dosbox-automation: A DOSBox fork with REST API for automated DOS game installation and control

Hi, I'm shakeyourbunny, and I built dosbox-automation: a DOS emulator you can drive from code, and from Claude.

Why I built it I wanted an agent to handle old DOS software the way a person does: type at the prompt, read the screen, swap in disk 2 when the installer asks for it. Clicking through an emulator by hand doesn't scale, and scraping a window is fragile. So the emulator got an API of its own.

What it does

• A REST API on your own machine, loopback only and token-protected: keys, mouse, screen text, screenshots, memory, I/O ports, disk swaps, with Swagger docs built in
• A sandboxed Lua engine inside the emulator for frame-exact scripts
• Mounts zip, rar, 7z and iso archives as drives without unpacking them; saves go to a folder of their own and the archive stays untouched
• Video and audio recording, plus recording and replaying input
• Unattended installs from TOML recipes

With Claude Two companions:

• dosbox-mcp, an MCP server that gives Claude dedicated tools for the emulator, on PyPI (claude mcp add dosbox -- uvx dosbox-mcp): https://pypi.org/project/dosbox-mcp/ and https://github.com/dosbox-automation/dosbox-mcp
• dosbox-automation-skill, a Claude Code plugin with the whole agent handbook as a skill, installable with one line: https://github.com/dosbox-automation/dosbox-automation-skill

My favourite test is one sentence: start Commander Keen 4 from the shareware zip, record the session and set the shots to 99. A fresh Claude Code does it in thre