I'm assuming old DOS games run in a DOSBox instance for XP,7,etc. Are the original DOS files accessible? I have some old DOS machines I'd like to play them on.

The game files themselves should be, but I believe I've seen people complain that the setup files are often missing, making it difficult to do stuff like changing the soundcard, setting IRQ and DMA, etc.

I joined up here because a lot of the older games on here are tweeked (or so it seems) to run smoother on newer machines. Case in point the DUKE3d promo. I've got 4 or 5 copies of the original game but I got it from here because you need to be a DOS wizard to get the old versions to be even remotly playable on Windows. On a side note (if I may push another emulator) I recently discovered 'DFend Reloaded' which while not perfect makes a lot of older DOS stuff much easier to manage.

The installers for GOG games won't run in DOS, but if you install a DOSBox game on Windows and then copy the files over to DOS you have a good chance of getting the game to work.

I'll have to try it out. Thanks everyone.

It's not actually another emulator, it's just a frontend for DOSBox. ;)

DOSbox was a gift from the Gods of Heaven. Why on earth does anybody go back to proper box!?! Because juggling EMS and XMS was so much fun?

Remember IRQ conflicts? Man, those were the days, computers are no fun at all today!

I remember spending lots of time trying to figure out what I had to do in the autoexec.bat and the config.sys to scrape up that extra few K I needed to play this game or that game. I remember getting very excited when I finally was able to play Descent, which ran at all of 5FPS. On one hand that was a very satisfying sense of accomplishment. On the other I never ever want to do that again. I'll stick with DOSbox.

Thanks. Tech was never my strong suit!

Real hardware can give a different experience. PC speaker music for instance, doesn't sound authentic unless it rattles your teeth. ;)

Cutemouse takes away a lot of the pain of scraping for every last kilobyte of conventional memory. I wish I had that back in the day.

Thanks.
Got to remember that one.

Now, if only we can apply this attitude:
"We don't support DOS, but you're free to try to get it running on DOS yourself if you'd like."
into this:
"We don't support Linux, but you're free to try to get the unsupported Linux version we provide as extras running on Linux yourself if you'd like."

:-)

Um... it's the same attitude they currently have with Linux. You still need to install the files using the windows installer to get at the files to run in DOS, too.