Working With DOS

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DOS (short for Disk Operating System) is the distant ancestor of the modern Windows operating system. When your virtual machine starts up, it'll present you with a prompt that reads C:\>. This means that the current drive is the C drive (the virtual hard drive) and you're currently in the \ or root directory. In general, you'll always work on the C drive, except when I have you load data from a virtual floppy, which will be the A drive - you can switch to it by typing A: and pressing Enter, and back to the C drive by typing C: and pressing Enter. Of course, since you don't have a virtual floppy disk inside your virtual floppy drive, this won't work yet! I'll remind you of how to do this when the time comes.

Like on a modern computer, each disk drive is organized into directories (usually called "folders" these days) which contain files. In order to view the contents of the current directory, type dir and press Enter. If the directory listing is too long to fit on the screen, you can type dir /w (the /w switch is short for 'Wide'), which outputs the listing in three columns. If it's still too long, you can type dir /p (/p for 'Pages', or perhaps 'Paginate'), which will pause outputting the listing when it fills the screen, waiting for you to press a key before it continues. You can also combine the switches (à la dir /w /p) if you're so inclined.

The first thing we're going to do is make a directory to store all our code in. Type in mkdir gameprg and press Enter. This will create a new directory inside the current directory called 'gameprg'. View the directory listing using dir, and observe your new directory.

To change the current directory, you use the cd command. Enter the command cd gameprg and the prompt will change to C:\gameprg>. To go "upwards" into a parent directory, type

cd ..

If you do this inside C:\gameprg, for instance, it'll take you back to C:\.

Whenever you want to stop running Bochs, just hit the power button - in Bochs, not on your real computer! There was no need for a shutdown mechanism back then.

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