Now the best holdovers from that by-gone era (pre-1995) were the games that were written for that time. I still have a few 3 1/2" floppies that still contain older applications like Wolfenstein 3-D the game that really kickstarted the first person shoot genre. What is shocking is how small these archives are by today's standards. My entire floppy collection fits on 1/6 of a CD-ROM!
The emulator starts up and resembles the familiar command prompt. It maps all USB peripherals and then starts with a "Z:\". The syntax to get started is displayed by typing "intro". It allows real paths to be mapped a variant of the unix "mount" command. Once you have mapped the path of your choice to the drive letter you can then change to it and launch your application.
The application behaves as if it is running on a dos machine. It will start in windowed mode but an "Alt+Enter" will quickly go full screen. Some people will prefer full screen mode to take advantage of their modern monitors. It is at this point you may realize why these games are not played often. The screen size that existed during the heyday of these games is much smaller than that of today and what looks good in a small screen does not always look good in a large one. For some games like Wolfenstein 3-D I did not mind the large pixels of the sprites but for games like Civilization I it gets really blocky.
Now the really neat thing about the emulation is the ability to configure the CPU speed and frame skip. Some games will appear slow in the box and you can improve the performance by increasing the CPU speed given to the emulator via the "Ctrl-F11/F12" buttons or the frame skip via the "Ctrl-F7/F8" buttons.
This application can be found at Dosbox and contains other links to graphical front-ends that can be used to pre-configure and launch applications. So if you want to recapture those glory days of the dos games or use the original Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect 5.1 this may be an application worth investigating.
