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By harishankar at 2006-10-22 21:53
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If you've been using computers since the mid-early 90s or even before, you'll have fond memories of DOS games. But in the post Windows-2000 era, most of these games have been rendered useless because Microsoft no longer supported real-mode DOS. Unfortunately a number of old DOS games remain among my favourite games to this day.
dosbox is a fantastic solution for people using modern Operating Systems and still want to return to the golden age of computer gaming. A multi-platform DOS emulator, it is particularly good at playing DOS games which require peculiar memory or hardware configurations. It's also one of the best emulators I've seen on the PC. Actually I like to think of it as a simulator because it reproduces the kind of hardware functionality peculiar to old DOS systems which makes it suited for playing DOS games in particular. There was only one game I've not been able to play with it so far and that was Mortal Kombat: Trilogy, which is a game notorious for exotic system requirements.
The flip side of dosbox is that it is resource intensive when you need to play games at an acceptable speed. You might never reach the optimal game speed with dosbox on a CPU < 2 GHz even by maxing out the speed setting.
While we see a lot of popular open-source projects which are dedicated to port classic DOS games to modern systems like Linux, dosbox remains the most reliable way to play DOS games today.
Website: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/
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