Addendum:

After tinkering around, I managed to get UFO to work by running the BAT file "UFOCD" from the D: cdrom drive in the DosBox emulator.

(1) It worked, but it seems to be running slow in Debian GNU/Linux compared to when I ran it on Win98 platform a couple of years back, on the same PC.

(2) I got a problem when I sent my skyranger in Geoscape to the ground assault mission - it wouldn't start up this mission. Being a creature of habit, I pressed "Ctrl+Alt+Del" buttons several times because I lose the mouse pointer functionality and I saw the familar pixeled texts, I think about not able to run misdata(?) before managing to return to the Geoscape, but with all data lost.

(3) How do you resize the Dosbox emulator to full screen? I only have minimise and close tab on menu bar and the emulator screen is something like the size of the editor window that I used to type this post.

(4) I'm running Pentium II 350mHz, 128RAM with GNU/Linux Debian installed in the HDD.

(5)I'm still interested in my original query about installing and running X-COM game in the emulator from C intead of D.

> I'm running Pentium II 350mHz
That one is good enough to run games designed for 286 processors in Dosbox.

ALso that 128mb of RAM is extremly low. IIRC, DosBox at default memory values eats up like 45meg....

Why are you running MS-DOS games under an emulator on Linux and not dual-booting into MS-DOS on such an old computer.....

Thanks for the replies hal-9000 & DosFreak.

I simply have the old Pentium lying around so it is a waste to chuck it out. Actually, it runs the X-COM games fine, no problem with speed - when it was originally running under Win98. But then I decided to chuck out Win98 alltogether so I could run under Linux. My apps work much better with Debian GNU/Linux when previously I had a lot of crashes with WIn98 that eat up so much CPU resources...

So, I never bothered with dual boot as I am not going back to Win98 - too unreliable on this old PC.

Anyway, it is still early days, I am going to continue tinkering around. I have questions though - when I run the Dosbox emulator and mount in CD ROM drive D, I managed to run the X-COM: Enemy Unknown by typing "UFOCD". The game went o.k. except for two things:
1. I couldn't save the game - screen freeze up
2. I couldn't enter the UFO ground assault from Geoscape.

I couldn't see how the 128M RAM be a factor even if the Dosbox itself use up about 45M as DosFreak mentioned?

I have read the Dosbox FAQ and noted that you can increase the speed by typing Ctrl-F12. It worked slightly, but game still running slow. Also, there is the fact that I already have some keys mapped for my Linux windowmanager, and these wouldn't work with Dosbox unless I change the config.

viv wrote:

I simply have the old Pentium lying around so it is a waste to chuck it out.

Nothing wrong with that. I see way too many people throw out perfectly good machines.

Actually, it runs the X-COM games fine, no problem with speed - when it was originally running under Win98.

Well...yeah.

But then I decided to chuck out Win98 alltogether so I could run under Linux. My apps work much better with Debian GNU/Linux when previously I had a lot of crashes with WIn98 that eat up so much CPU resources...

No suprise there! 😀

So, I never bothered with dual boot as I am not going back to Win98 - too unreliable on this old PC.

Yeah, here's your mistake. DOS/Windows games work best under DOS/Windows no matter how good the underlying operating system is. In your situation if I didn't want to keep 9x around and why not since it includes DOS anyway? I would setup a dual-boot between 9x and Windows. Then you have 3 operating systems you can use. DOS v7/9x/Linux.

Linux=Everything
9x=old Windows games or applications that don't work in Linux
DOS=Old DOS games.

Anyway, it is still early days, I am going to continue tinkering around. I have questions though - when I run the Dosbox emulator and mount in CD ROM drive D, I managed to run the X-COM: Enemy Unknown by typing "UFOCD". The game went o.k. except for two things:
1. I couldn't save the game - screen freeze up
2. I couldn't enter the UFO ground assault from Geoscape.

I've never run UFO from the CD before because every time I've run it has been from the hard drive. I'm assuming that when it tries to save, it cannot because it's trying to save to what it think is a CDROM and CDROM's cannot be writen to.

As for your second problem I don't know.

I couldn't see how the 128M RAM be a factor even if the Dosbox itself use up about 45M as DosFreak mentioned?

Well Linux itself chews up alot of memory. I'm sure it's eating alot more than 9x would on that machine unless you took the time to really slimline whatever distribution that your using. I'm betting that your using your swap partition heavily which definetly isn't good for performance.

I have read the Dosbox FAQ and noted that you can increase the speed by typing Ctrl-F12. It worked slightly, but game still running slow. Also, there is the fact that I already have some keys mapped for my Linux windowmanager, and these wouldn't work with Dosbox unless I change the config.

You will not be able to get the game running fast on that machine using DosBox. It's not gonna happen.

Thanks for the detailed replies DosFreak.

I took time to read some stuffs about Dosbox on web. The one thing that I discovered as you may already knew about is that programs like Dosbox requires substantially more CPU power and this greatly affect the software running in the emulator. I also read that DOS/4GW-based games may not perform at a desirable speed on Dosbox.

So, this mean that the X-COM game will run slow in the emulator on the the old PC that I have.

I had tried dual-booting early in the period when I was considering switching to Linux but there were issues of Linux installation which did not goes properly - had to reinstall Debian GNU/Linux several times and in the end for a machine containing only 4G HDD, I never bother with dual boot.

Oh, definitely Win98 was chewing up significantly more CPU resources that made some app crawl. I have Debian GNU/Linux with Fluxbox as my window manager - a slimline one that made app runs much faster and use far less CPU resources than Win98. I also have a desktop GUI like Gnome but it still use a lot of CPU compared with Fluxbox.

Anyway, I am just finding it fun to experiment. Later I will probably get a second HDD and have it fix in the same Pentium machine to use for DOS/MS-DOS app. Additionally I'll try to get the CPU increases from 350mHz up to the max 500mHz and a max of 256M RAM allowed.