Connect Hardware
Connect a USB keyboard to one of the USB Host ports. Connect the Fruit Jam to a DVI compatible display using a standard HDMI cable. Optionally connect speaker(s) or headphones to the JST speaker connector or 3.5mm jack.
DOS & Floppy Images
After following the instructions from the Install page, the 286 emulator will boot into DOS 6.22. Type commands with the connected USB keyboard and press enter to run them. Use commands like dir and cd to navigate the filesystem. There is a scanned copy of the DOS Manual on archive.org that contains a comprehensive list of available commands.
By default, the boot disk that has DOS on it is drive A:\. It's possible to connect a second floppy .img file that will show up as drive B:\ in DOS. There are screenshots, details, and a link to download an image file that we tested below. You can also search around archive.org or other places online to find downloadable copies of .img files for disks from this era. It is possible to create your own .img files that contain .exe's and other files, but it's rather involved, a simpler method of using regular programs and files is shown in the Map Drive section.
Supported floppy disk image sizes are: 360KB, 720KB, 1.2MB, 1.44MB
To insert an optional second floppy to the emulator:
- Unplug the Fruit Jam from power to shut it off
- Remove the micro SD card from the Fruit Jam and connect it to a computer
- Paste a floppy disk image into the XT/ folder at the root of the SD.
- Rename the new disk image file fdd1.img. There will already be a fdd0.img file which is the DOS disk that was setup on the installation page. The full file path within the SD should be exactly
XT/fdd1.img. - Use the eject, unmount, or safely remove action in your OS to disconnect the microSD drive from the host OS, then unplug micro SD card from the computer.
- Insert the micro SD back into the Fruit Jam and plug it back in to power
With the XT/fdd1.img file present on the SD card, the files from that .img will be available inside of DOS in B:\. To see what is on the disk use this command DIR B:\
The DIR B:\ command will list all of the files on the disk. Any files that are EXE executables or COM command files can be run by typing their full path and pressing enter. For example B:\JOUST to launch the Joust game shown in the DIR output screenshot to the left.
You can move the shell into the drive by typing it's drive letter and colon then pressing enter i.e. B: to navigate to the second floppy drive.
Joust & Mario Disk
Click the button below to download a disk image containing the games Joust and Super Mario Bros VGA.
In Joust, the player takes the role of a knight riding a flying Ostrich carrying a lance. The goal is to fly around and battle enemies with your lance. The controls and a few other aspects are customizable from the menu screen, there are instructions and keys documented at the bottom of the menu.
Mario Bros is set in a similar 2d environment with platforms to run and jump on. In this game the enemy turtles come out of the pipes at the top of the screen. The player must try to jump and hit the platform while a turtle is on the ground above to bounce it up and gain points.
DOS 6.2 comes with QBasic pre-loaded. To access it run the command qbasic from the A:\> drive prompt. There are a handful of BASIC games and programs included in a folder named QBFILES\.
To access the included programs, press Alt+F to open the File menu, then press O for Open. Press tab to move the selector to the list of directories and drives on the right, then press down arrow to select the QBFILES and press enter. Press tab to move the selector to the list of files on the left, then use the arrow keys to navigate up and down through the list of files and press enter on whichever file you want to open.
When you open a .bas files it will load the file into the main editor for you to view/modify the code. When you want to run the program press F5.
Aside from the games, there are a few programs that play jingles from the attached speaker, a copy of Money, an old Microsoft accounting utility, HGCTEST.BAS a graphics test that draws polygons, and REMLINE.BAS a tool for removing line numbers that aren't explicitly used within BASIC code files.
QBasic Games
Included in the QBFILES\ directory are GORILLA.BAS and NIBBLES.BAS files which contain playable games.
Gorilla pits two players against each other as gorillas throwing bananas back and forth at each other over a city skyline. Players take turns entering an angle and velocity to launch their banana.
Nibbles has the player control Sammy, the snake, with arrow keys. Attempt to collect the numbers and avoid the walls. During the first life of play, the field seems to get filled with a repeated character, I think that may be a bug but I never played the original and am not certain. After the player loses a life, the field resets and looks correct with blank areas and the numbers to eat being much easier to see.
Hard Disk Image
The author of the pico-286 project has shared a hard disk image that contains several other games and programs. Many aren't working inside of the emulator, but some do and there is plenty of nostalgia and fun to be had.
Adafruit's Anne Barela has taken the disk and removed many of the programming tools, leaving MS-DOS 6.22 and the GAMES directory. Also the image is bootable, unlike the Pico-286 image.
Mounting hard disk images inside the emulator is very similar to mounting floppy images. The emulator will look for the file XT/hdd.img on the SD card, if it exists it will be made available to DOS as the C: drive.
Click the button below to download the hard disk image file.
To insert a hard disk image to the emulator:
- Unplug the Fruit Jam from power to shut it off
- Remove the micro SD card from the Fruit Jam and connect it to a computer
- Paste a hard disk image into the XT/ folder at the root of the SD.
- Rename the disk image file hdd.img. It should be next to any existing fdd#.img files. Note that the main hdd.img file has no number in it like the floppy ones. The exact file path should be XT/hdd.img
- Use the eject, unmount, or safely remove action in your OS to disconnect the microSD drive from the host OS, then unplug micro SD card from the computer.
- Insert the micro SD back into the Fruit Jam and plug it back in to power
With the XT/hdd.img file present on the SD card, the emulator will see the contents of the hard disk image as the C drive. Move to it by entering the command c:. Feel free to use dir /p to look around at the included files. The /p argument tells dir to paginate the results so that they can be viewed one page at a time rather than scrolling off the top of the screen.
There is a games folder on the drive which contains many games. Use cd games to move inside of it. Then dir /p to list the available games.
To launch a game, type the name of its EXE or COM file and press enter.
Some of the games don't work inside the emulator but we found others that do and included them in the gallery below. We didn't test every game, so there are likely others that work not included in the gallery.
If you have a bootable hard disk image such as the one linked above you can also boot directly to the hard drive by placing the hdd.img file inside of the XT folder without any fdd#.img files.
Secondary Hard Drives and More Software
You can have a second hard disk image file named hdd2.img. The second disk will get mounted as drive D:. If you have one, place it in the XT folder also along with the other images.
Here is a link to a hard drive img that was originally provided by the author of the Pico 286 project. It contains the same games and qbasic files as the hard disk image linked above as well as some additional software to explore if you like. This image is not bootable, so you must have either a bootable floppy disk img at fdd0.img or a bootable hard disk at hdd.img to use this drive image as hdd2.img. Adding a second hard disk also gives you additional storage space to use inside of the DOS environment.
It can be kind of a hassle to get your files into a .img file of a floppy or hard disk. The emulator provides a convenient alternative called Map Drive. You can put COM, EXE, and other files on the SD card in the XT/MAPDRIVE/ folder and they can be made available as the H: drive inside of DOS.
The DOS 6 floppy disk and hard drive img files linked in this guide have the MAPDRIVE configuration done already already inside of config.sys, and set to auto launch in autoexec.bat. The directions below are only needed if you're using your own img files that don't already have it set up.
Once you've got files loaded into the XT/MAPDRIVE/ folder on the SD card, you also need to set LASTDRIVE=H inside of the config.sys file.
You can edit config.sys using the QBasic file editor with this command:
qbasic /editor config.sys
The config.sys file will open inside of a basic text editor. Move the cursor to the end of the file and add LASTDRIVE=H to an empty line.
After editing the file, press Alt+F to open the the File menu, then press S to save the changes.
Once the file is saved, press the reset button on the Fruit Jam to reboot the emulator with the new system config.
After the system config is updated and the system boots up, run the mapdrive to mount the files from XT/MAPDRIVE/ folder on the SD card to the H: drive inside of DOS. You can add mapdrive to the autoexec.bat file if you want it to run automatically on every boot.
Once mapdrive completes successfully, you can move to the H: drive by typing the command h: and pressing enter. Then use the dir command to list files that are present inside of XT/MAPDRIVE/.
EXE and COM files in this folder can be executed by typing their name and pressing enter, just like they can on the other drives.
Learning More About Disk Images
You can learn more about what disk images are and how to use them in an Adafruit Playground Note written by Anne Barela.
Page last edited October 31, 2025
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