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How to Run Return to Zork in DOSBox

"Return to Zork" was the first entry in the long-running series of Zork adventure games to be designed by Activision, and the first not to be primarily text-based. Because of the game's age, it's essentially impossible to get it to run on modern operating systems -- but the free DOSBox emulator, by mimicking an MS-DOS environment, can coax games like "Return to Zork" into running smoothly.

Instructions

- 1
  Download and install DOSBox, if you haven't already. You can download it for free from DOSBox.com -- click "Download," then download and run the installation file that corresponds to your operating system.
- 2
  Insert your "Return to Zork" CD-ROM and open it in your file manager. Drag the entire contents of the CD into a directory somewhere on your hard drive -- you can put it anywhere you want, but the rest of this guide will assume you are using a Windows system and placed the files in "C:\games\rtz-cd". If you are using a different directory, or another operating system that formats paths and filenames differently, simply replace "C:\games\rtz-cd" with something else -- "~/games/rtz" in a Linux or Mac OS system, for example.
- 3
  Open DOSBox and mount both your CD-ROM drive and the directory you created with the following commands:
  
  mount c c:\games\rtz-cd
  mount d d:\
  
  where "d:\" is the path to your CD-ROM drive.
- 4
  Switch to your CD drive and run the "Return to Zork" installation program with the following commands:
  
  d:
  install
- 5
  Select "Drive C:" and answer "No" when asked whether to install a project file. Change the installation path to "\" when prompted, answer "No" when asked whether to launch from Windows, and answer "Yes" when asked whether to change sound settings now. Choose "Sound Blaster 16" for both music and sound effects, and select port 220 if prompted.
- 6
  Change to your C: drive when the installation program is complete, and run the "rtz.bat" file:
  
  c:
  rtz
  
  This will start the game.
- 7
  Run the game again later, after exiting and restarting DOSBox, by repeating steps three and six.

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