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Linux releases

Project-released tarball

Current stable version

Download DOSBox Staging 0.81.0 (tar.xz)
sha256: 034b08a941a7fd0279a81b10af620999c569f7e81b786e7f4b59a0b94e46d399

Check out the 0.81.0 release notes to learn about the changes and improvements introduced in this release.

Our pre-compiled builds run on most Linux distributions (x86_64 only for now). They depend on the following packages:

Install dependencies on Fedora

sudo dnf install SDL2 SDL2_net opusfile

Install dependencies on Ubuntu and Debian

Ubuntu 18.04 or newer, and Debian 9 or newer is required.

sudo apt install libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-net-2.0-0 libopusfile0

Install dependencies on Arch and Manjaro

sudo pacman -S sdl2 sdl2_net opusfile

Please run the install-icons.sh script included with the release to install the application icons.

External repository packages

DOSBox Staging is also packaged by external teams, as listed below. These packages may have variations in configuration file locations, filesystem or network restrictions, feature exclusions, and other differences compared to the project-released tarball.

To understand these potential differences, we recommend referring to the repository’s documentation and, if uncertain, comparing against the project-released tarball.

The DOSBox Staging team does not track or document these differences. For issues specific to these packages, please contact the respective repository owners.

Containerised packages

Download from Flathub

Fedora repository package

sudo dnf install dosbox-staging

Gentoo repository package

emerge games-emulation/dosbox-staging

Ubuntu and Mint repository package

Available via Personal Package Archive:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:feignint/dosbox-staging
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install dosbox-staging

Arch and Manjaro repository package

Available via Arch User Repository.

NixOS repository package

Available via NixOS or Home Manager. Add the following to your configuration.nix file:

For NixOS:

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  dosbox-staging
];

For Home Manager:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  dosbox-staging
];

Then rebuild your system with: nixos-rebuild switch

Other repository packages

Packaging status

Steam

You can easily configure your DOS games on Steam to use DOSBox Staging via Boxtron (a community-developed Steam Play compatibility tool for DOS games).

Boxtron will automatically use dosbox if found in your path, or can be configured to use a specific binary by editing the file ~/.config/boxtron.conf and overriding dosbox.cmd:

cmd = ~/path-to-dosbox-staging/dosbox

RetroPie package

You can easily configure your DOS games on Retropie to use DOSBox Staging via RetroPie-Setup (select Optional Packages → DOSBox Staging).

Hardware requirements

From the x86 family of processors, a processor with SSSE3 (Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3) is required.

Development snapshot builds

You can always see what’s cooking on the main branch! 😎 🍺

These snapshot builds might be slow or unstable as they are designed with developers and testers in mind.

Older releases

Building from source

Of course, you can always build DOSBox Staging straight from the source.

Send us patches if you improve something! 😄