Playing Classic Games In DOSBox

I'm not really a gamer but I enjoy playing a few classic games now and then. But many of the older DOS based games don't work on modern day systems. That's where DOSBox comes in.

www.dosbox.com

I'm going to attempt to play the first game I ever owned, Duke Nukum. I talking about the original first one that came on a floppy disk. I still think I have the floppy somewhere. So I have the files for the game in a folder with the path C:\Games

The program file that starts the game is called DN1.exe

I tried following the instructions on the website but couldn't make heads or tails of it so I took the easy route and make a shortcut to the game.

Right-click on your desktop and choose New, then Shortcut.

Type the path to the DOSBox program or use the browse button to find it. Then, add the path to the game. With the current version of DOSBox installed on my system it looks like "C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74-3\DOSBox.exe" -userconf

When you installed DOSBox, right-click on its icon on your desktop and go to properties and that will show you the correct path.

What you need to do now is click after the last f in userconf and then put a space then in quotation marks put the path of your game. As I pointed out, my game is on drive C:, in a folder called Games. I just uncompressed the files into this folder so there is no sub-folder. So the file that starts the game is called DN1.exe so my path is "c:\games\dn1.exe" so that's what I put on the end.

My shortcut Name looks like this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\DOSBox-0.74-3\DOSBox.exe" -userconf "c:\games\dn1.exe"

Click on Next type in a name and then click on Finish. Now you have a shortcut that will start your game up automatically.

Repeat for each DOS game you want to play.

One thing I noticed when I started this game up and that is how small the screen area is. But there is a solution for that. I can confirm it works with this game. Go to this file: www.dosgames.com/files/dosbox-0.74-fullscreen.conf

Download it or copy and paste its contents to a new text file and rename it dosbox-0.74-3.conf

Then in your account go to C:\Users\Terry\AppData\Local\DOSBox and copy this new file to this location. You might want to rename the one thats there first to keep as a backup.

Now when I start the game, it's full screen.

Duke Nukum Hack

The version I setup here is what I just downloaded from the Internet. I do have a copy lying around somewhere, too lazy to dig it out. But my original version only came with five levels. But there was a sixth hidden one.

If you go to the game folder the levels in this game are labeled WORLDAL1.DN1, WORLDAL2.DN1 and so on. There is also an USERDEMO.DN1. You can play the demo level if you rename it to a world file and replace one of the worlds like renaming USERDEMO.DN1 to WORLDAL1.DN1.

How Do I Get The Games?

A little search online and you'll have more than you can handle.