DOSBox Staging: Customising Prince of Persia — Display, Joystick, Audio and Autoexec Settings

This guide covers the configuration options that DOSBox Staging 0.83 documents for customising Prince of Persia. The game serves here as a testbed for the emulated display adapter and for other enhancements and tweaks. All settings are edited in the dosbox.conf configuration file.

Before you start

You need a working DOSBox Staging 0.83 setup in which Prince of Persia already runs, plus access to your dosbox.conf configuration file. Changes described here are made in that file, and some require a restart of DOSBox Staging to take effect.

Fullscreen mode

You can toggle between windowed and fullscreen mode at any time with Alt+Enter. If you always want the game to start in fullscreen, set fullscreen = on in the [sdl] section of dosbox.conf, then restart DOSBox Staging.

[sdl]
fullscreen = on

Choosing the emulated display adapter

The machine setting in the [dosbox] section selects the emulated graphics adapter. The documentation shows examples for ega, cga and hercules. Set the value that matches the adapter you want to emulate.

[dosbox]
machine = ega

[dosbox]
machine = cga

[dosbox]
machine = hercules

Joystick input

Joystick options are set in the [joystick] section. The documentation shows enabling circular input with circularinput = on and setting a deadzone value of 15. Use these documented values as a starting point for your own controller setup.

[joystick]
circularinput = on
deadzone = 15

Pausing when the window is inactive

To make DOSBox Staging pause automatically when its window loses focus, set pause_when_inactive = yes in the [sdl] section.

[sdl]
pause_when_inactive = yes

Audio effects

The [mixer] section includes reverb and chorus settings. The documentation shows reverb = large together with chorus = normal as an example configuration.

[mixer]
reverb = large
chorus = normal

Launching the game automatically

The [autoexec] section runs DOS commands when DOSBox Staging starts. The documentation shows switching to the C: drive, running prince and then exit.

[autoexec]
c:
prince
exit

Combined example

The documentation's combined example combines permanent fullscreen and pause-on-inactive in [sdl], the mixer effects shown above, and the autoexec commands that start Prince of Persia. Each individual setting is documented in its own section of the guide.

[sdl]
fullscreen = on
pause_when_inactive = yes

[mixer]
reverb = large
chorus = normal

[autoexec]
c:
prince
exit

Recovery and reverting changes

The documentation does not supply specific recovery steps for these settings. Before editing, keep a backup copy of your dosbox.conf. If a change causes an unwanted result, restore the previous value and restart DOSBox Staging.