Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Running DOS Games on Windows

In my last post, I mentioned trying to get Colourful Math to work on Windows, collecting a few delicious bookmarks along the way.

Today, I downloaded dosbox after a bit of an internet search to get a sense of its reliability (since the zombie-like dude in the top corner did not inspire a lot of confidence). dosbox allows you to run all sorts of DOS programs under Windows, Mac and Linux - Doom and Railroad Tycoon (which is a free download now) seem especially popular.

When you run doxbox, type
  • mount c: c:\colourfulmath (where c:\colourfulmath is the directory where the files are)
  • c:
  • dir
  • cd clrmath
  • 4colours (the bat or exe)
and voila!, you have a blast from the past in a nice tidy emulator (or virtual console?) window.



I received a very pleasant email from the Claude Laflamme, the developer (with Industry Canada funding) of Colourful Math. He indicated that his developer interest turned to lyryx.com and Colourful Math has not been ported to any more modern operating systems.

I was thinking that folks of a certain age (probably over 18) might like to know that there could be a way to play their favorite MS-DOS games on their current operating systems, using dosbox, if they are keen on having waves of nostalgia wash over them. My kids spent hours on the evaluation version of Soleau games like Wallpipe, Ant Run and Bolo Ball - which are still available - the rousing Sine Dancing-like antrun theme is playing on my speakers as I type (even after exiting!).

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