DOS Gaming Made Easy with eXoDOS – 7500 games

The IBM PC was launched in August 1981 along with version 1 of the Microsoft Disk Operating System, or MSDOS. At the time the computer was squarely aimed at the business market with a price tag of $1500, about $5500 in today’s money, with most of its software being  office orientated applications. But with all the hype and success of the home computer gaming market it didn’t take long for DOS gaming to take off.

Remember that although these machines were the first PCs we were in a time long before Windows has even been dreamed about. DOS was a command line operating system like all others of the time. You can still get a glimpse of it in modern Windows by opening up a command prompt. The black screen with the C:\ prompt and flashing cursor is effectively DOS but it’s no longer compatible with the 80’s and 90’s software.

DOS was the base operating system for PCs up until around 1995 when Windows 95 began the process of moving away from the reliance on MSDOS. But that still gave almost 2 decades of DOS gaming development which were really the formative years of our modern PC gaming scene.

So fast forward to today.

We can treat DOS gaming machines as another retro system that we can emulate and indeed I’ve created a number of videos doing exactly that. But what if there was an easy way to set up our DOS emulator, optimise it for all the games, give it a great looking front end and allow us to simply browse all of the games and run them at the click of a mouse button?

Well let’s have a look at how we can do that.

eXoDOS

The eXoDOS project is a fantastic DOS gaming project. If you head over to the website at

https://retro-exo.com/exodos.html

You’ll find the full project information and download pages.

Basically eXoDOS is a complete DOSBox emulation system that’s been set up to run inside of the Launchbox retro gaming front end. The project coders have worked hard to optimise the setup to each DOS game. It uses a number of DOSBox versions and configurations to make sure that every one of the more than 7500 games runs smoothly and accurately. If you’ve ever tried to set up DOSBox manually you’ll know that this is no easy task!

Installing eXoDOS

On the main project page scroll down past the project information and you’ll get to the main download links.

This is a big project. The full download consists of about 650GB of games and emulation code with a further 160GB of media and videos, so you’ll need at least a 1TB drive just for your DOS gaming. Downloading the full package is a great option as you then have everything you need on hand.

However, if you don’t want all 7500 games in one go you can opt for the Lite version. This installs all of the emulators and the full games list so that you can browse the titles, but doesn’t download the actual game files until you need them. At 5GB this is a much faster download and less hard drive hungry option.

Either download though is via a Torrent feed. If you’re not familiar with Torrents these are a peer to peer network where you can download the files from a number of other users on a sort of file sharing system. It’s totally safe to use as all the file access is through a torrent client application.

The torrent I recommend is qBittorrent. If you head over to the main website for this you can simply download the application and we’re ready to go.

So back on the eXoDOS site just download and run the torrent file. This should open up in qBittorrent. Make sure you specify a save folder and then you can then select all the items and start the download.

Once the files have been downloaded we need to run the setup batch file to extract the full application.

Once that has fully installed we’re all set up and ready to go.

Integrating eXoDOS Into Your Existing LaunchBox

The standard eXoDOS installation creates a new version of LaunchBox. To put this inside your existing LaunchBox setup you simply need to copy over a few folders. The full list is detailed below. For each folder just copy it to the same location in your LaunchBox setup.

• Data\platforms
• Data\playlists
• Manuals\MS-DOS
• Music\MS-DOS
• Images \MS-DOS
• Videos\MS-DOS
• eXo

If you now start LaunchBox you should find all your DOS games ready to play.

Running a Game

If you downloaded the full package there is nothing left to do.

If you downloaded the Lite version we need to install the games. Although you can browse through the full list of games none of them have yet been downloaded or set up. Again, this is all handled by eXoDOS.

Simply find the game you want to play and double click it.

This will start the game download process in a command window. Just follow the instructions to download and install the game.

And that’s it!