How to Play SimRefinery Game Online or in VirtualBox

Everyone knows about the popular game series SimCity but the same publishers who released SimCity had also released many other Sim simulation computer games. One of these games was SimRefinery –  a very old computer game that was released in early 90s. Back then not many people had home computers and the ones who had worked on Microsoft DOS operating system. SimRefinery was also a DOS based computer game. According to Verge, SimRefinery has resurfaced because someone found an old floppy disk image and has uploaded it over the Internet Archive website – the behemoth junkyard of all digital things.

Since the Internet Archive offers a DosBox of its own, you can play SimRefinery game online on its webpage. For paying SimRefinery online, you can simply visit its webpage at https://archive.org/details/simrefinery and click on the big power button over the floppy image that says “Click to Begin”. The game will start right inside your web browser.

SimRefinery

You can bookmark this webpage and whenever you want to play SimRefinery game, you can visit this page. But if you do not want to play this game online then can download its floppy disk image (available from the Internet Archive as well), and install it inside VirtualBox.

You do not need a large guest operating system for VirtualBox setup. You can use FreeDOS for this to work. Once the VirtualBox FreeDOS guest operating system is running, you can load SimRefinery floppy image in it to install the game from there. SimRefinery floppy image can be created easily using a program like WinImage.

SimRefinery

Running SimRefinery inside VirtualBox has its own advantages as you do not depend on the internet and also stay away from all the web browser related problems. The whole VirtualBox setup does not need more than 32MB of RAM and has no significant impact on the host operating system’s performance.