... are there any remaining problems? on my raspberry 3b+ it is running perfect with all sounds ... but i have to do a lot of changes to make it work ...

Thanks for the info.

So the PI2 might not be fast enough for such games on DOSBox. Too bad.

Just to confirm that example script you provided, worked well and that this problem is solved.
Thanks again for your help.

You can mark this SOLVED! I remembered I was following another site's suggestion on creating ".SH" files to automatically launch games in DOSBox without having to manually type the commands. Along the way, I had modified the es_systems.cfg file to give it an entry so it would show as an emulator because it wasn't coming up after installing DOSBox.

It turns out, there's more than one es_systems.cfg file. The one I posted above was in the ETC path. I found another one under /opt/retropie/configs/all/emulationstation/

When I opened it up, I guess I had somehow split the line:

<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ pc %ROM%</command>

into this:

<command>/opt/retropie/supplementary/ runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ pc %ROM% </command>

Once I backspaced each separation so it was on one line, it worked! Well, the "+Start DOSBox" entry works, but the ".SH" scripts I made do not launch the games properly, so that will be my next mission. Thanks for your help BuZz.

@CaelThunderwing

I really couldn't advise anything on that other than another search through vogons.org. I play a lot of DOS games, but installing Windows 3.1 has never been anything I wanted to put myself through. Maybe I'm being unfair, but I remember it as being an unintuitive and unforgiving environment when it came to hardware integration. The Keymapper is of course an option, so at least you have a contingency plan if all else fails.

That seems to have solved it. Thanks!

Epic Pinball runs so amazingly awesome on my non-overclocked Pi2. I've heard that DOSBox doesn't run well on the Pi3. I know Muriani is somewhat of a genius on getting DOSBox running well on the Pi3, but she only shows up in the IRC channel. Might want to stop by there and see if she has any pointers.

I had a what the heck moment and decided to try Rpix86 with this game last night. I was blown away by the performance improvement this emulator has over DosBox. I estimate I observed a 2-3 times speed increase over DosBox on the same Pi, bringing it into Pentium territory, which I totally did not expect because all material such as documentation and forum discussion suggest it operates at the speed of a "~20 MHz 486". The emulator is not without its problems, the cursor moved really choppily in the menu's, almost as if the emulator wasn't receiving input consistently while in menu's. Also the music did not work, only the sound effects, which is a big problem for me because I love the chip tunes in this game. Finally the game actually crashed on me once during my brief play session (taking me back to the days when I was running the same game on actual hardware, lol) I chalk this up to the likely conclusion that the Rpix86 emulator is not nearly as "complete" as DosBox. This still showed me what kind of performance with DOS emulation is actually possible on a RISC architecture like ARM and I sincerely hope this emulator is developed further (or a more optimized DosBox derivative is released). I noticed there hasn't been a new release of Rpix86 in a year or so.

Does anyone have any insight on how to possibly resolve the problems above? I'm most concerned about the music not playing, the other issues are secondary (but would still be nice to fix).

@BuZz Graphically, Doom is slightly more demanding than Arena, so that gives me a fair idea of what to expect in and of itself.

@punky you should download wold4sdl from retropie setup. Fullscreen and far faster than dosbox.

I'm having trouble with Chasm: The Rift and Blood running to slowly, has anyone experienced this as well?