One of the constantly repeated mantras in the PC world is that there is decades-long backward compatibility with the hardware. Which is completely wrong, all it takes is a very old application that has dependencies on hardware that is no longer on computers for it to stop working. Games being the most vulnerable, in particular due to the use of systems that have been lost in the mists of time. The only solution? Pull box emulation programs like DOSBox etc
DOSBox is an application that allows us to run old MS-DOS games, and it has become necessary since Microsoft, starting with Windows XP, started basing all its operating systems on the NT kernel. In such a way that all the services of the old operating system have completely disappeared, creating a huge incompatibility for many games. Thus, classics like DOOM, Monkey Island and many others were no longer playable, which led to the need to create a solution that came in the form of an emulator.
What is special about the MS-DOS emulator?
If you’ve ever purchased a game from GOG, you’ll see that many of them are already ready to run in a standalone version of DOSBox and already configured to run said title smoothly. However, we may have found a collection of abandonware games on a network and want to enjoy them. Rest assured, it is not piracy since they were abandoned by the will of their developers or because their creator company no longer exists. Either way, if you bought the games back then and want to enjoy them again, this is the best option. Do current computers have a floppy disk drive?
The other point is the hardware dependencies, the most veterans of the place will remember for example sound cards like the Sound Blaster, the Gravis UltraSound, the Roland MT-32 or if we are talking about video, the S/VGA standards, Hercules, CGA/EGA. Well, all these components are perfectly emulated and without performance issues in DOSBox. Of course, remember this is an emulator of an old PC, we don’t run old games directly on our PC hardware, so this has a limit on what it can and you won’t be able to run those titles that require DirectX. More than anything because of the dependencies of different games on this hardware and not just on MS-DOS.
How to configure DOSBox?
Well, the first thing you will need is obviously the app.
- To do this, all you have to do is go to the DOSBox download page, search for the latest version for Windows, download it, launch the installer and follow the instructions. She has no secrets and it’s like in any other installation.
- Once installed, you will see that an environment very similar to classic MS-DOS opens, ie a text terminal.
- The first thing you will need is to mount the main hard drive of your PC (C:) or rather the folder where it is located, to do this you must type the following command: mount c/direction/to/the/game/folder.
- So if the game is installed in c:/gamesDOSBox, the command will be mount c/DOSBoxgames.
- With the hard drive already mounted, all you have to do is type c: in the DOSBox terminal and we will have access to the drive we just mounted.
- DOSBox will not recognize our entire hard drive, but it will recognize the subfolders of the folder that we took as root. To navigate between them you have to use the cd command
- From there, you just have to type in the game executable and enjoy it as you once did.
