Dosbian

A 486DX machine in the palm of your hand

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Dosbian is the first Raspberry Pi distro totally dedicated to the DOS world.
Whether you love DOS games or you’re just fond of all the DOS retro software, this is the distro for you.

Just switch on your Raspberry Pi and in few seconds your Dos prompt will be ready to use. No configuration needed, just an old school command like based machine to enjoy!

Based on DosBox-SVN and DosBox-ECE, It guarantees you a decent speed in games and good performances in software emulation.

What you can do with your Dosbian distro:

• Run all retro Pc Sofware (DOS / Win 3.1 / Win 95 / Win98)
• Run most of 90’s retro games
• Run games from LaunchBox frontend
• Networking operations and bridging with real LAN
• Create empty floppy of size: 320KB, 720KB, 1,44MB
• Create empty HDDs of size: 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, 2GB
• Mount Floppy disk, CD-ROM or HDD using a GUI driven utility
• Keep Dosbian system file updated

Some games running on Dosbian

Some Software running on Dosbian

What’s new in Dosbian 1.5?

• Added patch NE2000 network adapter to Dosbox-SVN
• Added downloadable optional package MT-32 Roland
• Added Dosbox ECE (Enhanced Community Edition), this new version, allow to:
  – Reserve more memory (max 384MB) for all Win9x;
  – Increase Video memory to 4MB
  – Have a better Pc speaker emulation
  – Editing MT-32 emulator settings from config
  – Emulate correctly Tandy, CGA, EGA
• Removed Dosbox splash screen (all versions)
• Fixed menu shortcut not working
• Fixed ImageCreator tool not creating hdd greater than 512MB

How run games on Dosbian?

Here some video showing the game Diablo running on Windows 95 and Red Alert on Windows 98 / Raspberry Pi 4 2GB, of course with Dosbian 🙂

( Video courtesy of Daniel Řepka )

Terms of use and distribution

Dosbian is a donationware project, this means you can modify, improve, customise it as you like for your own use.

IT IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED:

• USE DOSBIAN FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES.
• DIFFUSE YOUR OWN CUSTOMIZED COPY OF DOSBIAN.

Dosbian Facebook group

Join the official Facebook group, a place where you can meet other friends and discuss about games, configurations, issues, etc.

Download

Please note: The distro doesn’t contain any copyrighted material.

Dosbian is compatible with the following Raspberry Pi models:

• Raspberry Pi 1 (Slow, need to edit configuration)
• Raspberry Pi Zero (Slow, need to edit configuration)
• Raspberry Pi 2B (Slow, need to edit configuration)
• Raspberry Pi 3B
• Raspberry Pi 3B+
• Raspberry Pi 3A+
• Raspberry Pi 4B

Dosbian is donationware, i spent many days of working flashing ISO/Shrinking OS/Recompiling Dosbox/Writing menu scripts
and i tried to do my best in bringing back the magic world of DOS of the 90s for much long forgotten among other distro emulators.

I hope i reached my goal! 🙂

You can download it for free, however if you want to thank me for my work and support future development, you can make a free donation 🙂

Download Dosbian 1.5

Note: Unzip the image with 7Zip and use Win32DiskImager or Balena Etcher to flash it.

Where to start from?

Here you can find some useful guide, link and tutorial:

• Dosbian a “Quick start guide” by Gary Marsh
• The Definitive Guide on installing Windows 95 on Raspberry Pi 3B/4B by Daniel Řepka
• Guide and drivers: Installing Windows 95 on Raspberry Pi 3B/4B by Daniel Řepka
• How to install Windows 98 on Raspberry Pi 4B by Daniel Řepka
• How to share Dosbian folders by Daniel Řepka
• mTCP – TCP/IP applications for DOS

Need a 3D case for your Dosbian PC?

This wonderful case was designed and developed by Jimmy Johansson and you can find it on Thingiverse

Do you have anything to tell? Write a comment 🙂