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.

Boxer is the easy to use Macintosh equivalent of Dosbox, allowing Mac users to easily install and run the games here. Boxer plays Ms-Dos games on your Mac. It is based on the robust DosBox emulator, with a lot of magic sprinkled on top.

Run DOS programs from Finder. Wrap your games into tidy packages that launch like Mac apps. Painlessly install games - you can even install from CD's or CD images - don’t struggle with mounts and emulation settings; don’t nurse a greedy games database; don’t bang your head against a DOS prompt; just play your games. Boxer takes away the fuss and leaves the fun.

Hamachi is a wonderful, free (for non-commercial use) little tool - it's a hassle free way of connecting with other retro gaming freaks over the internet as if you were connected via a LAN.

Hamachi allows you to create a virtual private network via a simple download with a user friendly interface, allowing you to manage your created network as you need it.

Hamachi supports the following operating systems:

* Microsoft Windows (Win2000, WinXP, Server2003, Vista, Win7)
* Linux 2.4 or newer
* FreeBSD
* Mac OS X
* Windows Mobile - beta
* Palm Pre and webOS

So in other words, it practically runs everywhere. On top of that, it doesn't have any problems with router firewalls and doesn't need any port forwarding. Because it's just that awesome.

Frotz (aka DOSFrotz) is an interpreter for Infocom's and any other Z-machine games. It was written by Stefan Jokisch in the years 1995-1997, complies with standard 1.0 of Graham Nelson's specification and has been ported to several platforms. Just read the FROTZ.TXT.

The 16 colours you can use are the CGA ones:

I recommend to use the parameters -l1 or -l2 and -r1 or -r2 to have a left and a right margin for easier reading. The screenshots of Infocom's Z-machine games on Abandonia are taken with Frotz - in display mode MCGA (parameter -d3) to have a resolution of 320x200. ~Luchsen