Let the good times roll.
If, like me, you’re staring at 30 in the not too distant future, then you probably remember some great PC games from the early 90’s.
You might even still own them. I’ve got an old floppy disk caddy in my office that contains the original DOOM, Theme Park, Street Fighter and a few other golden oldies that I just can’t seem to part with.
The problem is, a modern PC won’t run these games. Even if you’re fortunate enough to still have a floppy drive in your PC, these games were built for DOS, so you’re a bit out of luck if you want to play them on your Windows 7 machine!
Thankfully, help is at hand. All you need to do is download a free Windows, Mac and Linux application called DOSbox.
DOSBox does what the name implies. It creates a windowed “DOS” environment on your PC or Mac. You can then load games through this virtual environment and play them either within the window, or fullscreen.
All DOSBox newcomers will do well to heed the advice in the image above: type “intro” and “help” to get full details of how to use the program.
One thing that all users will need to do is create an area on their hard disks to store their old DOS games.
The easiest thing to do is create a new folder on your machine called “dosgames” and then copy the contents of your old floppy disks or CD-ROMS to sub folders for each game. Just keep the folder names under 8 characters or DOSbox might have trouble seeing them.
Then you just need to mount your folder location as a disk drive for DOSBox. Then you can use the old DOS commands to run the games.
mount c C:\dosgames\ <---- This would mount C:\dosgames\ as your DOSBox "C" drive
