xset

DOS Box – play older DOS games on your PC or Mac

// September 29th, 2006 // Personal

(Cross posted at XSet so they have something to read!)

A long, long time ago, before the invention of OpenGL and the XBox, when the SNES and Megadrive ruled the console world, when at least one of your friends had an Amiga and it was the dogs bollocks, when modems peaked at a heady 28KBPS… a long time ago PC gamers used to play marvelous games on a platform known as MS-DOS.

These days, modern emulators allow businesses to revisit the days of DOS and Windows 3.1 but they lack one crucial element for gamers. You see, business emulation (VMWare, Virtual PC etc) are deigned to run the OS and programs as quickly as damn possible. This is great for business use but it sucks for gamers simply because, a long time ago games were written to use the CPU speed to regulate the speed of the game. Consequently, most old games are completely unplayable on modern emulated systems as they run at 900+ FPS.

Enter DOSBox – a DOS emulator with one key difference – it allows you to specify the CPU speed and memory you want emulated! Using the CPU steps you can slow down your emulated PC to any speed and therefore run all the clock based games you want. DOSBox includes full sound card support (actually it provides 3 different sound cards), multiple graphics modes (from Tandy up to VGA) and, in it’s 6th incarnation supports a massive number of games. I’ve successfully used it to run all sorts from Worms United, to Kindom o Magic and Syndicate Wars right the way down to the good ole boys like Galactic Conquest, Spacewar and Scorched Earth. I can even run Windows 3.11 on the damn thing … if I wanted to.

Configuration can be a little tricky as you either provide a config file or mount drives from the DOS prompt but about 15 minutes with the user manual should have you up and running.

My only regret is that I dumped all those old DOS games years ago!