Table of contents

• Special keys
  • General
  • Captures
  • Emulation speed
  • Composite emulation
  • Monochrome emulation
• macOS notes

Special keys

This page lists the default DOSBox Staging special keys for Windows and Linux. macOS users, please refer to the macOS notes section.

You can always remap these to your liking using the Keymapper.

Note that there are a few other less important actions that are not assigned to any keys by default.

General

Key	Action
Alt+Enter	Toggle windowed and fullscreen mode
Ctrl+F10	Capture/release the mouse (you can also middle-click to release the mouse)
Ctrl+F1	Start the Keymapper
Ctrl+F4	Update filesystem cache of the mounted drives. Useful if you changed something on a mounted drive outside of DOSBox Staging. Also cycles through multiple disk images mounted with the IMGMOUNT command (useful for multi-CD games).
Ctrl+F8	Mute/unmute all audio output
Ctrl+F9	Shut down DOSBox Staging
Ctrl+Alt+Home	Restart DOSBox Staging & reload the config
Ctrl+F2	Reload the current shader from disk (useful for tweaking shader settings)

Emulation speed

Key	Action
Ctrl+F11	Decrease the CPU cycles setting (slows down the emulation)
Ctrl+F12	Increase the CPU cycles setting (speeds up the emulation)
Alt+F12	Fast-forward mode ("turbo button", or "unlock speed"). Only active while the special key is held down.
Alt+Pause	Pause/unpause emulation

Captures

All captured files go into the capture folder which is by default within the DOSBox Staging folder in your user folder. You can change the capture path with the capture config setting in the [dosbox] section.

Key	Action
Ctrl+F5	Save an upscaled screenshot in the correct aspect ratio
Alt+F5	Save a post-shader screenshot—what you see on the screen
Ctrl+F6	Start/stop recording sound output to a 16-bit 44.1kHz WAV file
Ctrl+F7	Start/stop recording video output to a ZMBV file

Composite emulation

Composite emulation is only available for the cga, pcjr and tandy machine types (e.g., machine = cga in the [dosbox] section).

Key	Action
F10	Select composite control
F11 / Alt+F11	Increase/decrease the value of the selected composite control
F12	Cycles through composite modes (on, off, auto)

Monochrome emulation

Monochrome emulation is only available for the hercules and cga_mono machine types (e.g., machine = hercules in the [dosbox] section).

Key	Action
F11	Cycle through amber, green, white, and paperwhite monochrome monitor colours

macOS notes

On macOS, use Command key instead of Ctrl key, and the Option key instead of the Alt key.

This works for the majority of the special keys, but some have special macOS equivalents:

• Pause/unpause is Cmd+P
• Restart DOSBox Staging & reload the config is Ctrl+Opt+Fn+Left on MacBooks with no Home key

If you're having trouble with the function keys, you may need to set your F keys to behave as function keys. You can do this by going to System Preferences > Keyboard, and then enabling the Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys option.