DOSEmu

For those of us old enough to have used MS-DOS™ and played the good DOS games of the day there is a great app called DOSEmu. This along with FreeDOS will give you a emuluated DOS platform. While it's not perfect, it does run well enough to play some games. After all, what else was DOS really good for anyway? grin

UPDATE: Transport Tycoon has been released as Open Source! You should check out the new Open Transport Tycoon.

After some simple config files you'll have emuDOS up and running. First you will want to setup a directory to install games on. For my setup I used ~/msdos. Then configure emuDOS to use that as your C: just make a symlink.

ln -s ~/msdos ~/.dosemu/drives/c

If you want to play a graphical game while running X, use the dosemu -X command to launch a window. You can lock your mouse cursor inside the window by first clicking on it. Then pressing CTRL-ALT-HOME. Now you are ready to play some games! One of my favorite games was Transport Tycoon (1994) by MPS and Chris Sawyer. Below are a few shots of the game up and running. It did have a few random crashes but just make sure you have auto-save on and it's not too bad.

NOTE:There is a bug in verison 1.1.99.1 and 2.6.1 Kernel that causes it to fail a remap memory map and crash. You can get around this by forcing the setting $_mapping = "mapfile" in your ~/.dosemurc file.

One problem that I ran into was the great MIDI music would not work with my sound card or emuDOS. PCM Sound (sound effects) worked great, but just no music. I did find a workaround that you can play music but not with the emulator. Grab a copy of TiMidity++ and do a search on Google for Transport Tycoon midi. Download the midi files and run TiMidity++ with random loop.

Config Files

~/.dosemurc

video { vga  console  graphics }
X { updatefreq 8 title "DOS in a BOX" icon_name "xdos" }
$_X_mitshm = "on"
$_cpu = (80686)
$_mapping = "mapfile"