from Hacker News

Dosbian: Boot to DOSBox on Raspberry Pi

by indigodaddy on 10/19/25, 7:26 PM with 69 comments

  • by vunderba on 10/19/25, 8:48 PM

    Whenever I see stuff like this, the ITX Llama [1], Pixel x86, etc. I think it's finally the time to build my ultimate love-letter to old school DOS and retro computing but always stop short because of the monitor issue.

    I feel like a lot of my nostalgia likely stems from the bright super low latency phosphor displays of a proper CRT. No amount of WebGL shaders/filters [2] ever quite seem to capture the original experience IMHO.

    [1] https://smallformfactor.net/news/retro-sff-itx-llama-is-a-br...

    [2] https://github.com/Swordfish90/cool-retro-term

  • by ok_dad on 10/19/25, 8:28 PM

    > Dosbian is compatible with the following Raspberry Pi models:

    I am amazed this doesn't run on literally any Pi since forever, it seems to be limited to Pi 3 and up. I have an old Pi 1B+ that I still use to host all of my websites.

  • by haunter on 10/19/25, 9:31 PM

    On the other hand arguably the best DOSBox version now is the new Pure Unleased, just released 2 days ago (Dosbian is using DOSBox Staging)

    https://schelling.itch.io/dosbox-pure

    https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure-unleashed

  • by jasperry on 10/19/25, 8:37 PM

    Projects like this are some of my favorite uses for single-board computers. Another one is Bare Metal C64, which aims for low-latency vsynced Commodore emulation on the Pi: https://accentual.com/bmc64/
  • by shreddit on 10/19/25, 8:03 PM

    > Join the official Facebook group […]

    Of all the things, why Facebook?

  • by geophph on 10/19/25, 8:34 PM

    So can I run Kings Quest on it if I get the files from GOG?
  • by MaximilianEmel on 10/19/25, 9:48 PM

  • by dsamy on 10/19/25, 10:26 PM

    What features or games are you most excited to explore with Dosbian?
  • by indigodaddy on 10/19/25, 7:36 PM

    I was thinking how to “boot to Lode Runner” on my Pi400, so this might be close enough:)
  • by nullbyte808 on 10/19/25, 10:48 PM

    Why not use https://www.freedos.org? Or boot FreeDOS straight from QEMU. Using Debian seems incredibly bloated when the goal is to use DOS. Alpine Linux would be a better base. Then you can use real DOS or a compatible one like FreeDOS.
  • by mrlonglong on 10/20/25, 2:02 PM

    I have an usb floppy disk drive. I wonder if dosbian could boot off it.
  • by ptek on 10/21/25, 3:00 AM

    AutoCAD R12 here I come