Many owners of personal computers, whose acquaintance with the world of computer technology occurred during the formation and heyday of the DOS operating system, often recall those glorious days. Some even have a DOS folder on their hard drive - an echo of the old system. Of course, in it for a long time there are no utilities smartdrive, scandisk, keyrus and others, as now completely different programs are in this directory, but some users do not dare to rename it.
It is worth recognizing that programs developed for the DOS environment differ from their modern counterparts for Windows and Linux with better performance. This is easily explained: many applications were developed directly in assembly language and carefully optimized. Each programmer sought to make his creation unique, thoughtful. But progress does not stand still: operating systems, programs are changing, and support for the old ones ceases. For example, if you try to run a DOS game under the Windows system on the NT kernel, a message appears indicating that it cannot be executed. Fortunately, there is a solution, even as many as three.
The first is to install a real DOS on the disk partition or flash drive and run the appropriate programs. The second is to use a virtualization system, such as VMware. Third, learn how to use DOSBox. Let us dwell on the latter in more detail.
Everyone who asked the search engine a question about launching old programs (games) probably received links to a request like: "DOSBox - how to use it." What is this "DOS box" (DOSBox)? Everything is simple. DOSBox is not such a large, but quite effective emulator that creates a virtual environment for running games (many commands of the interpreter command.com, IRQ, DMA, sound card, some basic video adapters are emulated).
That is, you first need to download DOSBox. How to use it, we will describe further. The emulator is launched on Windows, Linux, Mac and many others. When loaded, it processes its dosbox.conf configuration file, which contains all the parameters. Accordingly, by making changes to this file in a simple text editor, you can configure DOSBox in the optimal way. DOSBox configuration can be performed not only through dosbox.conf, but also by making changes on the fly, but then they are saved only until the next boot.
So, DOSBox. How to use it? Download, run. To connect the game to the emulator, we type the “mount” command with the parameters. So, the first letter will indicate the assigned drive designation in the DOSBOX, and the second parameter will indicate the source. For example, if you need to “insert” an entire CD (D) with games into DOSBox, then we write “mount dd: \ -t cdrom” like this. By the way, you can connect the image right away - the IMGMOUNT command serves for this. You can connect not only the entire medium, but also a simple directory: “mount cd: \ old” (in DOSBox, drive C will appear, the contents of which is the OLD folder on drive D). After that, you will have to recall the commands of the interpreter itself, for example, dir (reading the directory) and cd (transition, level change). In general, it is recommended not to be lazy and prepare the Norton (Volkov) Commander, Dos Navigator shell - this will greatly simplify the work with the file system in DOS. It remains to run the game itself.
Sometimes on the Web you can find the question: “DOSBox - how to use?”. This is often explained by the fact that in addition to launching the DOS program itself, I want to see a smoothed image, and not consisting of squares. In this case, the “scaler" parameter of the configuration file comes to the rescue. For example, by setting scaler = advinterp2x, you can achieve a significant improvement in the quality of the displayed image. Also, the speed detection built into the emulator does not work correctly, so the speed of the running program can be changed on the fly - Ctrl + F11 (to slow down) and Ctrl + F12 (acceleration).
Now a few useful tips for all users of the dosbox emulator:
- in addition to the official version, there are a large number of assemblies offering additional functions;
- you can download the configured configuration file.