As a relatively early computer user, I start my adventure from MS-DOS. About DOS, there is a kind of feeling mixed with love and hate, I love the command line, but remember the Config.sys and Autoexec.bat? remember the Emm386.exe? remember ‘DOS = High, Umb’? remember everything we did for one more kb additional memory to run a … Turbo C compiler?
OK, that’s not true, I seldom run it now, that was what I usually do when I was in university. Currently I only use DOS to run the old games only support DOS. You may say i am going farther from the programming things. But the command line, the config files (and Quick Basic) could be the beginning of a programmer.
How about you? Still have a old DOS installation on your disk? Or, have a virtual machine of DOS? As a programmer, you did better. But may I ask a question? Do you still have a floppy driver and How can you find the damn installation floppy? You use image files and floppy simulator? Yes you do it better and better.
If you want to go through this way, you can get FreeDOS, a open source, free DOS-compatible operating system for IBM-PC compatible systems.
You can install in on you hard disk, or use a PC emulator (Virtual Machine software) to install FreeDOS. You can find PC emulators for all computer platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac.) You can even run FreeDOS using a PC emulator written in Java : JPC, right in your web browser! Cool, we will talk about it later.
Now let’s get back to the point. Don’t you think it’s troublesome? Try DOSBox, It support Windows, Linux, Mac. You can easily install it as a programe on you desktop, get a command line window after ran it, and then run the game in the window, don’t need to care about the memory things any more.
You can get a portable release at PortableApps.com.
I even have DOSBox installed on my PSP Slim (PSP 2000), It means I can play old DOS game on my PSP. Someone even installed the Win 3 and Win9x on the DOSBox hosted at PSP Slim. I guess I used too many EVEN. Do some search work you can find the informations.
