Setting Up Prince Of Persia

First steps

We will set up the demo version of Prince of Persia, the classic cinematic platformer from 1990, as our first example. It was a landmark game, and it can still provide countless hours of entertainment if you like platformers that require you to exercise that pesky gray matter a bit.

First of all, we'll create a new folder to store all our DOS games. We'll use DOS Games throughout this guide, but you can pick any name you like. It's best to create this folder in your regular documents folder so dosbox-automation has full read and write access to it (don't put it in a system folder, e.g., Program Files on Windows). Each game will have its own dedicated subfolder under DOS Games, so let's create our first one called Prince of Persia.

Now download pop1.zip from the Prince of Persia demo page and extract its contents into DOS Games/Prince of Persia. The archive contains only two files: pop1.txt (a regular text file) and pop1demo.exe (an MS-DOS executable). Let's open pop1.txt in our text editor!

It's like an Arabian Nights movie come to life... with you as the star!
Leap into an exotic labyrinth of heart-stopping action, challenging mazes,
intrigue and superb animation that's breathtakingly realistic!

This is a demonstration version which only has limited functionality.  To
obtain the full program, just access GO BB, and order it from our store.

I'm not quite sold on the "heart-stopping" part, but otherwise, it sounds intriguing! As indicated by the second paragraph, this is a fully playable demo version that includes only the first two levels of the game. That's more than enough for our purposes here; you can always get the full game later.

But there are no further instructions, so what should we do next? Well, setting up old DOS games is not all that dissimilar to solving adventure game puzzles. Getting past these puzzles requires some logical thinking, a little bit of background knowledge, and the occasional bit of trial and error. Of course, the user manual often helps, too, if you happen to own the original or can procure a scanned copy online (most often you can).

Luckily, this is an easy one: executable files (programs or scripts you can start) under MS-DOS have the .EXE, .COM, or .BAT file extension. Looking at pop1demo.exe, the solution is quite obvious: we'll need to run this executable file in DOSBox!

The C drive

Most DOS games need a hard drive as a hard requirement (okay, I'll show myself to the door...), but by default, dosbox-automation doesn't have access to your computer's hard drive where your programs and documents reside - we need to tell it which folder to use as its "virtual DOS hard drive". This is called mounting; we mount a folder as the "DOS hard drive", the contents of which are then available to DOSBox as the C drive. All drives in DOS are assigned letters from the English alphabet (just like in Windows), and the C drive is usually your first hard drive.

The recommended way to mount the C drive is to create a drives subfolder inside your game folder. This drives folder is a "magic" folder with a special purpose: all its subfolders with single-letter names are automatically mounted as DOS drives with the same letter. This mechanism to auto-mount subfolders like drives/c and drives/d as DOS drives is called automounting and is unique to dosbox-automation.

In our case, we only need a single C drive, so we'll create a c subfolder inside our drives folder (technically, it does not make a difference whether you use uppercase or lowercase "letter C" on Windows and macOS, but it does in Linux, so we recommend always using lowercase). We'll then copy the files from the pop1.zip archive into drives/c to end up with the following folder structure:

Starting dosbox-automation

Okay, with our C drive set up and ready to go, the next step is to start dosbox-automation from our DOS Games/Prince of Persia folder. This is accomplished slightly differently on each platform.

Windows

If you have used the installer with the default options to set up dosbox-automation (and we recommended doing so while you're still learning the ropes), simply right-click on the Prince of Persia folder in Windows Explorer and select Open with dosbox-automation in the context menu.

Alternatively, navigate to the folder in Windows Explorer, right-click anywhere on the blank area inside it, and then select Open with dosbox-automation in the context menu.

macOS

If you built dosbox-automation as an application bundle, you can use document packages: add the .dosbox extension to the game folder's name in Finder (so Prince of Persia becomes Prince of Persia.dosbox), then double-click it to launch dosbox-automation.

Otherwise, start it from a terminal window as described in the Linux section below.

Linux

Open your favorite terminal and cd into the Prince of Persia directory, then run the dosbox command from there.

Use the --version argument to check that you're running dosbox-automation and not some other DOSBox variant:

% dosbox --version
dosbox-automation, version 0.84-da3

Copyright (C) 2026 The dosbox-automation Team
License: GNU GPL-2.0-or-later <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html>

Alternatively, create a shell script or a shortcut on your desktop that executes the following command:

dosbox --working-dir <PATH>

<PATH> is the absolute path of your game directory (Prince of Persia, in this case).

Installing the game

You'll be greeted by the following window when starting dosbox-automation:

Let's ignore the polite welcome message for now and focus on the text below the big blue rectangle:

Local directory drives/c/ mounted as C drive
Z:\>_

The first line is pretty straightforward - it tells us that dosbox-automation mounted drives/c we created earlier as the "C drive". In MS-DOS, folders are called directories - the various DOSBox messages usually use the word "directory", and we'll use the two terms interchangeably in this guide.

The second line is the DOS prompt. DOS has a command line interface that predates graphical user interfaces we're accustomed to from modern operating systems. We get DOS to do things by typing in commands, and if we manage to do this correctly, DOS will follow our instructions to the letter (pun intended). DOS is not a multitasking operating system; you can only do a single thing in it at any given point in time.

Let's analyze the prompt a little bit: it always starts with a letter followed by a colon, which denotes the current drive. Right after startup, this is always the Z drive. This is a special drive that's always available; DOSBox stores some of its commands on it - you don't need to worry about it for now.

After the colon is the path of the current folder or current directory in DOS terminology; this is currently the root directory (topmost directory) of the Z drive as indicated by the \ (backslash) character. The > character just signifies the end of the prompt, and the blinking underscore (_) character after it is - guess what? - the cursor.

Okay, enough theory! Type in C:, and then press Enter to switch to the C drive. The prompt should now reflect that we're in the root directory of the C drive:

Z:\>c:
C:\>_

Type in dir and press Enter to list the contents of the current directory:

C:\>dir
 Volume in drive C is CDRIVE
 Directory of C:\

POP1     TXT                     362 07/07/1995 10:12a
POP1DEMO EXE                 267,420 07/05/1995  9:53a
                2 file(s)               268,116 bytes
                0 dir(s)            262,144,000 bytes free
C:\>_

Well, that's what we put into our virtual C drive, so nothing too spectacular so far. We'll execute pop1demo.exe next! Type in pop and press the Tab key once to instruct DOSBox to complete the filename for you. This handy feature is called tab completion, and it saves you from a lot of typing. Press Tab a few more times and observe how it alternates between POP1.TXT and POP1DEMO.EXE - this makes sense as these are the only two files in the current directory that start with pop.

Okay, let's make sure POP1DEMO.EXE is displayed in the prompt, then press Enter to run this executable file. It turns out this is a self-extracting archive that unpacks its contents into the current directory when you run it. The following will appear (I've redacted the list of extracted files):

C:\>POP1DEMO.EXE

PKSFX (R)   FAST!   Self Extract Utility   Version 2.04g  02-01-93
Copr. 1989-1993 PKWARE Inc. All Rights Reserved. Shareware version
PKSFX Reg. U.S. Pat. and Tm. Off.

Searching EXE: C:/POP1DEMO.EXE
  Inflating: CDUNGEON.DAT
  Inflating: DIGISND1.DAT

  ...

  Inflating: PRINCE.EXE

C:\>_

The more observant among you might have noticed the last entry, PRINCE.EXE. Bingo, that's our game executable! But let's pretend we haven't spotted it; how do we find all executables in the current directory? By issuing the dir command with the *.exe wildcard search pattern!

But instead of typing in dir *.exe, press Up a few times until dir appears in the command line, then type in the rest (Space character followed by *.exe). This handy feature is called command history - you can move forward and backward in the list of previously executed commands with the Down and Up keys, respectively. Best of all, the command history is preserved across dosbox-automation restarts.

Okay, so here's what the output looks like:

C:\>dir *.exe
 Volume in drive C is CDRIVE
 Directory of C:\

POP1DEMO EXE                 267,420 07/05/1995  9:53a
PRINCE   EXE                 123,335 03/29/1990  0:00a
                2 file(s)               390,755 bytes
                0 dir(s)            262,144,000 bytes free
C:\>_

Starting the game

There's nothing else left to do than to start PRINCE.EXE (type in the letter p, press Tab to auto-complete it to PRINCE.EXE, then press Enter ). After a short loading, the title screen will appear and you'll hear the classic Prince of Persia intro music playing! Don't press any key yet, just wait and watch the intro sequence until the end to learn about the game's backstory.

If you keep watching, the game will enter demo mode, where the protagonist will soon meet his untimely death... Surely, we can do better than that! Press any key to start the game!

This particular game supports both the keyboard and the joystick. dosbox-automation emulates a joystick by default, even if you don't have a physical game controller plugged in. The game is clever enough to auto-detect that and switch to joystick mode at the start. Okay, so let's switch to keyboard mode instead by pressing Ctrl+K !

You can control the prince with the cursor keys. Hold down the Shift key to walk carefully. It's not that hard to figure out the various movement combinations on your own, but reading the Controlling Your Movements section of the user manual should definitely help. The manual also contains helpful hints and a full list of available keyboard shortcuts.

Congratulations, you've got your very first DOS game running in dosbox-automation! Have some fun, try to find the sword, overcome a few guards, and maybe even attempt to complete the first level.

You can quit the game by pressing Ctrl+Q , which will return you to the DOS prompt. There you can use the exit command to close DOSBox. Of course, you can quit DOSBox any time by pressing Alt+F4 on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Q on macOS.

Authentic CRT monitor emulation

dosbox-automation includes a cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor emulation feature, which is enabled by default. It strives to achieve authentic, period-correct results; the look of PC CRT monitors from the 1980s and 1990s has been painstakingly recreated via shaders as accurately as current technology allows. These monitors exhibit certain characteristic peculiarities when displaying low-resolution graphics; you can think of them as "built-in filters" that can never be disabled. Artists of the era had to embrace and work with these peculiarities, and people playing DOS games on their CRTs saw the art through the same "filters" as the artists.

For this reason, many people who grew up with CRTs think that once these filters are "digitally removed" by drawing the pixels as sharp little rectangles on modern flat screens, the art looks bland, sterile, and loses its "analog magic". That's the main reason behind enabling the CRT emulation by default; to give people a chance to see the art of DOS games in their full glory as the developers intended.

The remarkable thing about the feature is that it's "zero config" - it automatically adapts to the changing circumstances to always produce the correct CRT look based on the emulated graphics adapter, the current DOS video mode, the window size, and the native resolution of your monitor. You don't need to think about it or tinker with it, It Just Works(tm) :sunglasses:

We'll showcase the authentic CRT emulation throughout the guide, but if you prefer sharp pixels, we'll explain how to achieve that in the next chapter.

Auto-executing commands at startup

Every time we want to play the game, we need to type in DOS commands to switch to the C drive and run PRINCE.EXE from there. Isn't there a way to automate that?

There certainly is! We need to create a so-called configuration file that can contain various settings to customize the behavior of DOSBox, along with a list of commands to auto-execute at startup.

Launch your text editor of choice and create a new plain text file called dosbox.conf inside the Prince of Persia folder with the following content:

[autoexec]
c:
prince

The commands you want to execute right after startup should be listed in the aptly titled [autoexec] configuration section, with each command in a separate line. Configuration sections are introduced by names enclosed in square brackets; everything that follows belongs to that section.

When DOSBox starts, it looks for this special dosbox.conf file in the folder from which it was started, and if it finds it, it configures the DOS environment and DOSBox itself according to its contents. This is handy because we can put a different configuration file into each of our game folders to set them up differently (this is necessary; it's simply impossible to create a single configuration that would work with all DOS games).

Just to make everything absolutely clear, this is the folder structure we should have at this point (only the first four files are shown in drives/c to save space):

Starting up dosbox-automation from the Prince of Persia folder should now launch the game right away without any manual intervention!

So far, so good - now, let's see how we can use the advanced features offered by dosbox-automation to our advantage!