Fun playing old Dos games with DosBox for Linux!

[Dapper Dan]

As many of you know, and some of you may not, there is a Dos emulator that works with Linux called DosBox. Though I've been aware of it for quite some time, I've just begun to dabble around with it to any degree. Here are a couple of screens I made this morning of Tomb Raider:
Screen one
Screen two
As with Wine, the DosBox site has a list of Dos games (many of which can be downloaded as freeware or shareware) and how well they work accordingly. Since I'm just getting into this (and it's great fun!) I thought I'd create this thread for DosBox games discussion. Anybody else playing around with DosBox?

[Lazydog]

I was not aware of this or this site.

Thnx!!

[i92guboj]

Indeed, there are lots of dos based abandon-ware. And the vast majority of it runs without a glitch at all under dosbox (in fact, that's what people use to run them under windows xp as well, since they won't work on the native cmd.exe shell).

We can enjoy some classic games under this thing, and some other more modern ones (I am not sure what teh currect state of tomb raider is, though). Some of these have been freed by their creators, and some others belonged to enterprises that are now gone, so, in either case, they don't belong to anyone and we can freely use them as long as we can find them, of course.

There are lots os sites in the net, it's not worth even to save bookmarks. They are that abundant that google at any moment will gift you with thousands of links.

A common misconception is that adandonware=freeware, but that's not true. Freeware can be used freely usually, but it still has a owner and the terms of its license (whatever they are) still apply. That's not the case for abandonware since, legaly, an abandoned program has no owner.

[sdimhoff]

I used to use dosemu quite regularly and I have to say it worked quite well for all the things I had to use. I actually would also let my roomate use old engineering programs on it that he needed to use because they no longer worked with his windows box. I've tried dosbox and I think it might be a little better, but I haven't put in the hours to know for sure. However I can't say I ever tried any games for dosemu or dosbox. (During the dos days I was a mac person, so I never had dos game nostalgia, although I have dabbled now quite a bit to get old mac games running if anyone else has an interest in doing the same.)

So can you easily download old dos games or do you have to have copies of them?

[i92guboj]

So can you easily download old dos games or do you have to have copies of them?

There are lots of legal sites to download abandonware, just google and you will find plenty of them. Some of them might have gone freeware which is also legal to download and use, though, unlike abandonware, they have an owner and a license that must be acknowledged.

Abandonware has no legal owner.

[bigtomrodney]

I've used it in the past few months to run Duke3D, Grand Theft Auto and LCARS24. It is really an exceptional piece of software. Not to run the Wine guys down but rather for comparison's sake, this really does the job - it works with every DOS application I've tried 100%, and feels as native as a DOS application would in Windows these days.

[Dapper Dan]

I've used it in the past few months to run Duke3D...

Just installed Duke3D this morning. I'm still getting used to the controls, but the gameplay and visuals are pretty impressive considering it's DOS!

Is anyone else using a frontend for DosBox? I've been using DBGL.

[techieMoe]

What timing you have, Dapper Dan! I actually found an old CDROM stuffed inside a book last night that has Hexen, Heretic and Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders on it. Naturally, it doesn't run in XP. I'll have to give it a shot in DosBox.

[techieMoe]

Well, I downloaded DosBox on my Ubuntu side and it worked. I now have Hexen, the Hexen expansion and Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders installed. Cool.

I may have to start digging through the 99 cent rack at my local Half Price Books. It's usually full of old DOS games.

[Dapper Dan]

I now have... Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders installed. Cool.

I presume sound is working for you okay? I installed Hereitic... I guess it was the first one, last night and can't get sound to work. Got a download link on the expansion?