DOS Today: Running Vintage MS-DOS Games and Apps on a Modern Computer

By Brian Schell

DOS TODAY!

 

MS-DOS and its clones were all the PC world had to choose from back in the 80s and early 90s, but faded fast once Windows 95 and its successors were released. Still, tens of thousands of powerful applications and awesomely enjoyable games were released in those years. Some, such as SimCity and Tomb Raider, have been regularly updated and modernized, but what about all the rest?

 

M.U.L.E., Wing Commander, Chessmaster, King's Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Pinball Construction Set, and literally thousands of other games have been ignored for decades. They were fun in the 80s, so why not now?

 

And that's not to mention all the powerful non-gaming applications. WordStar, WordPerfect, dBase, Lotus, WildCat, TBBS, Telix, and many, many more run as well today as they did in their prime (or maybe better, since all the bugs were worked out decades ago).

 

Although it's possible to find and restore an old computer from thirty years ago, parts are getting scarce. This book explains the ins and outs of DOS emulation on modern Mac and PC computers. How to install and configure the emulators, how to install DOS or a clone, how to work with VIRTUALBOX or DOSBOX to make it all work. Everything you need to know is here!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BlueHouseBooks.com
• Release date: Jun 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533775184

Brian Schell

Brian Schell is a College English Instructor who has an extensive background in Buddhism and other world religions. After spending time in Japan, he returned to America where he created the immensely popular website, Daily Buddhism. For the next several years, Schell wrote extensively on applying Buddhism to real-world topics such as War, Drugs, Tattoos, Sex, Relationships, Pet Food and yes, even Horror Movies. Twitter: @BrianSchell Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/Brian.Schell Web: http://BrianSchell.com

Book preview

DOS Today

DOS Today

Running Vintage MS-DOS Games and Apps on a Modern Computer

Brian Schell

BlueHouseBooks.com

Contents

Introduction

What is DOS?

DOSBOX

VIRTUALBOX

Other Possibilities

Where To Get Games And Software

Additional Tips And Tricks

Basic Dos Commands

About the Author

Stay Up To Date!

Help Me!

Also by Brian Schell

To all those guys who made all those games,

still going thirty-five years later

Introduction

I bought my first computer in 1980, and it was one of those tiny Sinclair ZX-81 imports. I was in the tenth grade, and I played with that thing incessantly. I quickly outgrew it and moved to a Commodore VIC-20 and later a Commodore 64. I learned a lot on these early machines, including BASIC and a little machine code (they didn’t really have any Assemblers for those machines and C was limited to machines way out of my budget). Still, my computing education really took off in 1986, when I got my first PC Compatible computer. It had a 286 processor and ran DOS 3.3 from two 5-1/4" floppy drives. It didn’t have any hard drive at all.

I mastered the version of BASIC that was included with it, then picked up Turbo Pascal and got to work learning that. In the meantime, I played plenty of games, from the original SimCity to Ultima III. If I remember correctly, Ultima III was the first game of that type I ever actually took the time to beat completely. I may sound a little curmudgeonly here, but today’s super high-resolution first-person shooters just don’t have that kind of appeal to me.

Here we are in 2016, and I started to feel nostalgic for the days of BBSs and text-mode command lines. Today’s modern computers are vastly overpowered to run old copies of MS-DOS, even if I could still find one.

Actually, even today, floppy disc-based copies of MS-DOS aren’t hard to find, but most computers don’t even have the hardware to install it. Does your computer even have a floppy drive anymore? None of mine do. I might have an old machine in the garage somewhere that I could dig out and get running again, but if I did all