A good-looking, Boxer-style DOS gaming frontend for Windows. Drop your games in and they appear as boxes on a shelf — art downloaded automatically, sensible settings applied for you, and Roland MT-32 music (with a working LCD) when you supply the ROMs.
Inspired by Boxer for the Mac, built Windows-first.
📖 Full documentation is on the Wiki — features, usage, and the tech behind it. (The same guide ships with the app as
README.txt.)
- Bookshelf library — your games as box art on a shelf; hover a box to preview its gameplay video in a retro monitor, and press Ctrl+F to search and filter. Drop a folder,
.zip, or CD image to import. - 2D & 3D box art — downloaded automatically (ScreenScraper, with a SteamGridDB fallback); choose 2D or 3D per game or library-wide, or drop in your own cover. Logos, marquees, maps and screenshots download from the Manage window's Extras tab.
- Just-works settings — a curated catalog applies known-good DOSBox options on import; everything is overridable per game and survives updates.
- Discs & Windows — multi-disc games, disc swapping, and installing/booting a full Windows 9x.
- Roland MT-32 — drop the ROMs in and MT-32 games use them, with an on-screen dot-matrix LCD.
- Save states, screenshots/recording, mouse lock, and a smart launcher that picks the right program.
- Cloud save sync — back up your save states and notes to your own private GitHub repo, with optional passphrase encryption, synced automatically at launch.
- CRT shaders — download the libretro slang shader collection (CRT, scanlines, monochrome monitors); GPU-accelerated, switched live in-game and remembered per game, and captured in screenshots and recordings.
- Hardware 3dfx — Voodoo/Glide games render through hardware OpenGL for a sharp, accelerated picture.
See the Wiki for the details on all of these.
- Download the latest build from the Releases page, unzip it, and run
EmuDOS.exe. - On first launch, open Preferences → Downloads and get the DOSBox Pure core (fetched on demand, not bundled).
- Drag a game folder,
.zip, or disc image onto the window to add it.
See Getting Started for the full walkthrough, and How It Works for the gamebox model and the tech behind it.
Building from source (the .NET 10 SDK) is covered in How It Works → Building.
| Project | Purpose |
|---|---|
src/EmuDOS |
WPF app — the shelf UI and emulator window |
src/EmuDOS.Core |
libretro host, dosbox_pure interop, render/input/audio, import, catalog |
src/EmuDOS.Metadata |
box art & manual sources (ScreenScraper, SteamGridDB, Internet Archive) |
src/native/mt32 |
the MT-32 synth shim (C over munt) — see the wiki |
tests/EmuDOS.Tests |
unit tests |
EmuDOS plays MT-32 music with its own synth (a small DLL built from munt, shipped with the app). It needs the Roland MT-32 (or CM-32L) ROMs, which are Roland's copyrighted firmware — we can't and don't distribute them. Supply your own by dragging the .rom files (or a folder containing them) onto EmuDOS; the Downloads tab shows whether they're detected.
EmuDOS stands on the work of others, with thanks:
- Boxer by Alun Bestor — the Mac DOS frontend that inspired EmuDOS, and the reference for recreating the Roland MT-32 LCD.
- DOSBox Pure by Bernhard Schelling, and the DOSBox project it builds on — the emulator that runs the games.
- munt / mt32emu — the Roland MT-32 emulation behind our synth.
- eXoDOS — the DOS configuration set our catalog is seeded from.
- libretro — the core API EmuDOS hosts.
- FFmpeg — optional gameplay video recording.
- VLC / LibVLC by VideoLAN — plays the game-card video snaps.
- librashader by Snowflake — runs the libretro/RetroArch slang shaders on the GPU.
- libretro slang shaders — the downloadable CRT / scanline / monitor shader collection.
- ScreenScraper, SteamGridDB, and the Internet Archive — box art and manuals.
- DOSBox Pure (libretro core) — GPLv2; downloaded at runtime, never bundled.
- FFmpeg — GPL; downloaded on demand for the optional video-recording feature, never bundled.
- munt / mt32emu — LGPL 2.1; compiled into our
emudos_mt32.dll(source undersrc/native/mt32, rebuildable viabuild.cmd). - LibVLC — LGPL 2.1; bundled (via LibVLCSharp) to play the game-card video snaps.
- librashader (Snowflake) — MPL-2.0; downloaded at runtime to run the slang shaders, never bundled.
- libretro slang shaders — community shader collection (various open-source licenses); downloaded on demand from the Downloads tab, never bundled.
- Box art / manuals come from ScreenScraper, SteamGridDB, and the Internet Archive via their APIs.
Rebuilding the bundled MT-32 synth DLL is covered in the wiki.