For those of us who were around to drool over the Amiga, but at least got lucky enough to own an XT (perhaps with a mighty EGA) we sometimes long for the good old simple days of gaming. It is also our duty to teach the younger generation what truly makes a game classic. How do we do that? Emulators.
Emu-what ?
Emulators are programs designed to duplicate a physical computer system in software. So software written for one machine can be tricked into believing it is actually running on the hardware or OS ot was designed to run, while it is in fact running under a program, an emulator.
Over time many people with the knowledge and skills have written emulators for their favorite platform, primarily in order to run with today's PCs. Apart from the emulators for the micros (ZX, Amstrad, C64, Amiga, Atari ST, BBC Micro etc.), the consoles (Atari 2600, NES, Master System etc.) and the arcades (or coin-ops), there exist emulators for the MS-DOS operating system, since even though Windows is the successor to DOS, for various technical reasons the internal emulator for DOS applications doesn't work very well with most DOS games.
Dosbox
DOSBox is a x86 (Intel compatible) emulator that has been around for some time now (10 million people had downloaded it by July 21st, 2008), is quite stable and offers full graphics and audio compatibility, as well as CD support for some of the first (and last) DOS games that came in CDs. It is free as it is open source software, and supported on many other platforms other than Windows (Linux,Mac OS X, BSD, OS/2, BeOS.
Though its developers continue to enhance it in order to achieve total and perfect emulation of all processors and features, DOSBox remains the best available option for emulating DOS and more importantly, playing DOS games. Its only disadvantage is that it has no graphical configuration and all options have to be given at run time or edited by hand in its configuration file.
Fortunately, there are lots of front-ends out there that simplify the task of running a game through Dosbox immensely. Probably the best of those is D-Fend, recently revamped as D-Fend Reloaded. D-Fend provides total control over Dosbox for the advanced and knowledgeable user but at the same time is easy enough for the novices and first-time users.
Using D-Fend
D-Fend has a very nice and straightforward wizard to help you create a game profile.
Let's see the steps. Pressing F3 or selecting Profile -> Add with Wizard, we start creating the profile for our game. We'll input a name for the profile. Let's say I input "pirates", because I want to play Sid Meier's all-time classic, and plunder the Carribean, old-school style.
Then on the next screen we select the game executable. We probably don't need to run a setup executable first (usually to setup sound for the game), but if we do, we can also select one here.
The third screen is where we choose some readily available configurations for Dosbox. We can choose the "Use user-defined auto setup template" pull-down menu, which are ready templates for many well-known DOS games. Just pick the game title and you should be ready. Alternatively, we can use a more generic template from the "Use user-defined template" menu, like normal DOS games, simple DOS games, or complex DOS games. We can also use the default wizard template for an even more generic approach.
In the next step we can fill our information to catalogue our game and not have to look through our whole list of game profile each time we want to play one.
Finally we check the list of mounted drive mountings that will be available when we run our game (or application). A drive mounting maps a directory or drive from our computer into a DOS directory or drive that will be available when we run our game. You shouldn't have to change anything here. Just click Ok and double click your newly created game profile to play.