How to play MS DOS games on Windows OS

I loved playing DOS games on my Windows 98 PC. I remember the sleepless nights of playing Fatal Racing, raptor, Stargunner, Doom. As Windows XP emerged on the surface, I had to stop playing those games as they weren’t supported on XP anymore. 10 years have passed since then. And suddenly I feel the urge to play those old games again on my Windows 8 PC. It is easy to play MS DOS games on Windows OS regardless of the version. But how do you get those old games back now. The good news is, most of those games have become abandon-ware; that is, they are free to download from internet.

I have downloaded my favorite, WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game 1995, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Fatal Racing aka Whiplash, Stargunner in 5 minutes (Haha! those games were as small as 10 to 40 MB but seemed so big back in those days!) and playing them all for the last one hour without any problem. Okay, so those of you already impatient to know how to play the old DOS games on new Windows 7 or Windows 8 PCs just do according to the steps below. Trust me, it is child’s play.

1. Download your favorite DOS games by searching on Google, for example, if you are looking for the game Quake (I remember the spooky soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails in that game), just write ‘Download Quake Dos Game’ and hit search on Google. You will come up with a result presenting websites dosgamesarchive.com, classicdosgames.com, and many other websites to download the game from. Go to any website and download the game, preferably a .zip format version. Most of these games would be in .zip or .exe format. If they are in .zip then unzip/extract them using software like Winrar; if they are in .exe format, do not do anything with them yet.

2. Make sure you put the folders containing your downloaded games into another folder named ‘Games’ or whatever you like. You can put this Games folder containing all your games in any drive you like. Let’s say, you put it in E drive.

3. Download DOSBox 0.74 from here http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1

4. Install DOSBox. During Installation make sure you check the ‘Create desktop icon’.

5. Run DOSBox.

6. The DOSBox command prompt appears with Z:\>

7. Write mount c e:\Games\ on the prompt and hit enter. Command prompt tells you ‘Drive C is mounted as local directory e:\Games\

8. Write C: on the prompt and hit enter. It transforms the command prompt to C:\> Remember C:\> is actually e:\Games\. So, if you have Raptor games stored in folder named Raptor, you just need to write

9. cd Raptor. [It takes you inside the game directory. To run an .exe file, for setup or the game itself, just write

10. Rap.exe, or Setup.exe (assuming those are the names of the files). And you are done!

11. If your game runs too slow or too fast, keep pressing CTRL+F11 to reduce speed or CTRL+F12 to increase speed.

If you have forgotten the name of your favorite DOS games try the Wikipedia list of all DOS games. I forgot the name of Stargunner, but I could recall the game’s name started with S, so I looked for it in Wikipedia and found it.

Enjoy your games!

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