and still good, but I am uncertain if I have it) Math Blaster Episode I: In Search of Spot from the prior iteration.

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