DOS Games Discussion

I am trying to install and play an old IBM game from 1995 called "Emergency Room." Here are the requirements: DOS 6.0. 486/33 MHZ IBM OR 100% compatible PC. 4 MB RAM. SVGA. Sound Blaster or 100% compatible sound card. 4 MB free hard disk space. CD-ROM drive (double speed). Mouse.

I have a MacBook Pro with Parallels installed and Windows 7. Windows won't install it... I think because of the sound card. I have tried on DOSBox to mount and install. The installation seems to only add a folder with configuration settings. When I try to run the actual eri.exe file (which I assume is supposed to play to game) it says something about a setup error. Any suggestions?

Definitely, definitely you want to be running this in DosBox.

You can get it here:
http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

486's came out around 1990; there is really no hope at all that anything but the most trivial DOS games will run natively in a 2013 Windows 7 machine. No worries, that's what DosBox is all about!

There is also a good topic on this site showing you how to setup DosBox on Mac "DOSBox and Mac OS X [How-to]":
http://dosgames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14352

And we're happy to answer questions if you run into trouble, though some of us are Mac people and some not.

Seeing shanediggity needs to mount a CD or CD image and Mac can't handle drive letters, he needs to mount 'volume' - 'name' it could complicate things here......
For Mac/dosbox absolute beginners I would dare point to boxer, dosbox frontend and can be very helpful, certainly as most Mac users don't really understand command prompt stuff it seems..... (no pun intended, Mac and command prompt never were friends ....)
http://boxer.washboardabs.net/

However keep in mind that as boxer is a frontend it alas also adds (minor) problems ..... but it's certainly 'Mac user' friendly.

Hey,

every guide seems to be different to mine,

all I am trying to do is mount a folder, I used to be a whiz with windows but establishing the file path for the folder seems impossible.

The guide says to create a folder from which the program will run from, then going into dosbox you type the file path, : how do I get the file path?

for instance If I create a folder in finder entitled games, for arguments sake I place it in desktop, what do I enter in into dosbox to tell it that it is here?

It's simpler to keep games in a separate folder closer to the root of your C drive rather than on your desktop. The path to your desktop will depend on the username you chose to log in to Windows and also probably what version of Windows you have.

So instead try this, create a folder called "GAMES" on your C drive. The path to that folder will then be:

C:\GAMES

Within that folder, create a new folder for each game. So, if you wanted to play Commander Keen, you would create:

C:\GAMES\KEEN

And unzip/install the game into that folder.

Then startup DOSBox and type:

MOUNT C C:\GAMES

Or you can also put that line at the bottom of the DOSBox.conf file so it will auto-run every time you start DOSBox.

Then to start the game, change to the appropriate folder ... so in this example, first switch to the C drive you just created by typing:

C:

Then your DOS prompt will be like "C:>" then to switch to the appropriate folder type:

CD KEEN

(Replacing KEEN with the name of the folder of the game.) Then run the game by typing the executable name ... this will usually be the file ending with the .EXE extension (it could also end with .BAT or .COM). It's usually name similarly to the name of the game. You can type DIR in DOSBox to see a list of all the files; or type DIR *.EXE to see all of the executable files (or DIR *.BAT or DIR *.COM).

HTH

Ledgehammer, just to make sure, what computer and OS are you running? Windows, Mac? Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP? They all have tricks associated with them. More and more they try to hide the "actual file path", maybe that's what you are running into.