Reliving the MS-DOS games

It's been 31 years since the Microsoft Disk Operating System, better known as MS-DOS, officially saw the light first, and more than a decade since it was discontinued.

Among other things, MS-DOS was the cradle of great games, which profited so incredible features offered by the computers of the time. And they did not need impressive 3D graphics to engage their followers. From Sim City to Command & Conquer: Red Alert ... not to mention Doom, Blood, X-COM: UFO Defense and The Secret of Monkey Island.

In honor of these real gems, and many others that make it so difficult to mention them all, today I wanted to share with you this little guide to games running MS-DOS in our current computers and have the chance to relive the good old days.

Emulating MS-DOS

To begin, the first thing to do in order to run these old video games is to install a program that allows us to emulate the late MS-DOS.

This we can do with DOSBox , a complete emulator that has everything you need for what we do and is available for Windows, Mac and various Linux distributions, so you can enjoy no matter what your current operating system.

The installation of the emulator is really simple and does not require advanced knowledge. However, in case you have a problem to run it, you can see the DOSBox Wiki , where you will find a lot of documentation.

Using the emulator

Use the emulator does not represent a big challenge. Just look for the icon on the desktop or in the start menu (assuming you're on Windows) and run it from there.

The most important is to understand that the emulator takes as home directory, the root of the virtual drive Z:> and that in order to use our games we ride one again. At this point I recommend creating a folder, we can give you the name, for example, and within it MSDOSjuegos locate precisely the MS-DOS games that decarguemos Internet (soon to comment on where to get them), each in a sub -different directory.

Once we have the games folder from DOSBox run the following command mount cc:MSDOSjuegos . Where mount is the command to mount the new virtual disk c , is the unit disk and assign it to c:MSDOSjuegos is the newly created directory path where we have our games.

Once the new virtual disk is mounted, type c: to locate it and here, with the command dir should see the folders you copied the newly downloaded games.

To run a game on the command line, you must enter the same directory and locate the executable file. Write your name and press enter to start it will be enough. Assuming we want to play Doom, we place ourselves in the directory c:MSDOSjuegosDOOM and write DOOM , in case the corresponding executable is DOOM.exe.

Downloading games

Instead of making a list of "best games", although I left a track of which at least for me it is, I've got three sites from which you can download almost all (at least I got all seeking) .

Abandonware Dos : On this site you can find more than 700 games in 12 categories ranked. The games can be located easily by title or keyword. It is perhaps the best of all.

Two Games : Although one year has not been updated, has more than 600 titles available, also sorted by categories.

Free Classic DOS Games : With fewer games, can be an additional resource to download titles you do not find in the other two sites.

There are also some torrent sites with large collections of MS-DOS games available for download. My favorites are on TPB. In case of any questions regarding the use of the emulator, you can write in the comments. Try to answer in as much as possible.