DOSBox evokes nostalgia

With the thump of a synthesizer board and pixelated figures animating the screen, nostalgia sets in. Do you remember the era of frizz, mullets, and the lone arcade machine in the corner caf̩? With DOSBox, a free open source DOS emulator, arcade legends like Golden Axe, Bubble Bobble, and Street Fighter are brought to life again on your modern PC. No need to worry about graphics or sound РDOSBox supports graphic emulation for Tandy, Hercules, CGA, EGA, VGA, VESA, and sound emulation for among other things, Sound Blaster and Gravis Ultrasound.

For the review a number of classics were tested – from the 1983 Digger to 1994′s Prince of Persia 2. Although DOSBox is still at version 0.72, the emulator proved remarkably stable and supportive. Using the 2.6 Linux kernel and Windows XP for testing, most games ran glitch-free with full sound support.

DOSBox allows you to run DOS applications windowed or full screen and permits for exceptional fine-tuning – you can even set your CPU core and cycles.

Those of you who would also like to run DOSBox on systems other than Linux and Windows will be happy to know that DOSBox utilises the SDL library which allows it to be easily ported to various operating systems – in fact, DOSBox binaries are available for Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, BeOS, OS/2 and Mac OS X. For Ubuntu user you can simply use apt-get or synaptic to install DOSBox.