Nov 21, 2024

Play Dust: A Tale of the Wired West on an Apple Silicon ARM-based Mac

I have fond memories of playing Dust: A Tale of the Wired West with one of my best friends growing up. It’s a great game!

You can follow the steps below to play Dust on an Apple Silicon ARM-based Mac using DOSBox Game Launcher.

  1. Make sure you have Homebrew installed.
  2. Run java --version on the command line to see if you have Java installed.
  3. If you do not have Java installed, run brew install --cask temurin to install the Eclipse Temurin Java Development Kit. Run java --version again to confirm that installation was successful. If it was, an OpenJDK version number will be printed on the command line.
  4. Download and install the macOS ARM version of DOSBox Game Launcher from their website.
  5. Download the game archive dust.dbgl.zip without extracting it.
  6. Open the DOSBox Game Launcher app (the DBGL app in your Applications folder).
  7. In the top menu bar, go to Profiles > Import and select the dust.dbgl.zip file.
  8. Keep pressing the Next button on each screen to accept the defaults and proceed with the import. As of November, 2024, I experienced a bug in DOSBox Game Launcher where the row of Previous, Next and Cancel buttons at the bottom of these screens were not visible. I had to hit tab repeatedly in order for them to be highlighted with an outline so I could tell where they are and click them. You can search for “DOSBox game launcher” on YouTube to find a video of someone else importing games so you can see the positioning of each of them and tell which is which.
  9. When the installation finishes, you should be able to click Run Profile to boot up the game.
  10. Enjoy! 🤠

A note on not being able to see the games list

As of November, 2024, I experienced another bug preventing me from being able to see the games list- everything just appeared gray. If you experience the same thing and Dust is the only game you have imported, I think you’ll be able to just click Run profile and it will boot up your one and only game.

If you have the invisible games list problem and multiple games loaded into DOSBox Game Launcher though, I found that you can hover your mouse cursor over the invisible rows of the games list under where the Run profile icon is, pausing at various points until you see a tooltip that says “Cyberflix Incorporated”. When you see that tooltip, click the left mouse button to select the game, then click Run profile to launch it. Clearly, that’s a super hacky workaround, but at least you’ll be able to play the game!

Keyboard shortcuts

The list of keyboard shortcuts for DOSBox is here: https://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Special_Keys

To use the F- keys on macOS, you need to hold down the fn key. To un-capture the mouse cursor for example, hit ctrl+fn+F10.

Game saves

I found that trying to save the game in several of the drives listed in the save window results in DOSBox crashing. Thankfully, the c drive seems to work great, though. From inside of Dust, save the game to c:\ (not a subfolder within c, just the root of the c drive.). This will result in the game being saved in the ~/Library/dbgl/dosroot/dust/WIN31 folder on your macOS host machine. So you can open that folder on your Mac to access the .RTD save files, if you need to.

Thanks

Some of the steps in this guide and the linked zip file are from this page on Daniel Hobi’s site: https://www.danielhobi.ch/dust/

It looks like he also has game packs and instructions for running Cyberflix’s Titanic game, if you want to play that, too.