Dosbox

Do you have some old dos software you wish you could still use, but no computer with dos (the Windows XP command prompt doesn't count)? I find that some of the old dos games are still some of the best (as far as play goes, maybe not graphics). To solve this problem, and use your old software you can use a handy emulator called dosbox. Dosbox comes with many Linux distributions, but for people who don't already have it installed, you can get it here.The Windows version puts a icon on the start menu, people using other OSes can run "dosbox" from the command line. Once you get it running, you will need to mount a drive to place your files on. Make a directory and within dosbox run "mount c /path/to/dir" or (for windows users) "mount c drive:\path" (substitute with the actual path). Then you can change directory to your newly mounted drive (cd c:) and start installing software. You may want to unzip and place setup files in the directory you are using for dosbox from your main OS to make things easier.

Once you get your software installed, if it behaves slowly try pressing control+F12 to increase the amount of cpu given to dosbox or control+f8 to decrease it. When you find the optimal settings for your system you can setup a config file with the z:\config.com utility within dosbox and then run dosbox with the -conf flag (see the readme). Note that you will need a reasonably fast computer to even get the speed of a 486 in dosbox, since it emulates the entire system. It also supports CD drive emulation and some other things, so you might want to check out the readme.

I find that dosbox runs the old (great) Apogee/3DRealms games very well. There is also a list of other games on the dosbox site.