Installing QBasic on Mac a.k.a Revisiting the school days

My daughter recently needed QBasic for her school work. I set out to install the exact same program in my Mac as online emulators did not do a great job without confusing her.

The ingredients:

• Oracle VirtualBox
• FreeDos
• olddos.exe

Recipe:

• Installed Oracle VirtualBox
• Installed FreeDos using (http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/VirtualBox), along with networking
• Created a ISO image with olddos.exe ( https://web.archive.org/web/20070316205657/http://download.microsoft.com/download/win95upg/tool_s/1.0/w95/en-us/olddos.exe )
• Used DiskUtility and created a new image (Be sure to choose image format as CD/DVD Master)
• Copies the olddos.exe to the image
• Used the following command from terminal to convert the CDR to ISO

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o DosUtil.iso DosUtil.cdr

• Mounted the ISO in VirtualBox as  a drive
• Ran the self extracting archive olddos.exe

Now QBasic is all hot and steaming and ready to be served.