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.
  9. When the installation finishes, you should be able to click Run Profile to boot up the game.
  10. Enjoy! 🤠

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. To toggle full screen, press option + return.

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.