Filed under: Fun, Games, Macintosh
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.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
