Retro gaming: DOS
Remember the good old days? Sitting behind your 286 machine playing games on a monochrome screen? I do! Actually it was my very first “own” computer running DOS 6.0. I had only one problem: a lot of cool games failed to run. Later it turned out to be a problem that I had a monochrome screen, at least something with my old videocard.
The funny thing was the solution to this problem. I discovered once that I could play the games which first gave an error, if I had run the game “Wings of Fury” in advance…
Wings of Fury screenshot
I guess they build in some kind of VGA emulation or something like that into their game. In the end I programmed this game inside my AUTOEXEC.BAT in order to have VGA emulation on boot. Pretty neat 
Before I tool off for my holiday, I thought it might be nice to have the “oldies” back on my computer and play them again, the question was how. The trick was easy: use an emulator. I found Dosbox which is a pretty good DOS emulator and runs under both Linux and Mac OS. I just needed to start Dosbox with my .EXE file as parameter and the games ran like never before.
Another trick was where to get the games. I found a great website called Abandonia which turned out to have a tremendous amount of so called “abandonware”. In future post I will discuss some of my favorite abandoneware which I remember from the old days.
Dosbox in action