QBasic Tutorials: QBasic with DOSBox - Part 2

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QBasic Tutorials: QBasic with DOSBox: Part 2 of this tutorial illustrates how to integrate folders containing your source codes, and explains how to save a lot of typing when launching DOSBox.

Author: Crossroads

Created: 2015-08-18
Updated: 2022-05-24

QBasic with DOSBox

Other Parts on this Tutorial:

Part 2 - Automation and Customization

In order to store all DOSBox / QuickBASIC related files, we have to add another directory (C:\oldDOS\Progs) to our folder structure.
Copy or move all your DOS stuff to that directory:

Directories - Fig. 3.1 Directories - Fig. 3.2

Now we can restart DOSBox, as described in Part 1, Fig. 2.2 with one exception:
In order to have full access to all data in Progs, we'll integrate that directory as drive D (Fig. 4.1). Here we go:

Type mount C C:\oldDOS\QB45 ↵
Type mount D C:\oldDOS\Progs ↵
To change to drive C, type C: ↵
Last but not least, type in qb and confirm with ↵

Finally we are able to load, execute, modify and save every source code stored in drive D!

DOSBox - Fig. 4.1 QuickBASIC - Fig. 4.2 QuickBASIC - Fig. 4.3

The time-consuming typing before each start of QuickBASIC is extremely annoying. Is that really necessary? Fortunately, the answer is: No!
The following section describes how to start QuickBASIC automatically:

Go to Start Menu > DOSBox-0.74 > Options and click on DOSBox-0.74 (Fig. 5.1)
Scroll down to [autoexec] in the opened config file and add the following lines (Fig. 5.2)

Config - Fig. 5.1 Config - Fig. 5.2

Once the config file has been saved and closed, DOSBox needs to be restarted. Now QB should be available immediately without any additional typing.

! Part 3 describes how to launch a variety of applications within DOSBox with little effort using shortcuts.