As you can see, I’m sort of a retro junky. But this is a fun one for all of computer gaming geeks. No networks here… just early 90s computer gaming mayhem.
My good friend Ben and I used to spend hours in his parent’s basement playing a few games in particular:
-Star Control (The original!)
-Space Quest (For the official record… Roger Wilco was, is and ever shall be a character in my book–not voice software.)
-and Dr. Spaitso a Voice Synth response system.
We’d eat frozen pizzas and drink sugar pop. And although I can’t eat as much pizza and we’ve switched to diet pop, being able to play these games again would be fabulous. And now you can! A little program called DOS Box located at sourceforge brings your dreams of playing your old DOS games back to life.
Interestingly enough, the Space Quest series had a final release in which all 6 versions of the games were included in a single box-set. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the early versions Space Quest 1, 2 and 3 on my Windows machine they didn’t run so well. DOS Box has solved that problem. First I installed DOS Box. It’s a free download but the reason I found out about it is because I recently picked up the latest issue of Retro Gamer magazine and the free disc included DOS Box and a copy of the adventure game Arena. I then decided I would like to play the VGA version of Space Quest 1–the upgrade to the original version. So I copied the files to the hard drive–oof… a whole 6MB!
Then I ran the following command:
The great thing about DOS Box is that it creates a 486-based environment in which your DOS programs can run. So even the load times for the games are simulated. After a short wait I saw this for the first time:
Woot! And then the fabulous midi soundtrack began followed by…
And..
Needless to say, it’s been a blast playing this classic game again. Here are some more screenshots:
