Play DOS games on your Mac

by Christina Warren Sep 10th 2008

Lee's posts about gaming old school in your browser or on your PC have had me itching to get in on the old-school action myself. Unfortunately, because I use a Mac and prefer to stay in OS X when possible, some of the cooler emulators and browser ports are off limits. Sure, I can always play with the wicked cool Virtual ][ and get my Oregon Trail on like it's first grade all over again -- complete with whirring disk sounds -- but I think we all know that all the real old school computer games were made for DOS.

Russell Heimlich, AKA kingkool68 in the comments, tipped us to a great OS X front-end for DOSBox: Boxer. If you aren't familiar with DOSBox, it is an emulator that simulates an Intel x86 PC running MS-DOS, with a focus on running games as smoothly as possible.

Boxer feels very Mac-like and is extremely easy to use. Just add .boxer to a game's folder and the corresponding EXE files will open up in Boxer. You can then launch games from the Finder and have access to Mac-friendly keyboard shortcuts.

Sound, video, the whole thing works flawlessly. Within a few seconds of downloading Doom, I was presented with that familiar music and the the bloody menus that brought back to 5th grade all over again. Now I want to track down some old school games like Theme Park and Sim Ant!

If you're a Mac user and want to get your DOS-game on, check out Boxer! It runs on Intel Macs running OS X 10.4.11 or higher, though Leopard is recommended.

Tags: boxer, classic-games, doom, dos, dos-games, dosbox, mac

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mark said 6:54PM on 9-10-2008

I've been using DOSBox for several years now, love it. However I refuse to use a frontend, that just seems so wrong. If I'm feeling nostalgic and want to play some old games I want to use the command line like I used to. In fact it's actually more efficient in my opinion then clicking around on some pretty interface. :D

kingkool68 said 8:50PM on 9-10-2008

There actually isn't any interface to click around in. If you just open Boxer it shows you a blinking command line cursor just like you are used to. The real power is just add the .boxer extension to your game folder so you can double click it and launch right into the game.

Max said 8:46PM on 9-10-2008

Works well, but i get no sound at all in Doom

Zack said 11:37PM on 9-10-2008

Holy cow, I was just thinking about SimAnt today. I really want to find that game again.

Aron T said 11:53PM on 9-10-2008

Christina - please don't tease me... Did you *actually* play Wolfenstein!?

I've really got a jonesin' to play some Descent, anyone want to call my modem and we can get some multi-player on? Hold on while I check my baud rate...

hapbt said 10:39AM on 9-12-2008

thats surprising, a mac user who cant edit a text file to configure a program

ascagnel said 10:48AM on 9-12-2008

Interesting point on Mac only...

If you can find an image of the cover art, you can replace the icon of the .boxer package with the cover art.

1) Download cover art
2) Make an icon out of it. I recommend using img2icns
3) "Get info" the .boxer package
4) Drag the icon you created to the icon in the "Get info" panel.

Using this, you can get a pretty nice frontend using Finder's cover flow and the box art.

Another nice feature: you can name the .boxer package anything you want within Mac OS X standards, not DOS standards. So instead of SC2000.boxer, you can have "Sim City 2000 for DOS.boxer".

Christina Warren said 10:54AM on 9-12-2008

Those are great tips! If you don't have the awesome (and free) Img2Icns, you can also use Apple's Icon Composer. Just drag the graphic to the composer window.

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