Initially this game was “the first one” I actually bought and played very long on the Pentium 75Mhz, 8MB RAM and 650MB HDD with a single speed CDROM. Time goes by, 16 bit native dos mode is not even supported anymore in current 64 bit architectures (Windows 7 fail), so you’d just grab your dosbox and install the game over there. Good thing is – you don’t require Windows for that, just go with your favorite linux distribution and install dosbox.
Install it, and depending on the version, copy it over (we do this because games might have different tweaks applied)
$ sudo apt-get install dosbox $ cd ~/.dosbox/ $ cp dosbox-0.74.conf dosbox-siedler2.conf
Now actually install the game – this is mainly done using this guide in the dosbox section.
$ cd ~/.dosbox/ $ mkdir drive_c
Start dosbox and mount your “Siedler 2 Gold Edition” CDROM. If you have copied it already locally, make sure to navigate over there within dosbox or mounting that as “D:”.
$ dosbox mount c /home/michi/.dosbox/drive_c mount d /home/michi/Siedler2 -t cdrom d: INSTALL.BAT
Choose the default location for install – C:BLUEBYTESIEDLER2
After install chose to setup the sound. Dosbox got a better sound emulation than dosemu or freedos, so you can just select the following
- midi sound – Sound Blaster or 100% compatible
- digital audio – Sound Blaster Pro or 100% compatible
(if it doesn’t work, expirement a bit with the game – dosbox works fine with alsa)
Now it’s time to configure the game for our needs, and automate various dos commands
$ vim dosbox-siedler2.conf
Change the following
core=dynamic cycles=auto sbtype=sbpro2
and at the end of the config, add the following in order to mount C: and automagically start s2.exe and exit afterwards.
[autoexec] # Lines in this section will be run at startup. # You can put your MOUNT lines here. mount c /home/michi/.dosbox/drive_c c: cd bluebyte cd siedler2 s2.exe exit
Starting dosbox in fullscreen and with this custom config can be wrapped into a small script, put in PATH.
$ sudo vim /usr/local/bin/siedler2 #!/bin/bash /usr/bin/dosbox -conf ~/.dosbox/dosbox-sieder2.conf -fullscreen $ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/siedler2
Now simply type “siedler2” into your shell and see what happens. In case of errors check the paths matching and redo each step manually from the autoexec section.