Play your Good Old DOS Games on Windows 7, Linux / Free BSD or Mac OS X using DOSBox

DOSBox is an emulated x86 machine with integrated DOS for running old DOS games and applications. This emulated machine allows you to control the speed of old games and emulate old hardware like sound cards and video cards regardless of the host operating system. The integrated DOS also allows you to directly start games without first having to setup DOS in a virtual machine. This tool is mostly focused on running old games.

The new Windows OSs does not offer the ability to run the game in a command window, or improve the graphics with a scaler. That was one of the reason why DOSBox project was made. This tool is just 1.5 MB and it runs about 90% of old games.

People who want to play DOS games and preferably already have a familiarity with DOS will love this tool.  I am big fan of Prince of Persia, i remember playing this game almost 10 years back when I was in school. Till date, i would consider this to be the best game, i have ever played on a PC.  I am on a 64 bit Windows 7 Operating System and running this game is absolutely bliss.

Download the DOSBox here from the SourceForge website – http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/files/

Once you download and run this installer, the DOSbox will put all the executables needed and create a shortcut in the start menu. Launch the shortcut DOSbox as shown in the figure.

On the first Launch, you will see the below DOS Dialog.

You need to mount a drive to load your games onto this DOS panel. In this example, i have already copied the prince game to my C:\ in my computer. Now,  lemme mount my c:\ to this application. Check this below dialog.

Just scroll through the directory(c:\Prince) and invoke the game executable (prince.exe).

This will start the prince game and is giving me a similar experience which I had 10 years back.! Can i say., a better experience??

DOSBox emulates a full x86 pc with sound and dos. Its main use is to run old dosgames on platforms which don’t have DOS(win2K/XP/linux/FreeBSD/Mac OS X).