Adventures In DOS...

Another off-topic post. After my recent adventures with Microsoft Solitaire, I decided to try my hand at resurrecting some of my DOS era games. Of particular interest was an early first-person shooter called Doom. After a quick peek into the depths of the internet, I came across a project called the Doomsday Engine. The Doomsday Engine is a port of the original Doom rendering engine using updated technologies to breath new life into the old Doom maps.

Once I had the Doomsday version of Doom up and running, it wasn't long before I stumbled across a similar effort for Wolfenstien 3D called ECWolf. ECWolf is similar to the Doomsday Engine in that it is a port of the original rendering engine that can read the old map data for Wolfenstien 3D. After ECWolf, I came across an impressive MOD for Doomsday that simulates Corridor 7.

After my success with the these two applications, I came across another project called DOSBox. DOSBox differs from the previous applications in that it is an emulator for the DOS environment rather than a rendering engine. So, with DOSBox in hand, I can actually run the original game software as opposed to just consuming the game data.

It took quite a bit of work, but I managed to get about twenty of my old DOS era games to function in DOSBox. My personal favorite, Pinball Fantasies, gave me the most trouble as it has a manual protection mechanism. It took quite a while to locate the manual. Out of the box, DOSBox works reasonably well with most DOS-era games, but, again Pinball Fantasies exhibited some issues on start-up with some of the animations not playing smoothly or appearing to freeze for several seconds. I discovered patches do exist that address this issue. After installing DOSBox, head over to EMU_CrimsonRain to get the latest patch. Download the patch and unzip the files. Then, copy and paste the files into the folder where DOSBox is installed and overwrite the existing files.

For all of the games, I created a dedicated folder. Then, for each game, I created a sub-folder. I copied the main DOSBox configuration file to each of the sub-folders. This allowed each game to have its own custom configuration. Then, I created Windows shortcuts in each game sub-folder that point to the DOSBox install and using the -conf parameter to point to each games' custom configuration file. Finally, as I finished tweaking each game's configuration, I copied the shortcuts to my desktop. I could've also copied them to my start menu, but, decided against that for the time being.