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[Japo]

The first thing you must know to play a game is which platform (Windows, NES, Amiga, arcade...) it belongs to. Here you'll find (for the moment) help to run old PC games, that is games for DOS or old Windows versions; in order to play games for other platforms you need programs called emulators, specific for each platform. The guidance as to how the emulators are used can be probably found wherever you got the games from.

Once you know which platform the game belongs to, select the appropriate tutorial:

• How to install the games. Read this if you downloaded a game and it complains that it needs to be installed or asks for a disk. Old PC games you can download are usually zipped, and the only needed installation procedure is unzipping them (unlike "roms" for other platforms that don't even need to be unzipped). Likely you already know how to do this--then choose another tutorial--, but this tutorial is for whoever doesn't know and can't play the games even though everything else is done right.
  


• DOSBox. The ultimate program to run MS-DOS programs in Windows, Mac, Linux...
  
  
  
  • BASIC TUTORIAL. This tutorial saves you any technical details and teaches how to use DOSBox in the simplest way possible, with only a mouse gesture. It's recommended to start here to play DOS games.
    
  
  
  • CD tutorial. How to run games which require CD-ROM in the simplest way.
    
  
  
  • Advanced tutorial. Only for the brave; better than any frontend.
    
  
  
  • DOSBox configuration options. Only if you already know what you're doing or you've read the advanced tutorial.
    
  
  
• Games for older Windows versions. Many games for older Windows versions work fine in recent ones. But if that's not the case and there's trouble, there are a number of possible solutions.
  
  See also: Virtual PC tutorial.