A short while back I got to thinking about a game that a friend of mine introduced me to. The game was called Flame Dragon Knights and it’s coded entirely in Japanese. That fact frustrated me to no end but from the moment I first played it, I was hooked. I immediately ran home and got my Dos equipped PC ready for battle. So when I got to thinking about it this time, I got a little nostalgic. Then during my thought process I realized that I had the game saved on my pc! The only problem now was how do I get it to work on my Windows XP equipped computer? Enter the DosBox…

Dosbox is a great tool that I use whenever I need to bring back those programs from my past, i.e. Flame Dragon Knights. It was created by a team of 4 individuals with the intention of running games made for our old friend, MS-Dos. These days pc’s come equipped with a much more robust operating environment, yes even Vista is considered robust :ban: . Dosbox will emulate an Intel x86 PC complete with sound, graphics, mouse, etc… In other words, it’s an old school emulator with an attitude. I highly recommend it if you need to play some of the old school classics (the original Daggerfall comes to mind).

Installation is easy peasy.

Head over to their site and hit the version number in the top right:

Now once you have the right version for your Operating System, click on and install the executable file that is downloaded. After the short install, you’ll have a “DOSBox” icon on your desktop.

Step 1: Open up the program and you’ll be presented with the first screen.

Step 2: The first thing you need to do is “mount” a drive that you can work with. If your familiar with Linux then you know what it means to mount a drive. The quick definition is simply this. You are going to add a drive to your current working environment which contains the files that you want to run/play with. Enough techie talk. Go ahead and type (without quotes): “mount c c:\the-name-of-the-folder-that-contains-your-files”

Step 3: Then you’ll want to switch to the “c:\” drive by typing (without quotes): “c:”

Now you just have to track down the folder and files that will run the game you need to play. Like magic I can once again play the game that has been haunting my memories lately.

There you have it folks… My Dos in a Box!