Love your classic games? Have a lot of those classics on Steam? You need to grab Boxtron, the unofficial Steam Play tool that allows you to use a native DOSBox with Steam games even if they don't have a Linux build up.

As a quick refresher Boxtron improves the experience by giving lower input lag, better fullscreen support, Steam Overlay and other Steam feature support and so on. Compared to running games through Proton or messing about with a manual DOSBox configuration it makes things nice and simple.

The latest release of Boxtron v0.5.2 "Sating Box Dogs" was put out today which includes:

Add an option to disable games starting in fullscreen (with ♥ for tiling WM users)

Include several workarounds for broken or non-portable .cue files bundled with the games

Treat *.bat files as an executable for BOXTRON_RUN_EXE

Prepare for initial GameHub support

The install process is easy and the same as other such unofficial Steam Play tools. Close Steam, extract the folder from the boxtron.tar.xz download and place it into here:

~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/

You should then able use the power of DOSBox with Boxtron. To do so, right click the game in your Steam library, go to Properties and then see this at the bottom:

Something else came with this release as well, as the developer has prepared an experimental DOSBox build from the dosbox-staging repo for those of you who feel brave to test. Compared to the current DOSBox release, the experimental build includes fixes for fullscreen and ALT+TAB issues, MP3 playback is fixed, OGG playback is improved, a more stable Steam Overlay and more. They also said Tomb Raider 1 (software rendering), Carmageddon (software rendering), Alone in the Dark 3, Megarace 2 and Stargunner should work better with it.

If you want to test the experimental build and see the full changelog all details are on GitHub.