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[The Fifth Horseman]

1.0: "wTf iS DOSBox aNd dOeS iT rUn oN wInXp ???"

Knowing how impatient most people are, I presume you already tried running the game (and maybe others you downloaded). And found yourself sitting right in front of an error message saying "Unable to use EMS, press any key to continue" (or something similar - in some cases, the only thing that would happen would be a console window opening and immediately closing).

Why did that happen? Most of the games on this site were made for DOS or older versions of Windows and thus may not work correctly in modern Windows enviroment. There are, however various ways of getting around that problem, the best one being DOSBox.

What is DOSBox? For starters it's not the command prompt utility present in Windows XP, sometimes incorrectly referred to as "the DOS box of Windows" by the users.
You might have already had some experience with emulators of other systems - there are ones for Commodore, Amiga, Spectrum, Game Boy, PlayStation, NES/SNES and a bunch of others.
DOSBox is not really that much different from them, except it does not emulate a console but a computer system with DOS installed on it.

Don't worry if you didn't understand jack of what I just told you - in a nutshell, DOSBox allows you to run DOS games on your modern machine like they ran on your old 486 with DOS (or, if you never had a 486 system, then on your parents' 486; or one belonging to your older sibling; or... well, I think you already got the point).

Let's go to the DOSBox download page and download the latest executable for your system. And, of course, install it.

You don't have to read the README file right now if you don't want to, but I suggest you do that when we're done with the basic part of the guide. Many things are explained in it which we will only mention once or twice in the guide.