Petit DosBox Setup

Posted by Nick Loadholtes on 3/3/2006 filed in Apple, Games, OS X, Wasteland

I had the Petit DosBox from OS X up and running a while ago, but today when I went to run it I kept getting an error about libSDL not being found.

Last year I had an “incident” that basically required me to re-run the 10.4 installation. I think when I did that it must have wiped out the symbolic link I had made to get Petit to run. If you are finding yourself in this situation, here’s what I did to get it up and running (Mac Mini running OS X10.4.5):

WARNING: Only attempt this if you are confident of your computer skills *and* you have backups of your important data. This is a fairly safe thing I’m describing, but you are doing it at your own risk. I’m merely pointing out what I did and how it worked for me. Your mileage may vary. Proceed at your own risk.

  1. Open up a terminal window.
  2. Type in cd /usr/local/lib and press return.
  3. Type in ls and press return. Odds are there is nothing there.
  4. If you don’t see anything that says SDL, type this in: sudo su and press return
  5. Enter your system password. (Basically you are going to run as root for this next command)
  6. Your prompt should now say “root”. Type in (or cut-n-paste) this line: ln -s /sw/lib/libSDL-1.2.0.dylib libSDL-1.2.0.dylib and press return.
  7. Type in ls and press return. You should now see libSDL-1.2.0.dylib. At this point try running any Petit dos program. If it works, yaa! If not, you might be missing the SDL installation. I’m not sure if it comes with the Mac by default or ifI had installed it manually.

If you have success or failure with these instructions, please leave a message in the comments. I’ll try to help out if I can (but no guarantees).


4 Responses to “Petit DosBox Setup”

  1. Joe Says:
    March 15th, 2006 at 10:32 pm

    Tried the instructions, but did not work. I downloaded the latest version of SDL from http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php, put the folder in the framework in the right place as instructed by the readme. I freely admit that I don’t have a clue on this earth what I am doing – the versions don’t match up (1.2.9 is the SDL that I have) and there does not seem to be a file named anything like “libSDL” anywhere on my system to create a symbolic link to.

    Any ideas? Many thanks,
    Joe

  2. Joe Says:
    March 16th, 2006 at 8:24 am

    Okay, well it’s working. I think there were many little things wrong. 1st. install SDL (download from http://www.libsdl.org). This is simply copying the framework to the right place on your system – it’s all in the readme. Next, verify that you can run DosBox directly. I was having trouble unstuffing the .sit from the DosBox site. I read about a problem using Stuffit 10 – a zipped archive was kindly provided here: http://vogons.zetafleet.com/viewtopic.php?t=11511. That version worked fine for me.

    I was still having trouble with Petit – it said the SDL link wasn’t there, but the SDL checker on the last page said it was fine. So I updated the internal version of DosBox with the one from the zip above (using it externally didn’t work – in theory it’s the same version that was included with the Petit download). I don’t know, all I know is that it works now.

  3. Nick Says:
    March 16th, 2006 at 1:22 pm

    Congrats on getting it working! I’m sorry I didn’t get the first message fast enough to offer any help. That is weird about the problem with Stuffit, I don’t remember running into any issues with that, I might have just unzipped it from the command line.

    Thanks for posting the steps you used to get it working, I get search hits for DosBox and hopefully this will help someone else out there having problems. Hopefully future releases of DosBox will be a bit smoother. Now if only we could get Windows apps running on the Mac… ;)

    -Nick

  4. Joanna Says:
    July 7th, 2006 at 9:39 am

    Replacing the internal dosbox did it for me – thanks :)
    Just to clarify, that involves right-clicking on Petitdosbox.app and choosing “Show Package Contents” and navigating to Contents/MacOS and replacing the Dosbox file there with one from exactly the same place, but from right-clicking Dosbox.app.

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