Great freeware DOS emulator

[zork]

I ran across a great DOS emulator last night when I was looking for some settings for an old DOS game to try and get it to work in WindowsXP. "Pirates!"

Anyway, I found an emulator that has worked out really well for my machine that has fairly modest strength(P4 2Ghz, 512 MB RAM). I do have to change one of the settings to be able to have it running in the background and not affecting the CPU too much. I have it set to skip every 3rd frame of the emulation window. You can't tell visually but it dropped the CPU usage quite a bit.

All you do is download it, install it, set up a basic foler/directory anywhere on your harddrive to act as the emulators hard drive and you are in busness.

From there you just install the dos game in a sub-folder of the one you originally created in the previous paragraph. To get it to run you execute a basic dos command to mount that folder and then another to run your game or other old program.

The reason, I beleive, it takes an emulator now is because there is what is called a Hardware Abstraction Layer(HAL) in all Windows operating systems on the NT side.(NT, 2000, XP)

Not sure if that was clear or too convoluted but I wasted some serious time playing the old pirates! game late last night. (yes that is lame)

To get it go here:The Link
Click on the download page, select your operating system, I used version 6.1 and it seems to work fine.

A good basic setup and use tutorial for the non-DOS person is here: The Link

By the way..... I found this while looking at this random Pirates! BBS I found from google.The Link and then here:The Link

Stupid I know, but I am sometimes easily amused.

EDIT: ONE CAVEAT IS THAT IT DID TRY AND ASK FOR INTERNET ACCESS AFTER INSTALLATION. I used my firewall to deny it that access but I am unsure why it did ask in the first place? I also checked several things concerning network utilization and other CPU resource items and it does not seem to be a concern. Sometimes you never know with freeware though.

 

[Fanny McLonghorn]

Thanks. I might be trying to find Tank Wars in the near future. That was the best dos game I ever played.

 

[jmatt]

Are you talking about this game?

Tank Hunter

 

[wherzwaldo]

Two words:

Scorched Earth.

 

[TexasOwnzYou]

i remember red alert on dos

 

[Rusk]

hmm, I might try this. i've been wanting to play Doom and Doom 2 lately.

Scorched Earth was awesome, too.

Also a couple of great old DOS games are Full Throttle and Curse of Monkey Island. They were Lucas Arts adventure games, but they are two of the funniest games ever made. Had me rolling.

 

[linux]

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[idigTexas]

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[zork]

Some of the issue with playing fine in XP is the speed differences in the processors today vs back when the DOS games might have been developed. Much of the code didn't have any way to slow down the processing or regulate it so your ship or whatever didn't zoom across the screen as a blip instead of the normally rendered flowing ship.

Anyway, that was a consideration too that this version of DOS emulator somehow corrects.

That old Tank battle game and being able to play via a website is pretty cool.