There are many people, who just can’t forget that sweet era of classic computer games, when there weren’t that many computers, people came together to play the newest and coolest Warcraft installation, or to shoot a few more aliens with Duke Nukem. For me the golden era of computer games was in the middle of the nineties. I remember that we were amazed by the “superior” graphics, the humor, and if we played an RPG, the deep storyline. I still cherish these times. The days are long gone, when a bunch of us gathered to play a game, the sole computer in the room evolved to a LAN party, then network game. Heck, if I would play a game nowadays, I would never see my opponents face, the most of I would get is an avatar, and I believe kinda hard to befriend with a picture. However if you still want some old-school fun this is possible in a cross-platform way. DosBox is an emulator which makes running old games a breeze. Actually, the software is made for running DOS games easily across multiple platforms, unlike FreeDos, which is a complete operating system, and makes possible to run legacy applications. DosBox runs on Linux, MacOS X, Windows, and a couple of other systems.

Getting the software

Installing DosBox is easy on Windows, you can download the binaries from here . On Linux the regular software channels already contain some version of the program and installing it is just an apt-get or yum command away.

Now is the time to download a game. Searching for abandonware usually turns up hundreds of results. Abandonware is an application, not necessarily a game, that is not supported for a long time and the publisher gives it away for free, sometimes with liberated source code. Most of the classics are now abandonware, but those that are not, usually have shareware episodes available.

Play the game

The downloaded abandonware usually comes compressed in various formats. Uncompress the archive to a directory, list the files inside , and search for the main executable. Its name ends in .exe or.com, please keep in mind that when you unzip some DOS archive under Linux the names of the files get capitalized and the system makes distinction between the capitalized and uncapitalized letters. So lets run the game from console:

dosbox mygame.exe

If you don’t like the console approach you can install additional GUIs for DosBox, but the soft generally works well without them. There are some configuration options that affect the behavior of the application, but I never had to change anything from the default. DosBox emulates a SoundBlaster sound card, and if the game supports it mouse could be used too.

I recommend you to try out some classics, Tomb Raider I, Duke Nukem 3D or Betrayal at Krondor, to be a bit nostalgic or to see how much technology progressed in all these years. Please do subscribe to the newsletter to receive such interesting articles on a regular basis. Enjoy the Games.