Replay Dune 2 in all its splendour. I found some links that will enable you to replay this RTS classic. It was my first exposure to the Dune universe and one I haven’t regretted, and also and incredibly fun game. As the game ran in DOS it has difficultly running in later versions of Windows. I will provide installation instructions here.

These are the files you will need:

Dune 2: The game. This link might ask you to donate but if you wait it should provide the download for free. It did for me.

DOSBOX:  DOS emulator.

Manual:  This is a text version of the game manual – needed in game to answer a question after the first level. There is also a colour pdf version of the manual.

Setup

Once the game has been downloaded you will extract it to a folder of your choosing. Run the setup  (.exe) file, this will actually run in newer versions of windows. It will ask you about soundcard settings, back in the day you couldn’t have settings automatically detected so you had to input those manually. The SoundBlaster was a nice card and the SoundBlaster Pro was even better; this game will run with any of those choices but if you choose Pro then you get nice sound quality. If you choose PC Speaker than you get 8bit mono. All sounds came through my regular sound card and speakers with no problem. If you have any problems then you’ll have to Google it.

DOSBox

Download / extract as necessary then run it. Type ‘intro’ to understand how it works. Basically you need to mount your hard drive in the same way you would on Linux/Unix. Well, not exactly. You mount a virtual hard drive which could be your games menu, eg you could type mount c c:\games in order to mount your games menu as hard drive. That’s what I did. Also, I think you will have to mount your hard drive every time you use dosbox. I’m sure there is a script you could write to prevent this but it isn’t difficult to type out the above each time. If you want to access this directory then simply type c:

At this stage you are good to go. Go to Dune 2 directory and run the bat file (I think). Fingers crossed and it should load up with sound. Note that the game is windowed but appears to run at the correct speed.

Article previously posted in the other section of my website.