Dosbian-X - Boot directly into a 486DX on your Raspberry Pi

Dosbian-X

After eagerly waiting for Dosbian 2.0, I've decided to continue the development of the great Dosbian on my own and release it here. Dosbian-X is based on the original Dosbian image created by Carmelo Maiolino. I extended it with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit) and all common DOSBox emulators.

Dosbian-X includes:

• all common DOSBox emulators
  • DOSBox-X - modern and accurrate successor of Dosbox
  • DOSBox-Staging lots of enhancements (Shaders, Roland MT-32, FluidSynth)
  • DOSBox-ECE - Enhanced Community Edition (3Dfx Voodoo, Roland MT-32, FluidSynth)
  • DOSBox-SVN - the original
• latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit)
• support for all 64-bit Raspberry Pi models (3B, 3B+, 3A+, 4, 400, CM3, CM3+, CM4, Zero 2 W)
• build-pipeline to build the SD card image

If you have problems, fixes, comments please create an issue, pull request or start a discussion. Have fun and enjoy the 90s with your Raspberry Pi. More updates will follow...

If you like to support the development, you can buy me a coffee.

Installation

To use Dosbian-X, download the latest release from here and burn it on a microSD card, e.g. with balenaEtcher.

To connect your Raspberry Pi to your Wifi or enable the SSH server, put ssh or wpa_supplicant.conf files to your boot folder (the FAT32 partition of the microSD card) or start raspi-config on the Pi. More details can be found here.

Custom Build

You can build your own SD image of Raspbian for the Dosbian-X on your local ARM compatible machine (tested on Macbook M1) using Docker Desktop. After installing Docker, you should tune it a bit to speed up the build process:

• increase resources to e.g. 8 CPUs
• enable Experimental Features -> Enable VirtuoFS accelerated directory sharing

Then create the requried docker image with:

make docker-build

and after that build the Dosbian-X image with

make

The final image will be written into the folder images and is has a filename that includes a recent UTC date Dosbian-x.y.img. Simply burn that image to a microSD card using balenaEtcher and boot.

The original Dosbian image

Dosbian-X is based on the original Dosbian image created by Carmelo Maiolino: Web page: https://cmaiolino.wordpress.com/dosbian Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/Dosbian