One of the mantras that is constantly repeated in the PC world is to say that there is backwards compatibility of decades with the hardware. Which is completely false, it only takes a very old application that has dependencies on a piece of hardware that is no longer on computers for it to stop working. Games being the most vulnerable, especially due to the use of systems that have been lost in the mists of time. The only solution? Pull boxes emulation programs like DOSBox and the like.
DOSBox is an application that allows us to run the old MS-DOS games, and it has become necessary since Microsoft, starting with Windows XP, began to base all its operating systems on the NT kernel. In such a way that all the services of the old operating system disappeared completely, 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’s so special about the MS-DOS emulator?
If you have ever bought a game on GOG you will see that many of them are already ready to run in a self-contained version of DOSBox and already configured so that said title works without problems. However, we may have found a collection of abandonware games on some network and we want to enjoy them. Do not worry, it is not pira-cy since they have been abandoned by the will of their developers or because their creator company no longer exists. In any case, if you bought the games back in the day and want to enjoy them again, it’s the best option. Do current computers have a floppy drive?
The other point is the hardware dependencies, the most veteran of the place will remember, for example, sound cards such as the Sound Blaster, the Gravis UltraSound, the Roland MT-32 or if we talk about video, the S/VGA standards, Hercules, CGA/ EGA. Well, all these components are perfectly emulated and without performance problems in DOSBox. Of course, remember that it is an emulator of a PC from yesteryear, we are not running old games directly on the hardware of our PC, so this has a limit on what it can do and you will not be able to run those titles that require DirectX . More than anything because of the dependencies of the different games on that hardware and not only on MS-DOS.
How to configure DOSBox?
Well, the first thing you are going to need is obviously the application.
- To do this you just have to go to the DOSBox download page, search for the latest version for Windows, download it, start the installer and follow the instructions. It has no secrets and it is the same as in any other installation.
- Once you have it installed, you will see that an environment very similar to the classic MS-DOS opens, that is, 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 have to type the following command: mount c/direction/to/the/folder/of/game.
- So, if we have the game installed in c:/gamesDOSBox then the command will be mount c/gamesDOSBox.
- With the hard drive already mounted, you just have to type c: in the DOSBox terminal and we will have access to the drive that we just mounted.
- DOSBox will not recognize our entire hard drive, but it will recognize the subfolders of the folder that we have taken as root. To navigate between them you must use the cd command
- From there you will only have to type the executable of the game and enjoy with it as you did in the old days.
