I have two computers, one is fancy Pentium 4 blah blah blah, but the other is a five year old contraption that I run with Linux. I was wondering if anyone knew of a way to get DosBox for Linux and if anyone knew of some way to get the first 5 Wizardry scenarios for Linux, or if anyone knows of a Windows emulator or something! I already own the UWA, so there shouldn't be any issue about pirating if I need to download the games to get them to work on my old computer. I really want to get the first 5 on my old computer, because it seems such a waste to use my new one (especially since my whole family uses the new one whereas only me and my dad use the old one). If anyone has any information please share.

• ask your (package) manager,ShadowCrust, 12:33 PM, Nov-14-06
  • RE: ask your (package) manager,Andrew (Guest), 05:54 PM, Nov-14-06
    • this looks like a job for,ShadowCrust, 01:33 AM, Nov-15-06
      • RE: this looks like a job for,Prospero, 07:01 AM, Feb-06-07
        • RE: this looks like a job for,ShadowCrust, 10:31 AM, Feb-06-07
          • RE: this looks like a job for,Prospero, 10:58 AM, Feb-06-07
            • RE: this looks like a job for,ShadowCrust, 11:32 AM, Feb-06-07
              • RE: this looks like a job for,Prospero, 02:58 PM, Feb-06-07

What distribution are you using? In Debian and Ubuntu, you can install dosbox with apt-get. Most likely the package managers of other distributions have dosbox available as well. If not, you can download precompiled packages or the source at the official site:

http://dosbox.sourceforge.net

I've got Suse. But the other issue is that my computer won't even recognize my UWA CD, so I can't install the games. Hence, wondering about if there is a way to download the games, or if there's a way to "fool" the computer into installing the games or something. Thanks for your help.

yast, and if it isn't available in the official repositories, you can get the rpms here:

http://packman.links2linux.de/package/dosbox

does the UWA CD still work in other computers?

I suppose it's either a scratched CD or a picky CD drive why your CD isn't recognized

thanks, I'll try that. By the way, I've signed on now, so my name's Prospero instead of Andrew. The UWA CD still works fine on my Pentium 4. Actually, the old computer does recognize the presence of a CD in the drive when I pop UWA in, I just can't do anything with it. I figure it's just picky (especially since UWA probably came out before Linux did and I've got an old version of Linux anyway). Thanks.

What do you mean with "I just can't do anything with it"? Are you familiar with handling CDs in Linux in general, i.e. with mounting?

When I say "I can't do anything with it" I mean that when the CD mounts and I go to run the program a little window pops up saying that the computer was unable to run the program, a little lock appears in the corner of the icon indicating that it's read-only and the computer thinks that each file is an image rather than a program. In other words, my computer doesn't have a clue what kind of program the games are, so it has no idea what to do with them.

Ah ok. The UWA are DOS binaries, not a native Linux format. You need an emulator to run these binaries in Linux, e.g. DOSBox. The files are flagged as read-only because they are on CD-ROM.

So nothing to worry about. Copy the games over to harddisk, make the files writable, store the CD safely away and get yourself DOSBox (through YaST or other means) to run these games in Linux.

Thanks.