Computer gaming has evolved from the first early attempts at playing a game on an oscilloscope to today's plethora of gaming devices.  For some of us, our exposure to computer video games happened sometime in the 70s or 80s, the heyday of Microsoft's Disk Operating System (DOS). If you were a computer gamer in the early days, you were somewhat limited in your game selection. And, computer graphics were nowhere near today's baseline, so game design had to enable your imagination to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, that's still the case for some game developers, but that's fodder for another blog post.Given the hours of time spent playing those old games back in the day, it's understandable if you, like me, think fondly of certain games. So much so that you've even had the urge to dust off that old 386 or Apple //e and see if the game's 5.25 floppy discs will boot.Step away from the computerTrust me, don't dig out that computer. One solution is to, instead, save yourself some time and install DosBox, or a C-64, or Apple emulator on your daily-use desktop. I'm going to focus on DosBox (PC, Linux, OSX, and more) for now.


As the name implies, DosBox is a DOS emulator that runs comfortably on today's computers. When running, it opens an emulated DOS session in another window, and that's where you'll load and play your DOS game. Right alongside whatever else you have running on your computer. DosBox takes very little system resources.

Where to get the games
Now this may be a bit tricky. Depending on the game, the game publisher, or any other rights holders, you may or may not be able to find a copy of the game online. Or you may!

Many games are classified Abandonware , and are freely and legally (depending on your local copyright laws) available online:

In November 2006 the Library of Congress approved an exemption to the DMCA that permits the cracking of copy protection on software no longer being sold or supported by its copyright holder so that they can be archived and preserved without fear of retribution.

But wait! There's More!
There are other alternatives to running a 20 year old game in an emulator, after all, why should any true-fan of a game be limited to old technology emulated on new hardware to enjoy their game?

The answer is that a few big-brained game developers have decided to re-create their classic games using modern programming techniques and languages to take advantage of modern operating systems and hardware.

Kennedy Approach is one such redux , if you will.

And More!
Other publishers have chosen to release games under more 'open' licenses. Freespace, comes to mind:
In 2002, Volition [FreeSpace's developer] released the source code for the game engine to the public. This code became the core of the FreeSpace 2 Source Code Project , which has produced several mods based on science fiction series such as Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica .


Of course, computer gaming has been going on, as I said at the start, since the middle of the last century, but that's no reason to let these gems (or perceived gems as the case may be) languish, lost and forgotten. What game sits fondly in your memory, so much so that you've considered trying it again? For me, it's Red Storm Rising, and I've got it running on my little Asus eeePC Netbook. Your turn.