I love retrogaming.
There is something about old PC games from the 80’s and 90’s that you just don’t get in the current run of titles. The only downside of being a retrogamer in this day and age is the fact that computers are too fast to run anything written 20+ years ago. Couple that with the fact that the Windows platform makes it nearly impossible to get even Windows 95 games up and running on a modern (XP/Vista) computer.
But there is hope. And hope comes in a package called DosBox.
What DOSBox is, is a x86 emulator that runs on XP/Vista that allows you to run old DOS programs. How DOSBox works… well... that’s beyond my technical expertise. But the end result is one of retrogaming bliss. Tack a frontend to the program (like D-Frontend of DOG), and you have the best way to run DOS games.
Take the classic exploration game Starflight. It flat-out WON’T run on a Windows Machine. Period. I tried for months to try to tweak settings in XP to run it, and it just wouldn’t work. I downloaded DOSBox and DOG, and within 5 minutes, I was playing one of my favorite childhood games, with no errors or slowdown. Now couple that with the plethora of abandonware sites out on the internet (Home of the Underdogs and Abandonia come to mind), and you, too, can experience the treasures of computer gaming past.
I strongly recommend that if you download DOSBox that you also download a frontend. DOSBox’s command line is ancient compared to what current users are used to, and unless you learned how to operate DOS back when it was the operating systems of choice (remember c:\ = the stick shift of operating systems), it’s a very difficult thing to wrap your head around. The frontend allows you to go in and actually tweak setting for each individual game, giving you the ability to setup profiles for each game, and making the experience virtually pain-free.
DOSBox + a frontend = Gaming Bliss….
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