Retro-gaming with Wine and DOSBox

I blame the gaming section of Ubuntu Forums for my recent lack of productivity. You see, it was this thread that reawakened the gaming bug in me.

Since I'm an old-fashioned (alright, "old") gamer, I don't go for dem new-fangled shooters that need megaloads of video memory. I'm old school.

For my gaming fix, I go for old DOS and Windows games. They're called abandonware nowadays, and a whole trove can be found at Home of the Underdogs.

Thanks to Wine and DOSBox, I can now get my gaming fix.

Wine I've already covered in an earlier post. Nothing much more to say about that except to add a word about the apps database. This is where you should go to check if your game is compatible with Wine.

Games I've played with Wine include Anacreon2, Taipan and, um, A Game with a Kitty.

Then there's DOSBox, which resurrects the large library of available DOS games. I've played the old classic Master of Orion and X-Com: UFO Defense with DOSBox. The graphics look really dated but it's great for the nostalgia trip.

To install DOSBox,

sudo apt-get install dosbox

Then just run dosbox from the terminal or from the menu.

DOSBox has a mount command that will let you load a Linux directory as a drive. So, for instance, you'd do something like this:

mount c ~/Games/MOO

DOSBox also has a full-screen mode.

Happy unproductivity to you!