Programs

Many times I have wished to play some old DOS games on my Windows 2000 workstation. And many times I have been disappointed with incompatibility. In last few years the only solution was a dual boot with compatibility drivers for sound and graphic cards, and a huge basket of luck. There was no real and effective DOS emulator on the scene. Then DOSBox appeared. DOSBox is completely free of charge and open source DOS emulator for modern operating systems like Windows (2000 and XP), BeOS, Linux, MacOS X... DOSBox also emulates 286/386 CPU real mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, the SoundBlaster card (and others) for excellent sound compatibility with older games. There were a lot of problems in earlier versions, but now over a thousand games are supported, many of them are completely playable (Full Throttle… finally). The only bad thing with DOSBox is that you need to have a real beast to run some complex games. 400 MHz machine acts like old XT 80086… Heck, you can even play original Tetris once again!

If you are unsure about how to use DosBox, we have a step-by-step tutorial HERE

VDMSound is a program that overcomes what has probably been the most exasperating limitation of DOS boxes since Windows NT - sound support. VDMSound emulates SoundBlaster compatible as well as Adlib music. In development are improvements to the existing joystick emulation, and possibly VESA support. It is a self-contained, 100% software emulation program that is completely independent of your audio hardware type and settings. VDMSound works with any soundcard, and will even work on computers that have no audio hardware at all. This software is highly recommended if your computer is too slow for running DOSBox as it will start most games in regular WinXP command prompt.

WinFROTZ is a Windows interpreter for all old text-based Infocom games. It was written by Stefan Jokisch in 1995-96, and has been ported to MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows 95/NT, the Amiga, Unix, and the Apple IIgs. Really easy to use, to open a game you must go to:
- File
- Open New Story
- Select a .z5 game file
- Enjoy!
Nice features are the possibility to change background and font colour, as well as what font to use and its size, and a lot of commands that make your typing easier. A helpful help file (duh!) is also included. You'll need this to play most Interactive Fiction (text-based) games.