When I enter an occasional conversation with an older person about computers, they sometimes appear to rave about the bygone days of DOS computer games. To me it is beyond comprehension that how anyone can spend all night playing those games with very bad graphics and even worse audio. But those old men and women seem to delight at the idea of once again playing Quake, Doom and other games that perhaps only their generation can enjoy for more than a few minutes.
So when an old aunt of mine expressed her desire to play some of the older games in her new Windows 10 computer, I told her to install VirtualBox with Free-DOS. This is way better than using any emulator. And here is how you can also do too:
- Download and install Oracle VirtualBox in your Windows 10 PC from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox.
- In the VirtualBox, click on New and follow the on-screen instructions to create a new virtual machine. You can enter FreeDOS in the machine name and it will select all the proper settings. Do not create a virtual hard disk drive when that step comes.
- Download FreeDOS virtual hard disk image from https://virtualboxes.org/images/freedos/.
- In the VirtualBox machine settings, choose FreeDOS VDI as the hard disk image and save the settings.
- Now you can run this machine and it will boot into FreeDOS. You can load game CD in your PC, choose it as the optical drive for the machine and then install it on the virtual hard drive.
Using these easy to follow steps, you will be able to play your old DOS games on your new Windows 10 PC in no time easily. If you do not have the game CD for those older games, then you can try out the shareware versions of some of the those older games from http://www.archive.org/.