How To Create DOSBox Shortcut To Start Daggerfall!

Revisions
12-25-12:  Initial release.

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I’ll keep this tutorial short. So I have a Youtube video that shows you how to get the free copy of Daggerfall and install the game. If you missed that video, click here.

For whatever reason, there has been a ridiculous amount of demand from viewers who want to learn how to create a shortcut such that if they use a shortcut from the desktop, the game starts without them having to type in code all the time. Rightfully so as I’m here to make your life a little bit easier.

I re-installed the game recently to test the shortcut method, and I was able to get a working shortcut within 5 minutes, and now you can too! Let’s do this!

Text Tutorial

1) For this tutorial, I am assuming that your DAGGER and DFCD folder directories are located in C:\dosgames. See screenshot for clarification:

Daggerfall directory

2)  Now for simplicity sake, go into your DOSBox folder, find the “dosbox.conf” file, right click, copy, and now paste that into your DAGGER folder. To make things clean, I renamed it to “dagger.conf”, but you don’t have to. If you want to follow along with this tutorial, you can rename it if you want.

dagger.conf

3) Now open up “dagger.conf” with notepad. Scroll to the very bottom, and make the text edits as shown in the screenshot below. Save the text file. We are almost done!

Edit the “dagger.conf” and save.

4) Go to your DOSBox folder, right click the dosbox.exe, and right click and drag to the desktop to create a shortcut. Now right click the shortcut, and go to “Properties”.

As this point in time, we are going to modify the target path. Let me show you what my target looks like, and how you can modify yours:

“Z:\Portable Applications\Master\PortableApps\DOSBoxPortable\DOSBoxPortable.exe” -conf “c:\dosgames\dagger\dagger.conf” “c:\dosgames\dagger\dagger.exe”

The text that is in blue may vary from your computer. I am using a portable version of DOSBox, but the concept is still the same. We are more concerned with what is in red color.  Copy what I have, and adjust it accordingly.

If you installed the game just like the instructions that came with the game, then this tutorial will work out fine. Basically, we are putting into the shortcut where the custom “.conf” file is, and we are also telling it where the “dagger.exe” file is.

In the end, your shortcut will look similar to mine below:

DOSBox shortcut with modified Target box

Now if you run the shortcut, your game will auto start and mount your game CD! Have fun!