The installers for DOS games were initially distributed on floppy disks and the game authors may have never envisioned that people would be playing these games though the Internet without installation but that is exactly what you can do today. This can be done by burning a CD image of the DOS games and then attaching that CD image to the virtual machine. Once you have a virtual machine running DOS, you need a way to install DOS programs into the virtual machine. Microsoft offers a free copy of MS-DOS operating system that you may convert into a virtual machine or you can download the FreeDOS program from the Internet which is just like MS-DOS and completely free. If the requirements are such that DOSBox emulators are unable to run your favorite DOS game, you can try running DOS inside a virtual machine using virtualization software like Windows Virtual PC, VMWare Player, or VirtualBox from Sun - they are all free solutions. Build an MS-DOS Virtual Machine for Playing Games You can play these classic games using DOSBox without having to configure anything. To install a DOS game, simply use the import wizard or drag-and-drop the zip archive file (that contains the DOS program) into the D-Fend Reloaded window.ĭ-Fend Reloaded also offers game packages, containing both freeware and shareware DOS games, that you may install on your computer at once using a simple installer. You can install this program like any other Windows application and it is ready for use immediately after the installation. One of the most popular GUI frontends for DOSBox is D-Fend Reloaded. You can simply install DOSBox via the command line but if that sounds too technical, there are graphical frontends for DOSBox that will let you run DOS programs through a simple GUI. DOSBox is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X so you can practically use it to run DOS games on practically every computer. The easiest way to run DOS games on your computer is through DOSBox.ĭOSBox, in simple English, is a free program that emulates an X86 based DOS environment on your new computer including speaker sounds, video graphics and other hardware. The other good part is that you can download these DOS games from the web for free, legally. There are however simple workarounds that will help you play your favorite DOS games on any computer just the way they worked on old 486 machines of the 90’s. If your computer is running a fairly new operating systems, such as Windows XP, Vista or even Mac OS X, chances are that it won’t be able to play any of the old DOS games that were originally designed for 16-bit systems.

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