lDosBox

Luigi B.

About this app

lDosBox is a port of the Dosbox emulator (http://www.dosbox.com/).
The modified dosbox sources are included as a tgz archive stored in the internal SD card (Android/data/lb.myapp.dosbox).
lDosBox uses the same interface of my Bochs port, lBochs. That means that a virtual PC keyboard is provided, but you can use your own virtual keyboard if you like.
It's possible to create shortcuts for different dosbox configurations, and even shortcuts for programs.
It registers itself for running .bat files, but there are limitations and this may not work on all Android systems.
All the settings are made through a popup menu with quite many options.
The back button usually opens the menu if a menu button is not reported by Android on the device.
Don't mount the root of filesystems containing important data, to avoid deleting them by mistake inside the emulator

N.B. This app was first created as an experiment just for my personal use. Then I decided to make it available to the community as I think it can be interesting. There is no official or guaranteed support and I don't know if I'll maintain it in the future years.
The app is still considered in a sort of beta/testing stage.

Many thanks to:
SDL (libsdl.org) - No porting possible without that
Dosbox (dosbox.com) - They made the real thing
Free icons authors (iconarchive.com) - I'm good at coding but bad at drawing

** WARNING **
The app seems quite stable to me, but it's easily possible to make it very unstable and it may crash immediately if the user plays too much with the configuration, or if the guest system is not managed well.
It's possible that you have to reboot your Android device in some cases.
It's possible that in some cases you have to uninstall and reinstall the app to make it work again.
Than the app may drain your battery quickly, but this depends on the configuration (emulated cpu cycles).
It's possible that the device CPU becomes stressed causing overheating.
So use it at your own risk.
** WARNING **

Ratings and reviews

I would give this five stars, but it was hard to figure out. BUT, once you figure it out it's awesome!!! I suggest the help under configuration and Manual Configuration. It also fixed a problem!!!! I could not get some of my apps in 8.1 to recognize the external SD card for copy or move. Like QuickPic... but now it can, and so can my ES Filemanger which never could... I am very grateful... ok ... 4 and a half stars.....

Full onscreen keyboard. Good scaling (be sure to enable "quality zoom" or text is usually illegible). Partly runs Win 3.1; it works fine on VGA, but crashes nonstop if you use S3 drivers. Menus for mounting disks make floppy swapping easy, but CD drive is on E: while games of the time usually expect D:, so manual ISO mounting is necessary. EDIT: I don't see any mention of drive letters in the config or help, can you be more specific?

Installed app and loads fine. Copy over files and handles dos-based installer ok. Try to run it, flickers to black screen and exits app. Ok, maybe bad files? Transfer over non-install files. Same result. Ok maybe the cd was bad? Try another program, same result. Same with two others. Tried another dosbox varient, everything works fine. Maybe your results will differ.

What's new

Alignment with dosbox svn.
Targeting Android 11. No more file system access.
Use the File Management feature to import stuff in app private area.