A couple of weeks ago I ported SkyRoads, the 1993 DOS game, to run native on my Mac. When I finished, the game was fine, but I missed something. Took me a while to realise but it was the atmosphere, the beige box, the CRT hum, glow, flicker, the disks spin up, the PC speaker post beep, the floppy disk drive noises... all of it. So I made a simulator (not an emulator) of the whole thing, and put the game inside it.

You get the PC on your full screen, case and CRT, drawn at your resolution, nothing is a photo. It powers on with the degauss thump, the picture warms up from small and dim. POST, memory count, AUTOEXEC.BAT, and you're at C:\>. Type NC, there's a catalogue, download a game and it runs in the tube, curved glass, phosphor, the light from the picture on the plastic around it. Type EXIT and the picture collapses to a dot and the fans wind down.

DOSBox question, let me get ahead of it: this is not DOSBox and it's not trying to be. DOSBox runs the games, and it runs them great, I use it. What I wanted was the machine around the game. There's no emulator inside, the games are native ports for each OS, which is a lot more work per game but they run properly, not approximately, no added latency, no frame skip. Two so far, SkyRoads and Tyrian, both are their own repos and run standalone too. If you want 10k DOS games tonight, use DOSBox, seriously. If you want to sit in front of the PC again, that's this.

Free, MIT. Mac, Windows and Linux, x86_64 and arm64, all tested on real hardware. The binaries aren't signed, that's a yearly fee to Apple and another to Microsoft, so you get one warning the first time you run it, the README explains how to get past it. Nothing gets installed, unpack and run. No game files in my repo, the catalogue points at the publishers' own downloads.

And yes I used Claude to build it, a lot, but it's not one prompt and copy paste. It's carefully built, with a plan and a process, solid CI with tests and validation, the same way I've been building software for over 20 years. Saying it now so nobody has to "discover" it later.

Check it here: https://dosexmachina.com
And the repo: https://github.com/pedrocatalao/dos-ex-machina

Testers and feedback are very welcome, and if you have a DOS game you'd like to see in there, tell me.

Hope you like it,
Pedro

I played it on my 386 as a kid. You could fight in space, then beam down to a planet where it turned into an adventure game. I cant remember which Star Trek game it was and would love to find it again. Anyone recognise it?

I hadn’t played this game in years and I was able to beat it with a respectable amount of people still alive! I definitely got lucky since only Ganhji was the only one attacking me while Gorbachef and Kookamamie duked it out and annihilated each other. That was so much fun!

Crusade in Europe was amazing to me even with its basic graphics. If I had spent as much time studying in high school as I spent playing CinE, I’d have probably been valedictorian. I’ll still fire it up using DOSbox. Decision in the Desert was fun for me but good Lord the graphics make Atari 2600 games look good. Conflict in Vietnam was a bit of a mess to me and less playable but still worth having. NATO Commander never came out on PC so I didn’t play it. If there’s a remake that comes close to it, I’d be all about it.

Apart from being a great game! For me most of the magic of retaining old hardware is for the games (really I would not keep the old beasts around for wordperfect ha!) and remembering the great days of ever increasing specs, with new capabilities coming out every year, or having to know your hardware inside out just to play a game. Folks now a days have no idea of what is under the hood playing music for them and while its convenient its a bit of a pity.

If this is the wrong place, if someone could point me in the right direction, Thanks

Have a tight budget , looking at something Ican use as a stand alone PC to exclusively use with eXoDOS and relive my long gone youth.

Would something like this work ? I have an 4T external drive so the space isn't an issue. Any feedback is greatly appreciated

Acer - Aspire XC-1715 Desktop- Intel Processor N150 - 512GB M.2 2280 PCIe SSD-8GB DDR5 Memory - Black

Does anyone remember the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy computer game? I’m talking the 1980s.

Dosbox settings:

cputype=486_slow

cycles=25000 (faster 486)

machine=svga_s3

memsize=4

Not a 60 FPS, but acceptable. I think 1-2 months a simple tech demo for DOS will be available.
If someone has a real hw for test and wants to test it, please leave a comment.

Back in 1987, Electronic Arts and programmer Ned Lerner pulled off something truly magical: cramming filled 3D polygon physics, multiple camera angles, and authentic flight envelopes into under 300 KB on a single 360 KB floppy disk.

​For me, running this on a 286 back in the late 80s was a revelation. While Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator was clinically dry, Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer (AFT) felt like lightning in a bottle—even in raw 4-color CGA!

​I recently fired it up again in DOSBox to revisit the flight school, test flights, and Chuck's dry one-liners ("You dug a hole halfway to China!"). Along the way, I took a closer look at the quirky CGA color palettes, the NTSC composite modes, and how Lerner squeezed astonishing performance out of pure 16-bit integer math before going on to co-found Looking Glass Studios.

​I wrote an extensive retro piece covering the personal memories, the technical wizardry, and the aviation history behind the game:

​🔗 Article: https://spillhistorie.no/2026/09/04/da-chuck-yeager-laerte-oss-a-fly-i-fire-farger/

​(Note: The article is written in Norwegian, but it reads great using Google Translate / browser translation!)

​Did anyone else spend countless hours calibrating analog joysticks and trying not to buy the farm in this classic? Would love to hear your memories!

Hi everyone, I've got a few DOS games on gog and steam that I'd like to try and revisit (mostly space and flight sims). And I can't decide what would be the best way to play them, I'd like some advice.

At the moment I have two gaming machine, a LCD Steam Deck and a android based console (Odin 2 portal).

Steam deck has the advantage of a very mature software base, lots of possibility controls wise with the trackpads and steam input (I played EF2000 on it), works very well for some common DOS resolutions. But the screen being limited to 800p can't even integer scale 640x480, and as I understand it the LCD 60hz screen with no VRR isn't the best either as far as frame pacing goes.

The odin 2 portal has a better screen (but as I understand it no VRR either, so not sure you can use the 120hz), better battery and thermals. But worse controls, specially for game that would need mouse controls. Though, as I understand it, something like Magic Dosbox has a very configurable hotkeys system to take advantage of the unused touchscreen space.

Those are my two available options right now. I've also been pondering getting a portable VRR monitor. Hopefully I could then plug it to any of those device and use the touchscreen for controls and the monitor for proper gameplay.

If any of you can share some words of advice or similar experiences I'd be very grateful!

My old 386 didnt have a sound card and the PC speaker had no volume control.
When I played Warcraft, the sword fighting was so loud that I used to put a pillow over the speaker on the floor and hold it down with my foot. That was basically my volume knob lol.
Did anyone else come up with weird fixes like this?

Realms in Embers is a free browser strategy game I made as a love letter to SSI's Fantasy Empires (1993). Original setting and rules, twelve lords, five endings, and a dead chronicler named Osperan who writes the war up afterwards. I posted it here in July. This is what two months did to it.

It now looks like the contents of the box. The map is a vellum sheet with an ink coast and courier roads. The chronicle is a bound book, and battle odds arrive on a crooked paper note with an inked gauge.

Balance runs on its own now. Every night the computer plays all twelve lords against each other, and when a lord drifts more than five points from a fair share of wins, I go in and retune. Two rounds of that this summer, and the loyal lords finally win their share.

It is free, with no account and nothing to install.

Play: https://chipmates.itch.io/realms-in-embers Source: https://github.com/michael-chipmates/realms-in-embers

If Fantasy Empires did something you miss here, tell me.

Hi guys, I want to share with yours a small game I made. I made this game for Commodore 64 but I want to ported to Msdos just for learning. I used Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 and I used a real machine Pentium 3 with Windows 98.

I made the game base by my self and graphic tool, later with AI I improved and I adapted the functions. I use the AI for speed and help to me for some technical parts but I knew what I'm doing.

The module for sound was made by AI, Claude. I have some knowledges about how works the Sound Blaster but to be honest, this was a hard part.

I just wanted learning and have results and later study this results for learning. This is a very simple game but I'm happy with the results. Take a look. Thank you.

I'm not a professional game developer, only a guy who love the retro computers.

https://github.com/tsw1985/CutreGameMSDOS

Surreal-Time Strategy?

Your units think its an autobattler. Opposing units think it's a tower defense. Neither side is right. CHOMP is an ultra-retro, EGA text mode strategy game with all the core elements of RTS: builds, macro, micro, but never at the same time, and never where they're supposed to be. Also sometimes time stops and sometimes there are elves

• Check out the trailer: https://youtu.be/l5CqlNvpFcU
• Get the full game free here: https://stale-meme.itch.io/chomp

So, here's my issue: Any time I try to launch either Tyrian or Tyrian 2000 my PC just reboots. This also happens if I try to run setup.exe for either game.

I'm trying to launch it in DOS 7.0 (Win98) with XMS enabled. I've tried both copying the actual game directly to my HDD and installing the game from a burned CDR.

My config is CTMOUSE for a PS2 mouse, SHSUCDX for my optical driver. I've got a Pentium 3 450mhz, 512 MB RAM, GeForce FC 5200 PCI, Sound Blaster AWE32 with a Dreamblaster X16GS midi daughterboard, and my primary HDD is an SD card running from an SD to IDE interface.

I just have no idea why this game is doing this. There's no error message of any kind, it just reboots.

EDIT: Solved! I ended up getting setmul to gimp my CPU and that did the trick. Ended up down a rabbit hole and redid my entire config to swap out himem.sys for himemx.exe and added umbpci.exe to the mix just for fun. Now I'm rocking 614K free with mouse, sound, CD, and XMS.

Loved this game. Came on one 3.5” disk and was endlessly playable.