DOSBox - Play old DOS games via an emulator
Sep 08, '06 11:59:02AM
Contributed by: robg
The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 9 out of 10]
This is the Pick of the Week for the week of August 28th
If you grew up in the early days of IBM-compatible personal computing, the odds are good there was a DOS-powered PC in your home. And if you liked games, that means you were playing games that ran on top of DOS. Classics such as Prince of Persia, Duke Nukem 3D, and numerous others. Who can forget the days of limited sound, low-res graphics, and stilted gameplay? Still, if you long for those days, long no more -- now you can run the oldest graphical games on the latest and best operating system.
DOSBox is a DOS emulator that runs on OS X (as well as other platforms). Installation is simple; it's just an application, so drag it wherever you want it. Launch the program, and you'll be staring at the familiar white-on-black DOS interface. So what next? Well, you probably don't want to just sit in DOS all day, so go grab some games. There are many sites out there that have collected fully legal shareware, freeware, and demo versions of many DOS games. DOSGAMES.com and DOS Games Archive are two such sites. (There are probably also sites where you can find games that have less apparent legal status -- full versions of old DOS games whose ownership and copyright may not be completely clear. Using such sites, of course, is at your own risk.)
So what do you do after you download an old DOS game? Expand the archive, and then place the folder somewhere easy to get to. Launch DOSBox and then mount the folder as a virtual C drive: mount c: ~/DOSgames/whatever. Then just type C:, find the .EXE files, and run them. The small shot above left, for instance, is from Epic Baseball (click the image for the larger version). I managed to get most everything I tried running, though Duke Nukem 3D was giving me some user interface issues (as in I couldn't select any items on the menu!).
DOSBox isn't rich on user interface features, but it works quite well. There's even SoundBlaster support, so you get in-game sound. I'm sure DOSBox could be used for more productive tasks as well, but it's great as a flashback gaming machine!
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