How to run WORMS in a custom DOSBox?

[MickeyKnox]

I've installed steam with wine on my mac. Then I installed WORMS. It comes with an integrated DOSBox for Windows. For Windows only, unfortunately; although DOSBox is available for linux and mac as well. It works via the steam client in wine, but it's kind of a hassle to start steam in wine to run WORMS in a DOSBox.

So I installed DOSBox for mac via brew to run WORMS directly. In

.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Worms

and its sub-directories there are quite a few .BAT and .EXE files. I think I've tried them all

dosbox <file>

but no success so far in launching WORMS. I think I read somewhere that WORMS is DRM free. In theory this should work I think. So, how to run WORMS in DOSBox?

[sss]

It is DRM free and yes, this works. Just look for the batch file that steam is using to start the game, then mount the game directory in DOSBOX and execute that file.

[MickeyKnox]

How can I find out which batch file steam is using to start the game?

[sss]

Just go through them, there aren't many. It's probably called something like worms.bat or start.bat, the names are usually descriptive. But Steam will probably also load a specific dosbox config file that came with the game. You usually don't need to do that, the game runs fine. But if you want to, look for a .conf file in the game folder, that's probably the one.

[sss]

I found it, it's goworms.bat: https://steamdb.info/app/70640/config/
Steam launches runworms.bat, but that's just a Windows batch file that's used to bootstrap Dosbox. It contains the following commands:

.\dosbox\dosbox .\drivec\goworms.bat -conf .\worms.conf -fullscreen -exit

So what you want to do is, launch Dosbox on your mac with all the parameters above, of course you have to modify the paths because these are Windows specific.

Im not familiar with Mac computers, but your command should be something like:

dosbox .wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Worms/DriveC/goworms.bat -conf .wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Worms/worms.conf -fullscreen -exit

[MickeyKnox]

Unfortunately, that didn't work. (I had to escape the parenthesis too '\(', '\)' ). There is just a grey screen.

If the command works in Linux, it should work on a Mac as well.

I even tried to call the file referenced in goworms.bat directly, e. g. DriveC/WORMS/WORMS.BAT, but that didn't work either.

In worms.conf there is also a Windows specific path, which I changed, no success either.

[sss]

This will be easier to debug if you skip the batch files and try each command on its own. Here's what you should do:

- Open the Dosbox config file in a text editor (dosbox-0.74.conf)
- Add the following lines under the autoexec section:

mount c /Worms/DriveC

imgmount d /path /Worms/worms.cue -t iso -fs iso

Replace /Worms/ with your actual path to the Worms folder, obviously. Run Dosbox without any parameters, see if the mount commands worked. If they did, try running the game:

c:
goworms.bat

This approach should make sure that at least the paths you're using are correct. If goworms.bat doesn't work, you could also try running the worms executable directly:

c:
cd worms
dos4gw.exe bin\wrms.exe