Hands On: Game On

Dosbox
There are hundreds of great classic games that ran under Dos see the attached pdf). With newer Windows systems (including XP and Vista) no longer providing a real Dos environment, many of these games will no longer work at all in Windows directly, leaving them otherwise unplayable.

This is where Dosbox comes in. It’s a Dos emulator that is capable of behaving just like a real Intel 386 PC; it emulates a soundcard, mouse, and various graphics modes (including VGA and SVGA, for later high-resolution games).

Although emulating a computer is generally taxing on resources, processors have increased so dramatically in speed since the last Dos games were produced (about 10 years ago) that even a modest modern PC should run the most demanding Dos games at full speed.

On Intel x86 processors, it can use a special ‘dynamic’ emulation mode, which will run the games using much less CPU time; quite possibly a fraction of the standard platform-independent alternative.
As a fully virtual environment, Dosbox doesn’t affect your Linux system at all, and it means no reboots are needed; you could even run several games independently at once.

Dosbox is completely open source and freely available, and runs on Linux, Windows and OSX. Some games companies have even re-released old Dos games with Dosbox included, as it is the only way to get them running on a Windows XP or Vista system.

The dosbox website includes a database of all popular Dos games. Almost all run perfectly, with absolutely no issues at all. There are also pre-compiled binaries available from the website.

You do not require a copy of MS-Dos; Dosbox has its own implementation of Dos built in. If you use Ubuntu you can get hold of a package with apt-get or Synaptic, though unless you are using Gutsy Gibbon, the package is likely to be an older version:
$ sudo apt-get install dosbox

The legal status of the distribution of old Dos games is questionable. Many websites offer downloads of ‘abandonware’, software that is no longer maintained or possible to buy, or from companies that no longer exist. If you have old Dos games lying around on CD or floppy, you can of course use these directly in Dosbox.